PART TWO
Black Mountain Review, 1953–1956
Mallorca, Black Mountain, San Francisco
[Mallorca]
January 9, 1953
Dear Paul,
We got your Xmas card ok, and very lovely it was! It made me feel somewhat bitter we didn’t send any, although we never damn well make it, and haven’t for the last five years. But next year, etc. Wait & see.
Laubiès wrote he had started on the cover for your book, and very happy about the dimensions—which will be, roughly, sort of tall, or that emphasis, and proportionately narrow. Anyhow don’t get worried, I wanted to keep to the format in your mss/, and think this will do it most easily. I also want to use vellum for the paper, if what we lose on the size (i.e., on what paper may have to be wasted) doesn’t make it too expensive. Once Olson’s book is done for Cid, I’ll start on yours.
Olson’s book turns out a considerable headache at that, i.e., the mss/ runs to some 88 pp./, and had contracted for 64. I expect there is considerable discontent in Boston tonight, etc. Likewise in BMC. Anyhow it ought to be a very decent book, he has some very strong things in it—and wild to have THE KINGFISHERS, and like poems, in some place available. Otherwise, it gets loose toward the end, he has it in 4 sections, or parts, and for the last is: A PO-SY, FOR RAINER GERHARDT, and THE MORNING NEWS (another blague one, like PO-SY). The thing being, it makes G/ poem damn equivocal (and I’ve never liked the damn thing anyhow), and all seems tacked on—at least in point of general content which the rest of the book is making. But to hell with the sniping, KINGFISHERS is one of the greatest poems I know. It will be a very cool issue, if production goes like I want it to.
I finally heard from Rainer G/ yesterday, he’d been in the hospital for two months, and family without a house, etc. He has a hell of a life. Anyhow he’s better set at this point, doing scripts for divers radio stations, some experimental ‘drama’, as he says, and also hour-long scripts on people like Williams, Artaud, etc. He wants to do one on Olson. The press is going again, and they have a series of pamphlets as well as FRAGMENTE: Confucius, The Great Digest (Pound); Wolfgang Weyrauth, Die Feüers Brünst (?); How to Read, Pound; Artaud, Brief über das Theater; Klaus Bremer, Poesie; and that thing Achilles Fang translated with Cid, and also a booklet of G/s poems, etc. I remembered you said you had a friend who was interested in German writing, perhaps G/ could send him the German material, etc. Or translated things as well, if he wanted to see them. FRAGMENTE #2 is out, he says, and #3 due in February. Very great he is back on.
I keep thinking of you, and this editing, etc. I do damn well want to submit something soon. Would you tell me what your deadline is. The reason I haven’t sent poems, etc., is that I’m now damn well committed to this little booklet for late spring, and thought poems put in that might fuck up printing in ORIGIN. If they won’t, tell me, and you can have whatever you want (i.e., edition will be very small, 300 copies, as against at least 500 on your PROENSA—maybe it wouldn’t bother anything, though I don’t like this damn printing over & over, etc. Like what’s happened to most of the stories.)
Also, will you please tell me if you get the copy of LE FOU—I don’t think Emerson has sent any of the copies I told him to. Christly bug at this distance, and whole thing has so much the air of a kindness in any case. I’ve heard from about three people, re the book—and get scared I’ve committed some frightful act, etc. If it does get to you, for god’s sake tell me what you think of it. I would rather know the worst, like they say—but silence is horrible, I can’t make it at all at the present. Such a fucking hell anyhow, trying to be ‘serious’ in this fashion. It seems a lonely and utterly rejected act.
I had started a story for you, but then O/s mss/ landed in my lap, and twelve or so hours later, I couldn’t do anything. So that was that, etc. I don’t like prose much at the moment, anyhow. I am very damn deep in some kind of ‘morbidness’, it’s very much in rhythms, etc., and altogether poetry. I spend a hell of a lot of time fucking around with this & that, but when it finally does come, it’s all a rush (usually I grab any pencil I can find, and do it on one of Dave’s papers, etc., I have this sense of ‘doing’ it, like a shit!) This one I’d been sitting on ever since we left NH, i.e., was in that same spring, and how many damn things I killed like this I wouldn’t like to remember.
THE CROW
The crow in the cage in the dining-room
hates me because I will not feed him.
And I have left nothing behind in leaving
because I killed him.
And because I hit him over the head with a stick
there is nothing I laugh at.
Sickness is the hatred of a repentance
knowing there is nothing he wants.
[CP I, 124]
Anyhow, all the rhythms are like that these days, which is the point. There was a crazy thing of conversation between Ann & [Robert] Graves when I was sick last month, and hellishly mean, etc. G/ was saying: “This is the first time we’ve seen Bob’s dark side.” “It’s not his dark side, he’s suffering.”
That fucking Wm Merwin, whom I don’t meet as yet, seems damn symbol of rot, I had seen his bk/, and then poems here & there, etc. He is somewhat afraid of you, as it happens, i.e., yr translation, etc. He is being crowded, tant pis, etc. Martin SS/ seems to have got very damn drunk Xmas, and told him I did not want to meet him, etc., and later seems to have either kicked or hit him—also chanting parodies of his grrrreat worrrrks, etc. Graves said, you shouldn’t be so mean to Wm Merwin . . . Fuck ’em all. (Martin being violent little s.o.b., I love him very much.)
Write damn soon, shall do likewise. All our love to you,
Bob
•••
[Mallorca]
April 8, 1953
[RC’s hand-drawn musical notes, before salutation]
Dear Charles,
Feeling much your own impatience, about all the damn distance. And just now when all this comes up, and hopeless fact of how long it will take to get back to you. To hell with it. Leave us be stoic, etc. Voila.
Re the poem to hand—I get, and damn well respect, your premise. And think, in fact, this is precisely your method, either now or in the past. Or at least that is how the poems have read. The ‘forms’ you have effected in their own fact of the speed & apposition of all facts or detail, etc., have had to be just this ‘form as present’, or else they could never have made it. That is, junking the whole via of ‘form’ as an external discipline (sonnets, etc.), either one can effect the coherence just by means of a like tension between all substances dealt with—and/or, sufficient to keep all in play, etc.—or else they, the poem, fragment into the state they’d had prior to use of them.
I also see what you mean about ‘music’, i.e., can I take this to be the ‘swelling’ usual to that verse which maintains a ‘rhythm’ irregardless of the closer & more pertinent intervals called for—or one which does go, da/dum, da/dum, etc. And ignores the closer demand of any aspect of a sense just then occurring in the poem’s going on.
Anyhow the battle against the iamb & all, seems to me dull primarily because it is a digression, both from the whole problem of rhythm and likewise from a sense that all things are relevant to the use which can be made of them. Which is too general, but no matter. But to fight the fact of iambic pentameter, etc., implies the search for an alternative means to form—and this, at least, doesn’t worry me, and should hardly worry you—who gave me the solution. To think of the poem as a ‘field’ means, beyond anything else, that one think of the poem as a place proper to the act of conjecture—and to effect conjecture in form, can only come to—total assertion. If it is a poem. It would strike me that the only possible reason for this iambic pentameter line taking on the weight it seems to, is because, like they say, it might be felt as a general sign of the common rhythm of speaking, in English. I.e., that the stress pattern, generally, is weak/ strong, etc., and that the breath, generally, can handle a five-stress line—more or less. The ‘more or less’ is the dullness, and the fact that it is all a ‘general’ practice, etc., the final one. Or, why the hell bother with it, beyond that. The practice, in any case, of any man either of us could read, would so alter this ‘general’ aspect of a rhythmic structure for poetry, etc., that it would be not at all ‘iambic pentameter’—or here comes in, I’d guess, all the problem of caesura, and the like. In any case, it does not interest me. As for Williams—here, say, is one case where the iamb is probably at the root, no matter the ‘five feet’, etc., but also where the rhythms which then prove particular come to over-ride any such simplicity as this one:
Viz, it is somewhat ridiculous, for the man who wrote that, to worry about alternative ‘forms’, etc. Or the answer, in terms of rhythms, for the iambic pentameter line. In fact, when anyone can read that, and comprehend the rhythmic structure thereof,—and why it is so damn fine—then the whole thing is no longer a problem. But the problem of each poem, as it comes. Well, call it ‘theme & variations’, etc. [note in margin: P(ound) or P(arker): constant + variant] I have felt that if, say, in any poem I can manage the rhythms of one line, and feel their necessity, actually, then I have made the way altogether for all the lines subsequent. Anyhow—the above strictly in point of rhythms, i.e., that’s what just now I would lean on, here—that such rhythm can be held in a poem. The second & third verses are all the ‘proof’ one needs.
Well, for christ sake, you might likewise examine the rhythmic structure of THE KINGFISHERS. Which is the wildest I know of. Can you tell me, for example, how else you could have got to that last part—and why, there, the rhythms are so christly exact. And why, also, you are allowed the whole swell (god knows this is another kind) of that, “With what violence . . .” If the steam is up—which is nothing other than, this hot world, etc.—then the rhythms come to declare it. And these rhythms must, of necessity, and their own, be particular to that content which they issue from. What else.
I only bug at the poem now here, because I think you run it too slow—or, isn’t the damn mnemonic the headache, and doesn’t it have the kind of rhythm pertinent to memory—“Without power, and only a poor oar . . .” I think that is the sound of memory, etc. The headache is, for me reading, that there exists a split, in force, between that which rides up as a detail out of memory, and that which is more properly now. I.e., I think the memory acts, here, do not exist on a like ground as the other things got to. Well, the lead-off: you’re in hot water by line two I think—that once the ‘depth’ is declared, as what it is, etc., then how much longer can you continue with qualifications, even those which bear the sound of the act of memory—i.e., won’t the reader bug, as I do, that he has to inhabit this revery finally proper to yourself. Viz, too much like sitting at a table with a man who has gone, if only slightly, to sleep. Which is no damn kick, but that I think it isn’t properly in the poem. Likewise—I mean because of this same savoring—you get a problem beginning, “I had made the mast . . .” in the form. For example, think of this usage:
And I twist,
in the early morning, asking
where
does it stop
And then of that in this poem now to hand. I.e., does this pulling in, here, actually declare a tension in hand or is it ‘formal’? It hits me, anyhow, as the latter.
It’s a hard one to nail. My sense is, that the present, of the poem, is not of sufficient tension to involve the past actively—i.e., in a proper state of tensions. So it is, that the second mention of ‘Cabbage’ is lost in the first, etc. Or not enough, it seems, more. I have the sense, likewise, that the purest part of the poem is, finally, that section beginning, “that channel / would be bluer . . .”, to “. . . the years . . .”
That here is the least ‘formal’ usage. And that, otherwise, other acts of this same memory are too glossed with almost a feeling of ‘symbolism’. Viz, [note in left margin: And so, forward] do not take on that straight throw, back. Likewise, that, in the opening, say, there is too much the tone of an ‘explanation’—which, for example, differs entirely from either the kind of ‘explanation’ you get in the opening to AN ODE TO NATIVITY, or THE K/s.
Well, I think you are right, in short. That a poem must be this ‘total assertion’, and that same is possible only when there is sufficient cause, to provoke it. And what same cause can be sufficient, is so much a matter of just the present, and what there is, there, that how the hell can we ever damn well lay down ‘general’ rules of practice. At least we know what we want—which seems the gain necessary.
The ‘technical equals obedience’ is damn useful statement. Obedience to the nature of what is to hand, and it takes the ‘technical’, to deal with it. I had thought, last night, that just here came in that old thing of Bird & all, i.e., Charley Parker—and wonder if I have seemed too silly with all that. I.e., I am dead serious, and want sometime to do a gig on this whole area. (I had hoped to when Bud was here, to help me with notation, etc., likewise with examples, etc., but wasn’t time or the place.)
Bird, and few others equal, are almost the only present relevance, in rhythmic structure, available. Viz, that only Williams is of this order. That, a poet can look to this usage for an analogy to his own—and, if he is not a literal goof, etc., can comprehend that Bird’s premise for structure in terms of the musical (or harmonic) line, is or can be, his own.
The same thing is actual in flamenco, but this comes finally to another ‘classicism’, i.e., it is worn to that extent—and tho it can provoke me, it is not of the same use that Bird is, and was. For example, I am more influenced by Charley Parker, in my acts, than by any other man, living or dead. IF you will listen to five records, say, you will see how the whole biz ties in—i.e., how, say, the whole sense of a loop, for a story, came in, and how, too, these senses of rhythm in a poem (or a story too, for that matter) got in. Well, I am not at all joking, etc. Bird makes Ez look like a school-boy, in point of rhythms. And his sense, of how one rhythm can activate the premise for, another. Viz, how a can lead to b, in all that multiplicity of the possible. It is a fact, for one thing, that Bird, in his early records, damn rarely ever comes in on the so-called beat. And, as well, that what point he does come in on, is not at all ‘gratuitous’, but is, in fact, involved in a figure of rhythm which is as dominant in what it leaves out, as what it leaves in. This, is the point. Only one other man, up to this—viz: the Dr. Like this:
If I
could count the silence
I could sleep, sleep.
But it
is one, one. No head even
to gnaw. Spinning . . .
It’s what they call doubles, in the other area, but here ok! I.e., that doubling on the, “sleep/sleep” and “one/one”. That Williams hears this way, is the fact. And note where it falls, and rides off—to “even”. Likewise the “Spinning . . .”
[at top of the page and over the following citation: RC’s drawing of a sequence of musical notes; also a drawing of a cross with downward pointing arrow]
You are the only other, viz:
And the too strong grasping of it,
when it is pressed together and condensed,
loses it
This very thing you are.
Listen to Bird on, All the Things You Are. Too much! (Well, seriously, do sometime hear: Chasing The Bird, Buzzy, April In Paris, etc., etc. I wish to god I had my own with me, I miss them more, finally, than any other one thing—and sit here some evenings turning the damn dial on this damn radio up & down, just for even a fucking imitation, of what this is.)
I think we can afford the casual, to the extent, that for us there can’t be any usage but that peculiarly of the moment, instant, or what to call it. Gratuitous equals fortuitous, etc. Tho not at all that simply. But rhythm is where the most work now comes in, that, if we can manage the declaration of rhythms more exact than those now in use—the iamb, etc.—we clean up. Likewise that rhythm is a means to ‘going on’ far more active than any ‘thot’, etc. And that sound is rhythm in another dimension.
Bach & Bird & Williams ought to be enough for any ‘poet’—and he might do worse than not bothering to read anyone after Shakespeare, etc. Who I honestly, like they say, can’t now read myself.
On this last—it is a constant damn embarrassment, that S/ at least in the books I can get, the forms of them, etc., is so slow on the page I get bugged, and don’t make it. That, say, whereas Melville, Lawrence, Crane, Cervantes, Williams, yourself, Pound (in his prose), Parkman, Stendhal, and Homer—are all of particular relevance, immediately & unavoidably clear to me,—S/ is not. I’d be an idiot to say he was, etc. I cannot get into his content, or dig it, enough, to move me to a proper study.
I can’t read, or won’t, anymore, what doesn’t damn well involve me. I don’t go stiff, viz not try, etc., but will no longer read with that self-consciousness I had growing up, when the Great Books, etc., seemed damn far away from Acton, Massachusetts. And, of course, were. I have no damn wish to stay a provincial, etc., really the last two years have hoisted me out of that damn viciously. But there is nothing but what is—like you sd, all there is, is, etc. I have to see what there is for myself.
I don’t think Rabelais is funny . . . I can’t make Donne . . . I think James is a horrible old bore . . . I think N/ West’s Day Of The Locust, in parts, is better than anything Faulkner or Valery ever wrote . . . I hate Beethoven, and get to hate Mozart . . . I think that Bird, Bach, and a few others are all the music one needs . . . Well, the sun is shining, it’s a fine day, etc. Or leave us cry, etc.
Liquor and love
rescue the cloudy sense
banish its despair
give it a home.
Write soon, tell us how you all are. All our dearest love to you all.
Bob
•••
[Mallorca]
July 19, 1953
Dear Charles,
Your two damn beautiful letters in this afternoon, and saved my life, i.e., otherwise deluged with half-backbiting business from Cid & somewhat lukewarm reception of book from Paul B/. But, very happily, to hell with that. Ok.
It is very damn fine you were talking with those people about Bird and all. The more any of it comes clear, the more he does damn well seem the key—or one of the most substantial users of what time can do in any business. That thing of cutting an 1/8th off the quarter, etc., is it, and the precision of such rhythms so got is a) the necessary fine-ness of the intention and b) the greater potential of variation then possible. I.e., what bugs either one of us, in the old biz of closed verse, or any such partitioning of potential forms, etc., is the damn loss of variation effected. Not, to grant them the obvious, that infinite variation within the given isn’t also possible, etc., etc., but that total set is pre-determined. Bird, in any case, first man importantly, call it, to stress the vertical potential of the melodic line, and by vertical I think I mean much of what you have always meant, i.e., that emphasis on the single & total content of any one word or note therein occurring without an overstress on projection-along-a-line, or what they loosely call ‘sequence’, or what you’ve called horizontalism. What I’m trying to say, in any case: that Bird manages single content of the note, call it, in conjunction with total content, and/or its place in the whole structure of the melody, etc., etc. Whereas, say, usual ‘modern song’ goes along, etc., i.e., moves from note to note (and gains our patience or impatience only in same), Bird clears notes one by fucking one, and reasserts a rhythmic structure with each note posited. Myself, I think you go back to Bach before you ever find it done quite so clearly.
Well, that is fuzzily put, etc. To hell with it. I know nothing about music more than I can hear, and that is enough for the moment. For example, we have a hell of a headache in just how much weight any one word can carry, either by virtue of its sound & rhythm, or by virtue of its implicated content, or finally by virtue of both these facts then conditioned by the context given, etc. At this point you might insist (I do, etc.) that most poets now writing have as much knowledge of sound weights & rhythmic structures, etc., as Guy Lombardo has of the equivalent in his own business. There are in both places the old devices, etc., and their use (ad nauseam) gets to the same end. Anyhow for one analogy is useful, Bird with his given line, what his rhythm section is doing, the base chords of the melody he is on, etc., and then what he does. I would claim that any poet worth the time, will come back to his own job more clear if he could, without feeling much one way or the other, hear four good choruses by Bird on the same base structure. People have the dull notion, all flows the same way, at the same time, and if we assert our own piddling ‘individuality’ against same, even so we die, die, die, etc. But poem or song is autonomous, or else nothing, so that is not really relevant. (It damn well pleased me to note in Ez’ ABC OF READING, biz abt Provencal poets considering use of another man’s forms the same kind of plagiary a steal of his content might mean for us now. I.e., When forms are given such emphasis and care as those apparently got, you don’t really get an overfineness or mechanical procedure—but actually an insistence on each man finding his own, which will best & most accurately serve him. The same condition obtains in the case of Bird & followers, etc. It would be a like sin. The extent to which padding & like set device is condemned by same, gets evidence in the contempt they feel for any man using what they call ‘doubles’, i.e., repetition of a phrase (1,1). Same is stock in trade with any so-called swing band, etc., etc. And very funny to hear Bird parodies of same, i.e., do de da do—etc., etc., like yawning behind vaguely cupped hand, etc.
What I wd insist on, is that practice & conditions obtaining here have direct parallel in present usage in poetry. When we call for a poetry the direct issue of language in a given instant, i.e., when we say it is possible, and a gain, to make a poem precisely in terms of all the words which can occur in it, their rhythms & their sounds, & what each then figure as in terms of a total structure—we argue the same premise that Bird uses when he hangs off the 1/8th of an instant. Because there is another note to follow. And he knows it.
Well, fuck that perhaps. But that it is a useable stimulus. And hearing a line of B/s music, one sees the possibilities for his own. If I write:
. . . The unsure
egoist is not
good for himself . . .
same is my own extension of what sd Bird has taught me is possible, more than any other man I can honestly think of, offhand. Bird’s effected relation between sound-weights & rhythms is the greatest any man ever got to, or I don’t see anyone as having done it any better. This don’t mean, sadly, that almost all of so-called BeBop is not dull, dull hash of what B/ does. You should hear German bands (with their talent for precise imitation sans feeling) play what they think they heard. It’s what one finally has to hear that’s interesting.
Also, as Buddy pointed out to me, music played at the corridas is very much Bird’s way. And wild fact usual flamenco ends at that precise point you swore it couldn’t. It is too much, when it is good. (You should hear what they do with 1/4 & 1/8 tones, etc. How, I damn well don’t know.)
So. I like yr poems, last one most of all. Ann suggests title of, THE TRAP—i.e., she knows what you mean, and I goddamn well do. Sayin ‘you & me’ is damn well my arrogance. I think all that counts is not to care the way some do, i.e., to have it, I would try to, “we who have perhaps, nothing to lose, etc.” I don’t finally see that I do. I.e., Cid climbing for a reputation, etc., is his business. Luckily over here I am so much out I can get free of that most of the time. I cannot bullshit so much, because there is no one to bullshit. I think kids & wife etc. are conditions of sanity. Fuck them all!
It wd be wild if you cd all come over. I damn well wish you would. Write soon. All our dearest love to you all,
Bob
•••
[Mallorca]
September 17, 1953
Dear Paul,
Just back after horrible trip to yr beloved France. In fact we made that vicious jaunt from Marseille thru all the beloved places: Montpellier, Beziers, etc., etc. Only decent one is Perpignan—which is Catalan. Anyhow, if it were me . . . , I wd go live in P/, or any of that stretch back along the Pyrenees—which is real great, if no longer romantic, tho I did once see, there, a very damn lovely Shepherdess, guarding Flock of Sheep, in Leather Jerkin, with both Breasts most lovely & most hanging Free. Well, fuck that. We were dead broke, hungry, only making it for stamps on passports, etc., which will enable us to hang on here without becoming residentes, which wd entitle US gov’t to take 30% of our already miserable ‘income’.
In Barcelona we were so flat we ended up sleeping in a sort of ‘bring yr own’ whorehouse in little side street off the Rambla, which is a lovely street. Very odd making love to yr wife in a whorehouse. It seems very damn immoral, however familiar. Wow.
So what’s new. Cid wrote of all of you making wild sortie to Cape. You should have brought bombs, tho it sounds as tho Carroll was adequate. That’s another place I hate incidentally. Did you ever read what Thoreau sd of it, i.e., how they cut down all the fucking trees to boil salt water, etc., etc. Wouldn’t they just, etc. Anyhow I spent some of the most miserable months of my life in sd place, so forgive me. What else.
Don’t flip re book shipment, i.e., Cid is, so don’t you too, etc. He should worry, he’s only getting a handful, so there, etc. Anyhow I mailed them August 14th (of this year), and think you’ll have them circa 5 to 6 weeks from sd date. Well, anytime before end of this month I wd guess. But they will get there. I hate C/s damn sour biz of, they aint coming, they aint coming—yaaaa/yaaaa. Fugg him. Don’t you be like that. It is not attractive.
You never sd a damn word more re yr poems, i.e., one note re yr having enough for a book, and that was all. I think you know the ones I wd know, etc., so maybe make a list? Of what I know of, and maybe add copies of other stuff? I want to get a mailing list out with O/s [Olson’s Mayan Letters] (which is due to be done late October at the latest), and want mss/ as set as I can get them. So if you still have eyes, let me know. (I think you sd something like 30 or more,—cd we work down from sd number to tightest selection possible? Not ominously, but what do you think? Let me know. I want the book very much, if it’s free, etc.)
So that’s abt it, at present. Cooler now. Life ok. Lonely sometimes, but that’s usual. I hope you all make it here—but Aix . . . O well.
All our love to you both,
Bob
•••
September 23, 1953
Dear Jonathan,
I had a note from Rainer, along with your last letter, and if this is any evidence, I think he thinks his wife is in love with you. At least that is the substance of his note: “big troubles with Jonathan for Renate. I think, our marriage is finished . . .” The rest of the note mainly a statement to the effect he does not want you to publish his book (which is understandable, assuming this idea on his part), and fact he is very mixed up, and a mess generally.
God knows what all that comes to. Any other man, like they say, is liable to have faced the same accusation, given the mess they have been in, and the fact you gave them the sympathy you did. However unreasonably, it’s very likely (and apparently what did happen) that he should imagine you as so much better than himself (the monster, etc., etc.) It seems mainly a commentary on all the hell they have been facing. It is also quite possible that Renate is fed up (though she hardly sounded that from what you had said of her feelings for Rainer, i.e., that he was certain to be a great man, etc.), and did cast on yourself as at least imaginary alternative. I think that sort of problem is, or has been, faced by anyone who ever married.
In any case it seems the best thing might be not to see them at all for awhile. I.e., it sounds very deeply a family business—and subject to all the apparent unreality & lack of rationality such businesses can come to. In any case, I should not allow myself to be used, in any way, as a lever between them. That would leave you altogether the short end of the stick, and sooner or later you’d have them both after you. You can only convince Rainer, no matter what the facts may be, that his assumption is fact, etc., by allowing any basis of sympathy to continue between Renate & yourself, which does not include him. If you can force him back into it, that would be the answer—but even such a thing as his dependence on her for english words, etc. could become an irritation to him, and hence more of this sense of ‘cause’. The point is, I think, that at this level of relation, you’ll have to chuck out all notions of ‘rational’ behaviour, and take it as a mess involving two people—and more than that, a mess where a third will only lose his head perhaps too damn literally. Give them even a little time, and I think you’ll find them as good friends as they had been—but the thing is, if Rainer keeps on with this notion, and if you even unwittingly provide him with the fuel for it, that can only make him hold still more bitterly than ever. Anyhow it calls for a hellish amount of ‘Christian forbearance’, it’s rotten damn luck it comes when it does. Obviously it has, very damn ironically, almost nothing to do with yourself.
It may sound all so unreal you’ll have a hell of a time either believing it, or else not laughing at the goddamn idiocy involved. But people damn well do act like this, in reaction to problems a hell of a lot more real than the ones assumed. Well, fuck that bullshit. But don’t think too badly of Rainer’s imaginary rivals, etc., etc.—they get to be like an army, when one thinks one is a rotten beast at best.
I’m very shamefaced not to have written about the photographs, we liked them very damn much. (And if you can put up with it, would very much like some more prints of same, for cost of which I’ll send you a check, as soon as Ann has had time to decide which she looks best in, etc., etc. Ok.)
Also the type book—a hell of a big help. I’ve spent a good two days on it, looking it over & trying to get some kind of actual feel of the divers kinds of type & the actual uses to which they can be put. It’s the first chance I’ve had to do this, and it is all very damn interesting.
Rene had mentioned the bookstore there, and very much hope it all works out. I wish to god I could be there. Well, to hell with that. As it is, I may see you a lot sooner than I’d thought, i.e., I may very well be back in the States this coming spring. Olson wrote of a possible shake-up at BMC (which will involve you, I think, as much as myself) & if it all falls the right way, and if there is any place for me, I’ll be there for the new term in March. Ann & the kids will then be coming later, very damn sadly—but at least it will be a beginning. Finally, the sense of being foreign, here, is too much of a drag—or is after the first excitement wears off—as it has to after two years, etc., etc.
Anyhow there is that possibility, and have my fingers very damn tightly crossed. Olson said he would know pretty definitely what was to happen, in two weeks to a month. If it falls the wrong way, I guess he’ll be without further interest, as much as anyone else. It’s a question of funds, as usual—and whether or not the man providing them is sympathetic to the plans Olson has worked out. So damn well hoping. It could be the end.
Very great the books are going ok. (You should butcher an ox or something, and let the gentle reader get some conception as to what they all came out of.) Some damn thing to hang on to at least—though it must at times seem damn vague consolation. But this is temporary. I’m sure a hell of a lot will clear once you yourself are clear of the army & all. One can’t make it, in same. There’s simply no way to.
Sorry to hear abt money. Well, maybe something can be figured even here. If you should still be here until the 2nd week of December, then we could certainly have the money to you. Otherwise, any arrangement that seems feasible is damn kind of you to bother with. Ok.
This for now. Again, don’t think me nosey, etc. I shouldn’t have said a damn thing but for this note of Rainer’s—and fact you were clearly entitled at least to have that information.
All our love to you,
Bob
•••
[Mallorca]
October 15, 1953
Dear Paul,
Leave me try to muddle thru those 2 poems you note. Anyhow, I can’t fool you—so maybe I can explain at least what I was after, or thot they should be, etc., etc. Ok. THE DRUMS [CP I, 29] (title of which pertains to droning kind of conversation I often hear, or heard—you’re looking great, etc., etc.) is blague on ‘old times’—rhythms of same, and particularly that first line (with internal rhyme rushing it on) to set tone. Perhaps there is whimsey in the ‘in heaven’, and jovial type wry humor in the ‘surely’—last line mostly ironic. Really an echo of old times conversation—rhythm piece almost completely. I have a friend ‘harry’ or had one, who sells insurance & lives in Dobbs Ferry, etc. Perhaps it is too private—but I can read it with a fine sneer . . . (This is to get that, ‘howarreya harreee, thee’ hard—let the ‘in heaven’ and ‘surely’ stop it in a sense, then roll out on last line again—but it’s a joke.)
THE PEDIGREE [CP I, 51]: title to serve as sense of ‘breeding’, claims to title sense, with ambivalence of reference, i.e., dogs/people, etc. Whole sense of conformance to an established system of ‘proper’ connection, etc.
The beginning ‘Or’ : to suggest sense of, if I will not get myself a normal continuum ‘pattern’ (the Freudian, etc.), i.e., if I will not show the ‘normal’ feelings—the lost man’s wail (ironically)—“What will I do?” To snap it then, to my own sense of how any of this occurs: What, of what occasion, is not so/ necessary (i.e., doesn’t ultimately seem so, etc., i.e., doesn’t, because it has happened, argue with that logic its ‘rightness’ qua ‘natural occurrence’), we do not/ “witless” (which is picked up from Wms/ vocabulary, but, as well, from a further sense of the non-intellectual senses of action—Elizabethan, I suppose, too) perform it. In short, statement of the self-evident—ironic, in part, but also suggestion that the character of actual action has some aspects of a logic not altogether shared by that theoretic ‘action’. Well, the real, etc. Hence: Or me. Who am of common stock: sharing these same patterns of actuality, etc., coming from the same sources, etc. As are we all. In other words, an alternative ‘pedigree’ to that suggested by a theoretic behaviour pattern—last lines citing my claim to a common source, albeit I know, obliquely. Again, the first Or to cite my antagonism to assumptional notions of how people are or work, etc., etc.
That’s damn muzzy. To paraphrase it all, in brief: What I am (i.e., title). In any case, not to be explained by a possible conformance with assumptional notions of behaviour—viz, I won’t rape my daughter, nor has any such ‘longing’ ever plagued me, etc., etc. “What will I do?” I.e., that’s the general cry—lacking normal basis for behaviour patterns, etc. My own answer being, well what the hell don’t we do, because we ‘have to’, i.e., doesn’t reality itself allow us both such definition, of action, and one large part of the conditions for that definition as well. And don’t we ‘do’ it, etc. Well, then: me. I was ‘made’, I expect—just like that—and continue as part of the same process. My pedigree. Finally, of course that first ‘condition’ could be changed to almost any other of a like kind: OR if I will NOT pay my income tax, OR if I will NOT take off my hat in the house—o the shocked murmur: what WILL he do . . . I do what is ‘necessary . . . ’ ho/ho. As do ‘we’ all.
So much for that. I don’t know if it ever makes much sense. These poems, like the ones in this coming booklet with Laubiès, very much an attempt to side ‘statements’, i.e., ‘ideogrammic’ to that extent, tho I don’t believe it finally Pound’s usage. Really more Stendhal’s. Or Wms/. I want the barest possible ‘frame’. When they break, or flop, etc., I think it is because either the referents are imperfectly stated or too personal, or else simply without sufficient force, in themselves, to gain the kind of final ‘welding’ the form calls for. The only ‘classic’ instance of same I’ve yet managed, for my own uses at least, is THE OPERATION [CP I, 128]—where literally each two line section is such a statement, the four together being the total ‘thought’—and not at all that ‘thought’ in any one part, or combination of parts other than the one given. Earlier and perhaps most successful use of this same ‘method’ is THE RIDDLE [CP I, 115], with the shift in the middle, i.e., juxtaposition of those two base ‘statements’—with the almost jingle-like & ‘bitter’ summary: give it form certainly/ the name & titles (which last has almost to be said the way a child might pronounce it., i.e., with that ‘lilt’). I suppose there are several ‘classics’ of this method—certainly Stendhal is full of them. Wms/ 1st part of THE LION. Crane’s ISLAND QUARRY—though more ‘progressional’. But that is what had interested me. Where tone as well as content, is ‘reasonably’ variable. To make a total fusion. Well, it’s my own headache. THE DRUMS is minimal at best. THE PEDIGREE perhaps a joke for my own sense of balance. It also interests me in prose, i.e., I finally did write a story in which two rhythms—god knows I did not manufacture them, but there they were—and characters of statement ran parallel throughout, coming to a final end when (just when) one of sd rhythms literally becomes dominant. (I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but listen to this, from PR, where I’d sent it, hoping for loot, etc., etc.: “I’m sorry we don’t feel we can use this. It’s very well done, I think, and I hope you can place it somewhere.” It’s Catherine Carver—and was ‘grateful’ for her ‘opinion’ in any case. I’m going to use it, in any case, for title of this book of stories—tho still don’t know whether or not Trocchi will print it (he likes them, phew . . . , but says there is a ‘board’, etc.): THE GOLD DIGGERS. It’s a frightening story, for me—i.e., the first one not at all me, but a man literally there, of himself. A damn incredible feeling. At the end, I felt utterly helpless—and so on. To hell with it.
Damn pain in my belly commencing—have to eat something. Wow.
I was in Aix this past week, with Ann. It was very nice, finally, i.e., we had to take the car back, permit here having run out—and drove up from Barcelona, to leave it there. Very lovely at this time of year—and perhaps I am too bitter. But it is damn expensive, almost the same now as the US. And I, at least, can think only of getting back, now. If this job at BMC comes thru, I’ll be back in March—so will see you anyhow before you all go. It’s a shame—to have you here wd be the end. But i have been here too damn long, and it’s no longer any damn good. Write soon. Title for bk fair enough. Ok.
All our love to you both,
BobWill get photos
back this coming
week.
•••
February 3, 1954 [Mallorca]
Dear D/
Writing you from my Bed of Pain etc. Goddamn cold now for 4 wks/ and finally a fever—but Bizness As Usual in any case. Very gt/ you liked the bk/—I do really, a lot of fun, and L/s (in Paris) inks goof me very much. He is a gt/ man. Anyhow calamares is octupuses, and canalones—kind of ravioli—I don’t know if either stimulate sexual prowess but may have been thinking of it. No matter. ‘Dull Movement’: both sea thudding in, grind etc., as one hears it here at nite, and also, allied I guess, sound I sometimes perhaps ridiculously think of as re millions of people making love. Not important either—i.e., I think it wd filter in sooner or later. The ‘jagged encumbrance’—sexual relations, whole mess of relations generally, sense of impending, restricting, even obscuring ‘attachment’. Not defined. But hung on etc. You may be right in any case. I like others better too (Tho L/s ink is very gt/ for this one, very funny).
Mag// ok thank god. #1 now all in proof—I got so nervous I started feeding it in abt 2 weeks ago & now have first proof on all 64 pp/ it will be—and well, by god, on way to having most of the ms/ for #2 as well. It is, or will be, the same rush—what with the move in the middle. Hopeless. #2 I think will be cool enough, #1 is too really except it was very much a pick up. [note in left margin: For #2 Also Ronald Mason on Melville’s poems- do you know his book? SPIRIT ABOVE THE DUST (English-the best I’ve found. Very very nice man.)] Anyhow got everything from very funny Japanese story to Artaud trans/ by none other than K. Rexroth. How abt that. He also came in as a contributing Ed/, most politely, along with [Irving] Layton, Paul [Blackburn] & Olson. I think it will be interesting. Anyhow do damn well send what you can soon—I wd be very grateful for something for #2 say, still room on po-ems. So.
Cid has been very gt/ all along. There is, in fact, no real reason even for competition, i.e., there’s enough material—and my emphasis has to be a little more on reviews etc. than his. It works out. (Very great actually—for one thing it turns out I was the only one apparently who came thru for him on reviews for #12, so we have wild honor of holding down sd position with 2 yet. O well . . . ) Also none of the people involved, Layton, Olson, Paul etc., etc., have shown him the least sign of letting him down for this other. It will really be two fronts, which I think can be used—granted we haven’t simply been engaged in bullshit. I.e., here’s another place to say what most of us thot, and think, necessary—fair enough. (He was likewise one of the very damn few who came thru with reviews for me on #1—so we know damn well who we can count on. Voila!) One thing I have to mention, tho no pleasure—i.e., we’ll be facing a like [^ as you were then] problem of money, for Ann’s passage & the kids abt June—and can you get us any of that $100 back? I think you know I wdn’t bring it up if I didn’t have to—i.e., things will be very tight, because there won’t be time for any money from the books to come in, and that backing we had will have run out by abt the next bk/—anyhow cd you please write me as soon as you can how it looks. If you cd get it to me by abt the first of May, then that wd be great. But write anyhow—ok/—I’m sorry it has to come up.
This for now. All our love to you all & all best luck on that issue—it sounds very good & I’d be damned if I’d worry. Who can.
Bob
[note in left margin] Very good you liked the poem—many thanks for taking it.
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
June 6, 1954 [Black Mountain, NC]
Dear Bill,
I hardly have any excuse for taking this long to thank you for all your kindness that afternoon—both you and your wife. Which says it very damn dully & forgive me. I think I know your poems as well as any man living—which is obvious presumption—but anyhow now I know the man who wrote them too, & it means a very great deal to me.
Nothing is much simpler here, the place continues to founder on this headache of money—otherwise it’s terrific & the past weeks, even if that’s all it comes to, won’t have been for nothing. I feel better in this thing than I’ve felt for a long, long time—& if you had wondered what I got out of it, then that’s it. Some guts.
Anyhow, if it closes (and the test I guess will be very soon, i.e., no money & we can’t get much beyond July, if that) for myself, I don’t know what I’ll do, I haven’t really been able to think much about it. As well, I’m in a kind of break-thru or down depending on how you look at it, & don’t even see anything but simply what’s right in front of me. What a goddam pleasure it is.
I don’t know whether or not my wife sent you a copy of the magazine, I’ll send one from here soon in any case—also of what new books we’ve done. I’m just now waiting for copies to come from Mallorca. I think both of these things, i.e., magazine & books, can be kept going no matter. From what little I had time to find out in NY , I think they’re our best bet for making some kind of front & holding it. At least it keeps us from being smothered completely. I was surprised that they get around as well as they do.
So to hell with this for the moment—I wish I could talk to you again, right now, but perhaps I’ll be able to get up again sometime not too damn far away. I hope so. Could you let me know what happened on the play—it’s very exciting & I hope to god they work it out. I asked around about Paige but got the same answers you had—I hope you’ve managed to get hold of him by now.
Well, thanks—& please bear with me for being so inarticulate about it, I hate that—not being able to say it the way I want to, how very damn much seeing you meant.
All my love to you both,
Bob
•••
August 14, 1954 [Mallorca]
Dear Rexroth,
This is not at all worth bothering you with but you are at least there. Ok. I had today a letter from Duncan calling me on the 1st issue, to wit, the review on Roethke plus the Patchen review which I of course wrote. The latter seems to have bugged everyone and god knows that was not the intention. I.e., I conceived the book or much better, I felt the book as written with pain, a fucking simple element these days. What I had hoped at least to say was that he cared to write, that it hurt, and that to write in this fucking world does hurt. And that if your back hurts, too, then it hurts. A fucking simple element, pain. All of which I seem to have misread. I can’t believe it. Whereas the jacket says ‘gayety’ etc. I could hardly believe that either well, you know. Today we smile. Voila.
Also on Roethke—as again Duncan says Patchen is not ‘rain’ or is, as he says, Lewis Carroll ‘pain’ too? Jesus Christ—the review is ‘cruel and attacking an ‘insecure’ man’ etc. Here is a man who has profited by every fucking filthiness of literary practice in the US today and Duncan says, “cruel . . .” Is this man serious? Is he going to lay down and lick the fucking stick that’s shoved up his ass? Well, again I am much too goddamn assumptive. But my god to praise this character of self-devotion is pathetic. I don’t know what these people are thinking of. This is the end of the world, possibly—and yet we are to have these politenesses. Which he would hardly extend to another—at that.
Would you sometime write me an article on the West Coast, anonymous or whatever. I.e., I am if you will a lonely man living with a wife and three children. What else. I see no one here. Teaching, it was almost worse because at least I could hope. And I would rather live on the ground.
People cry, scream, yell—for what. So he can be kind, or generous, or polite. You know, anyone. Either way. A character of writing becomes the abstention from all care—do not be partial, goddamnit. I think I lost all respect for Patchen, because I know this man through his wife’s family, I grew up there, where they came from and saw the pathetic picture to the great man they had over their fireplace. With care.
This idiot. This pathetic idiot. This is writing, for him. NOT to care, to be a great man. Fuck him.
So, you know, I guess it does mean sides. Of course I am lonely. How could ‘I’ be otherwise. I don’t really care much anymore what people think, or even think of. Let Duncan worry as he will. I like your writing. I trusted you before, younger, and would again because at least I know what you care for, egocentric as it’s become for me now to say so.
All best to you,
Creeley
•••
August 19, 1954
Dear Rexroth,
That letter of yesterday can serve, I guess, as what I had to write but it is hardly what I wanted to. I can’t yet believe it is all this simple, or that what I have taken in your work as care and a core of absolute seriousness can be so simply obverted. Perhaps even that is presumptuous, though I have to read you as I will. But that we should come to a difference on such a question as Roethke seems to me impossible.
I can’t offer you any equivalence of experience, except to say, as what I am, that I do care, that writing, this process such as I have known it, gives me that relief. That is, it is, at best, what I am, it gives me that relief. At seventeen I used to hand out pamphlets at the Fore River shipyards, we were trying to break the company union and get the CIO in. My mother was a nurse, and my father died when I was two years old. I have one sister who is miserable. My mother, now almost seventy, will be up for retirement this year, whereupon she will go live with her sister. At eighteen I was in Burma, every morning I got up and to get out of the ambulance stepped over stretchers that had about an inch of blood in them. I saw people die, as many of my age did, in every conceivable posture. I have no longer, nor can I ever have, the least tolerance for any ‘sickness’ per se. I suffered too much from ‘sick’ minds and the purposes to which they commit themselves.
So what does that matter. I do not think it the least aggression to believe we can only say what we think, responsibly. I certainly accept all responsibility for the ‘attack’ on Roethke. I submit that other men have cared to keep clean, under equally difficult conditions. Artaud, of course, comes to mind and the description of him I had from a friend of the way he was after the war, of what he weighed, of how to speak even was difficult, of the people who then allowed him who had said, is this a poet . . . , earlier. I think, too, because you bring it up, of Hart Crane, and the one man who knew him, I think, as well as any other and better than most, Slater Brown. Rhetorically enough, this man was the first ever to care one good goddamn what I wrote, and hoped to. I learned a great deal from him, both of Crane—who certainly you misunderstand in your value of this [Yvor] Winters’ attack—and of that kind of care poetry can be, as I also learn it, indirectly, from what even Robert Graves now has to say of Crane, from the meeting in London perhaps too long ago to matter. You see, you are much too solicitous of ‘sickness’ per se. We are all sick, if that matters. If we care, we are sick, because we are insane to care, now. You know that all your ‘revolutionaries’ are dead. How protest now, you think—except to rid yourself of the embarrassment of any attachment to people who cannot read Roethke, hopefully. That is nasty to say, i.e., I hardly mean to be. I would, if I were there, put you to a very simple test, to wit, ask you to prove it, what you say of me and of this man. And if you could not, of course I would deal with you as I have, and have to, with any man who assumes my ‘unfairness’, which is actually to say I am a liar. The point is that my generation doesn’t give a good goddamn for any hope, or any pretension, or anything but what comes of actual care. How can we. You ask us to assume this man’s seriousness? When every single word he writes is both self-indulgence and a distortion of those who do care. Even Crane, particularly Crane.
Well, fuck rhetoric. It hardly serves anyone. I wanted you on the magazine because, ingenuously, I thought here is a man who can spit, usefully, who writes poetry, a poem, who has cared for a long time. All much too simple I grant you, though you did write me, “Sure, I’d be glad to be on your editorial board. I do get a certain amount of stuff from young poets around the country, etc. etc.” That’s the last I ever heard from you but for that mimeographed note re the radio program, until this letter yesterday. I know you are busy, I only suggest that other men can be equally so, and with, I hope, equal purpose.
I don’t know why you make it a case re Roethke, I have read that article many times since getting your letter. I read it after getting Duncan’s. I think either I am completely mistaken as to the nature, call it, of what you had cared about, or else a fool, completely. In which case you would do both me and yourself a service by forgetting you ever read a single poem by me. I could not possibly be a ‘good’ poet by these criteria.
If I were there, I guess I wd have you by the lapels anyhow; jesus god to say only I don’t understand. I want to, I don’t. Because I will never forget this, one way or the other. I wrote five people to be on that fucking ‘board’, four of whom came, the other being Paul Goodman who never answered and that was honest of him. But you did. And you cannot answer me this way, now. If you’re for Roethke, and if you’re a man, say why. If you think the attack was dishonest, unfair, or any other thing, say it. I mean say it. With respect, absolute,—say it. You cannot go ‘old’ on me or claim a ‘superior’ bizness. This is the bizness, all it ever is.
Obviously I want you on, I won’t take you off until you give me an answer. Not simply to be difficult, but I care to know. More than you tell me in this note. I want to know, poem by poem, what you see in this man. You are on the board by your own will. To deny that can’t be simply a shrug of your shoulders. I think that is fair.
Best to you,
Creeley
I enclose a note I’d written earlier to follow your own, i.e., I had, as I said, to say something. It seems to me altogether inadequate, at least from what I know to be involved, but anyhow let it stand for now. I wish you would say it, what’s on your mind—Roethke is the issue, not Thomas—who is hardly ‘attacked’ in your sense. Is there some question of a loyalty which I would certainly respect, however it came. At least I think it worth saying.
[Note appended to August 19, 1954, letter to Rexroth]
“Kenneth Rexroth wishes to state that he had nothing to do with the attacks on Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke in the first issue (Vol I, No 1) of the Black Mountain Review. He has never functioned as an editor, associate or otherwise,1 and has requested that his name be removed from the masthead.”
Kenneth Rexroth asked that the above notice be put into the Summer issue of this magazine, i.e., Vol I, No 2. But since that had already been printed and shipped by the time his letter arrived, it was impossible. A record of his wish, however, is due him, and should be noted by the reader.
Otherwise, and what should also be noted, is that the editor of this magazine does not withdraw one inch from the position asserted by the publication of the reviews in question. The reader can judge for himself whether or not these reviews were printed solely as attacks on persons, as opposed to the acts of those persons and their subsequent endorsement by a large portion of what passes for critical writing in America. Certainly it is not Roethke’s fault that those very characteristics in his work which are most lamentable, eg., diffusion, generality, and a completely adolescent address to the world in which he finds himself, should be the ones on which his reputation is maintained. But it is to the point to attack such a maintenance, and this the editor believes was done in the review in question. Poems were given, were quoted, and discussed. And that fact alone allows the reader his own judgement. He has no obligation to agree, he has only to consider what lies in front of him. He can make up his own mind as to whether or not these poems constitute the possession of “enormous talent . . .” In the case of Thomas, he can also make up his own mind as to whether or not the question, “His work has imposed itself on contemporary readers as ‘major’, or, rather, it has been made ‘major’. Why?”, is a fair one.
Let him do this for himself. Who else can, or should. There is no possible defense for the editorial position of this magazine except that it believes in what it prints.
R.C.
[RC’s note] 1Mr. Rexroth accepted the post of ‘contributing editor’ in a letter of January 17, 1954.
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
[Mallorca]
August 21, 1954
Dear Bill,
Your letter just came but you’ll have had my own by now about Rainer Gerhardt—which stays with me very much. Selfishly, I want to do something about it, it seems such an ugliness that he is dead so goddamn simply. As it is, I can only write ‘notes’, and they are hardly to the point. But I can’t see letting what he did go unnoticed. Well, something at least god knows—it must be possible. He can’t simply be shoveled under like that.
It’s very kind of you to say what you do, of the stories. I’ve written a couple of others, one since coming here—perhaps I’m going too arch. I don’t know, but anyhow something comes which is it I guess. Also I’ve written a few poems and that, too, is a relief. This process of sitting down again, more or less isolate, is difficult, or is against all the contact there was there at Black Mountain. Except I have it here too. It’s simply in another character, which I have to manage as I can.
It’s also very good to hear what you say of Olson’s MAXIMUS POEMS—I like them very much. I think what you say, of their structure, is the point. He needs this size very much to declare himself, finally—he gets pulled almost too short otherwise. I hope that piece for Jonathan Williams comes ok, god knows Olson will be very happy. He cares what you think very much.
I’m glad I didn’t jump you on that thing of ‘women’, but then I had to read the poems and trust to that. You know, I was scared meeting you. And felt utterly at home by the time I left. I.e., I’d hardly be so presumptuous as to say, I ‘know’ what you mean, but with that I’ve had chance to, you make absolute sense to me. As against those men very often, whose ways I can see & value, but whose content is simply too far from my own to make the tie. So I read the poems I guess caring more than it is very simple to say. And somehow, perhaps ridiculously enough, getting to Barcelona & seeing Ann, with that shyness, I ended up, or we did, sitting in a room we had in a pension, there, reading them to her as best I could. Well, they work, they say it—what the hell else can matter.
As it is, I’m fighting after a fashion, with both Rexroth and Robt Duncan on this article I’d printed on Roethke—and what a waste of time that is. To be separated from anyone on such an account. Rexroth thinks the attack was unfair, and he’s right to, because R/ must be a friend. But the practice involved sticks, and I think it’s filthy. I wish he did too, but he doesn’t.
So, look, do come if you can. I don’t even dare really think about it much—it would be terrific. I also think it would be on your route to Greece, and we’re easily found, in fact we’ll meet you & all, or anything that’s simplest. Ok. I’ll even see to it that Robt Graves pays you homage as you descend etc. Voila.
Write when you can, please. All love to you both,
Bob
•••
[letterhead]
The Black Mountain Review
Black Mountain, North CarolinaCasa Martina
Bonanova, Palma
Mallorca, Spain
November 10, 1954
Dear Mr Zukovsky:
Mr Edward Dahlberg has just come to Palma, and talking with him, he had mentioned you and your work. Also I had just seen your address in a recent issue of The Pound Newsletter. In any case I’m editing the above magazine for Black Mountain College, and should be very grateful to see anything you might be kind enough to send us. I have known your work from Pound’s Active Anthology, also from your own very interesting ‘anthology’, so I very much hope that I can be of some use to you. It would please me very much.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
P.S. I’ll send some copies of the magazine soon, so that you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about—such as it is.
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Casa Martina
Bonanova, Palma
Mallorca, Spain
November 25, 1954
Dear Bill,
Many thanks for your letter about Kitasono’s book—it’s wonderful you found it that moving. You’ll know, I guess, that it is not a very ‘simple’ book for the usual reader, i.e., I get some letters asking how we came to print it & so on, so many ‘cliches’—o well. What they won’t see is precisely this quality that you do see, so very clearly. This commonness—it moves me very much. My own favorites are the first (A Shadow) and one of the shorter (A Solitary Decoration). I love his tone—or what to call it—literally the movement of the words, the way they are in a sense always with the slightest of hesitancies, from the difficulties of his ‘english’ I guess—anyhow, it seems a very particular care. (In fact, just like this image, of the performer on the pole, the way the man does ‘set’ himself, for the consequent movement, etc.)
So that was pleasure, certainly. And again, I’m very pleased you liked it, and know he will be too.
I’ve just had a copy of your Selected Essays, which is not a simple book for me. Probably it’s because I’m apt to hold your work with rather ridiculous fierceness, i.e., what I like & so forth. So it is that I miss things like that note on Women I had mentioned to you in Rutherford, also With Rude Fingers Forced (which always seemed to me very exact), the Letter To An Australian Editor (in which your references to Pound were stated very fairly and explicitly), and even something as brief but also as unequivocal as the National Book Award address. Well, how can you be expected to get it all in—except that I find myself perplexed, reading the note on Thomas, for one thing, or your being literally so charitable to Auden, when Crane (who cared I think so much more) is then put down elsewhere (in the piece called: Shapiro Is All Right—which I’m damned if he is!)
In any case the book puzzles me, sometimes I almost sense a gun at your back—which may be utter ridiculousness. But Charles Henri Ford! And as you say there: “To me the sonnet form is thoroughly banal because it is a word in itself whose meaning is definitely fascistic . . . But for Ford’s sake I am willing to ignore the form as unimportant . . .” Put it, that at that point my understanding balks. I don’t mean to argue a literal straightness of black & white, but rather that some kindnesses will be utterly misappropriated—as you had told me this one in fact was.
Well, this is no matter. I’ll try to review the book as accurately as I can—tho that will also hardly matter to very many. I can’t put it otherwise, than that I care for your work very deeply—and I’m damned if I can see it misused by what must have been a publisher’s selection (?). Which is presumptuous—forgive me please. The American Background is what I value, completely; In A Mood Of Tragedy, for what?
Anyhow I had to say it. I hope things go all right for you, I wish very much I could see you. This distance is damn well impossible.
All our love to you all,
Bob
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
December 6, 1954
Dear Bill,
Many thanks for your letter—which is such a dull way of saying it, forgive me. I know, I think, what you mean, though god knows that is presumptuous. Anyhow—I did the review last week, and hope it makes some sense to you—also, now, I’ll try to indicate more than I did (I can add a few footnotes to places where it comes in, etc.), what effect the omissions do have.
In any case, what I did want to ask you—very much at the time the book first came—was, would you have any use for, call it, a supplementary volume, i.e., something we could perhaps do here. I would have asked sooner, but thought perhaps this was your own final taking of these things—well, that was goddamn smug of me. Anyhow say what you think, it would be a readable job of printing, etc., and we could print maybe 1000 copies. Not to be grand about it—nor to trade on your name, etc. I’d simply like to see the rest of it said, or literally available. Because there is the impossibility of trying to find these things, now, in magazines out-of-print, scattered, and so on.
Well, the goddamn review—it was a messy (my messiness, that is), difficult job. So much of the book made its point, almost in spite of its subject—as many of your comments, for example, in the essays on Lowell (It is to assert love, not to win it that the poem exists), Thomas (What is more profound than song? The only thing to be asked is, whether or not a man is content with it)—and so on.
So I fumbled with that, in some sense. But, more particularly, I tried to take on this nightmare of measure—because I believe it is one. Again, the way the book is now ‘presented’, it’s difficult to avoid mis-emphases. For example, I found that this thing makes three overt appearances, first re Pound’s Cantos (Pound’s 11 New Cantos), then in the piece on The Poem As A Field Of Action, and finally and at length in the piece at the end for Cid.
All thru it, I had the feeling I agreed with your sense of it all, but was damned if I’d grant you the word, not with the horror of its implications. Anyhow, someone had been telling me about some elizabethan, Sam Putnam, who wrote it all: numbers & measure equals arhythmus; whereas that rhythm which we call ‘poetic’, is basically irregular, or rather is, that ‘regularity just out of hearing’. For myself, when you say, a relatively stable foot, you’re arguing 1) that a man trust his own ear, i.e., hear the weights of those words he’s using; and 2) that a reader at least try some like care, etc. I don’t see it as ‘measure’. Nor do I believe a line must be measured, to be in measure. (Graves, for example, was telling me of some tests some idiots had made with a seismograph, yet, wherein poems were read & the patterns came out complete flux, i.e., no ‘measure’ at all. They couldn’t even separate words, much less lines—and so on.)
But, if you’ll forgive my presumption, again, this comes to me somehow from Pound (?)—or what is it—and also from god knows a reasonable wish to have some means wherewith to attack the ‘typographical’ poets, and also to argue the coherence of your own structure. But, for me, Marianne Moore is measure—there’s the goddamn mathematics of it, I can’t make it. Even as a ‘relatively stable foot’. I think once this becomes the ‘direction’, call it, in which a poem is written, words drop their own weights, in an either/or battle with ‘metric’. I mean, the coherence tends to become ‘exterior’. Frankly, even this much discussion involves me in the weariest of generalities—I don’t know, I don’t think anyone ever did, does, or will. Like Campion and his own statement, that he wrote to no ‘measure’, etc.
Kinde are her answeres,
But her performance keeps no day;
Breaks time, as dancers
From their own Musicke when they stray:
All her free favors and smooth words,
Wing my hopes in vaine.
O did ever voice so sweet but only fain?
Can true love yeeld to such delay,
Converting joy to pain?
Lost is our freedome,
When we submit to women so:
Why doe wee neede them,
When in their best they worke our woe?
There is no wisedome
Can alter ends, by Fate prefixt.
O why is the good of man with evill mixt?
Never were days yet cal’d two,
But one night went betwixt.
I don’t think one could ‘measure’ it, to begin with—nor granted some ‘flexible’ system might allow that, for what purpose? The ‘length’ of anything is such a variable—and doesn’t it, too, involve us in all this horror of time, literally? What is ‘five minutes’, etc. Or ‘I thought you’d never come’. I think it’s an impossible thing, to measure, in any sense. But that is willful, etc., I mean, not romantically, outside the window here there’s a stone wall, sun, etc., and that, if one will, is measure enough. Because all the stones, tho of god knows a great variety, do ‘fit’. And has an edge of sorts along the top which is ‘rime’ enough. And keeps the cows out, or in, depending. I don’t think you should bother your head about me who have no ears—or they will not hear, I think, because of ‘measure’. Writing, anyhow, this review, I remembered one of your Collected Later Poems, that had appeared in the London Times Literary Supplement, as follows:
. . . But his forms are so irregular in outline that there is no way of measuring them. Any metrical ideas which the reader retains while reading him will be an interruption . . .
You know—how true! And at least you give us the poem. I just damn well don’t see backtracking in any sense, from that very substantial victory. Like, even Ben Jonson—particularly Ben Jonson—was brought to write:
Still may Syllabes jarred with time,
Still may reason warre with rime,
Resting never.
Poor devil, etc. Anyhow, again my own hatred of what the publisher involves you in—so much more to the point seems the kind of sense you made of Pound, i.e., one basically intuitive hit, where you point out his idea of mind generated by mind, a male process—head to head, sans body (female), etc. Graves was out here for supper a few nights ago, and that seemed to impress him, as much as it had me, when I read it. Well, like they say, that is so much more interesting than measure—if you’ll forgive me that sense of it.
God knows it’s all our battle—and the damn deep bitterness of it I sometimes feel, dispossessed, etc., tears & all,—ah well! You have done so much. That doesn’t even imply a ‘past’, i.e., you do it. I wish, again and again, very selfishly, that there were not this great distance, etc.
I hope I don’t tag to you (as I may have suggested, re Shapiro, etc.) any necessity of infallibility. I think your poems are often ‘infallible’—god knows enough. I’m not very old, but I’ve read them for some 10 years now—and they’ve held me very kindly. I can remember doing one of those ‘papers’, at Harvard, on your work, at a time when all I really knew of it was the first Complete Collected Poems—and was stunned by the insight of, call it feebly (!), that Nantucket poem with its, “the immaculate white bed” or was it just, ‘bed’. Anyhow. Granted loneliness, and often a feeling that no one else has possessed any of those dilemmas, with which oneself, etc., seems confronted, it helps to be contradicted. You’ve done that time and again for me. The most pleasure I got from that class at BMC was, after, one of the kids telling me, for once he got Williams—as opposed to ‘Creeley’, or whoever of course it could have been. That was damn good to hear.
So, anyhow, to hell with it, i.e., do tell me if we can be of any use, re the material that isn’t in this Selected Essays—or anything else you may think of. I hope the review won’t seem a complete waste to you, i.e., simply something presumptuous. I did attack the ‘measure’, because I don’t see it—that may well be me, and granted the light ever comes, know that I’ll acknowledge it. But that seemed to me anyhow one of the book’s centers, as it was there given. As to the other things, The American Background, for one, argues so much your strength, seeing Ciardi (I think it was), singling out The Artist, in a review of The Desert Music, to quote, etc. But that comes to his and my taste, and has nothing to do with you—or often the poems, either.
I hope things go ok. Have you thought of coming here? Just now the weather holds fair enough, we get strong sun from roughly 11 to 3 or so—actually very good. And here it is December, etc. Nor does it come to that soporific bizness like in Fla, etc. Anyhow it’s as good a place to be as we can now either think of, or manage. So.
Write when you can, please.
All our love to you both,
Bob
•••
Merry Christmas & all
best for a good New Year!
December 24, 1954
Dear Cid,
This is a little close to the deadline, to make much sense—but I want to answer you, i.e., that way it’s simpler to keep up & all. We just got a monkey— very lovely little thing, a lady, etc. I’ve always wanted one, it’s the kind of thing one dreams abt—and last night in fact it seemed that I dreamed abt everything I ever have, at that—anyhow she is very nice. Now of course we worry abt her getting cold & so on—like having another kid. We gave her an old sweater of Tom’s last night to sleep on, & she fooled around with it for awhile, then put it on! Too much. It’s weird the way they parallel (and god knows equal in many cases) so-called human intelligence. So.
The pigeon book is by H. P. Macklin, who writes a series of articles in the Am/ Pigeon Journal (who is buying out the edition, for distribution etc) on divers odd & out-of-fashion breeds. Very nice man. Anyhow that’s it—and I’ll try to get you a copy. I hadn’t really thought to send one, because it is, granted, a peculiarity of my own—and those likewise afflicted. Just now I’m trying to locate a good pair of Homers for Graves—who plans to use them for communication between Deya & Palma—very funny.
While I think of it—two Oxford students (both from Newfoundland, one [^ Cyril Fox] a Rhodes scholar, etc) came to visit this past week; I liked them very much, particularly Edward Flynn, whose whole character, to put it dully, seemed to me very damn decent. [note in left margin: It was a tremendous pleasure to watch Flynn read Irving.] Anyhow I took the liberty of giving him your address, in case he can get there—either going back now, or perhaps later. I think you’d like him, also both of them. The other’s name is Cyril Fox (he had known Rainer & Renate, etc). Ed F/ is doing graduate work in English Lit/—very sensible and fine-humored man. I hope you have chance to see him.
As to the magazine—by all means, do send whatever you have, anytime. I know you don’t want to waste time trying things you may think I’ll have no use for. As to the Apollinaire specifically, I’m a little against using such as opposed to new work—but that’s a ‘general’ feeling, i.e., I wouldn’t use it for a club, etc. Well, you say. Prose is, god knows, hard to get—I have at the moment two stories in hand I hope to use this next issue (#5)—but that’s not much of a backlog. As to doing 4 issues in advance, I haven’t been able as yet to come anywhere near such a thing, i.e., it’s always a pickup, or has been. At best I’ve asked people to do specific things, but that’s invariably dependent upon their own time, etc. So it doesn’t constitute a very deliberate ‘plan’, ever. I do hope to do an issue of ‘parodies’, to put it loosely, some time this summer—but that again depends on what material can be got together. I also hope to have some material on both dance & music, i.e., Katie Litz wrote she’ll try at least; and has also asked David Tudor, for me, to see if he can’t do something. She says the latter had just come back from a European tour—did you happen to hear him? Very fine pianist. (Of course both were at BMC, etc. I met Katie in NY C, very nice woman—and very damn good dancer I think.) But again, it all stays tentative which is perhaps best—at least it’s the rule, at the moment.
I’ll try to send some poems soon, I’m working ok thank god. Can you tell me what you have, from #13—is there anything of mine in #14? I haven’t seen #13 as yet. I’m all confused as to what I did send & also what you accepted. Ok. To hell with it & I will try to send something soon.
All best,
Bob
[note in left margin] Thanks for asking about cars, etc. I hope we can get something.
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
January 26, 1955
Dear Bill,
Olson just sent a letter to be added to all this discussion re ‘measure’. It’s an answer to that review of mine—such as that was. Anyhow, here are quotes of the main parts of his letter.
“. . . Would there be this use: that a line is at least all at the same time quantity, breath and accent. And that rhythm is something else again even though these three are its agents. That’s so far as prosody goes. But the prosody is only itself one of three parts of the act of any given line simply that the line is also, word-wise, image and thought. And these are as much agents of the rhythm as the sound effects are: what you have in your mind and your soul is as much a matter of the rhythm as the words you get out of your mouth? I don’t need to say, try and write without something to say. And see what you get.
“Foot, me eye. Or arthmus, me arse.
“What is patently true is that rhythm now is arhythmic—which certainly Campion wasn’t, and that second stanza in the Williams’ poem you quote is arhythmic. The Campion is straight lute music, and as different from the ‘music’ of Mr Bill as Boulez is not Bach. OK?
“All right. If what we got is arhythm—and that means that on one face of the line the image and thought too will be different from, say, the Elizabethans, it also means that on the other face the arhythm will be demanding other services of its agents quantity breath accent than what they were used for, either by the Elizabethans or the classical poets, then or now (Eliot Milton any of those Bill had it were, with forced fingers rude, diddling the nightingale)
“Thus a foot, like I say, is—my foot. At least we’d be best to throw some of these words out of the window, that they do go with a state and time of language and verse which ain’t now, viz., meter, measure, foot, rhythm (if “rhythm” is still going to be what it became by a decay of its root meaning through mediaeval Latin: see definition of “Rime” in Shorter Oxford). And I suggest these be the words to go, because they describe a usage not a fact of language.
“There are these five facts of words in verse: (1) that they take an observable length of time to get out of the throat and mouth—quantity; (2) that there are certain terminals that require it, and anyhow the breath itself can’t push ’em out forever, so there are stoppages or silences, for example caesuras, they used to call them, rests, they call them in music, here we call them—breath; (3) that words are pronounced with accents on definite syllables, according to the country you live in, but with general agreements which make the hearing of their meaning clear—accent;
and two too little noticed “facts”, that (4), words have meaning as thought; and (5), that they have meaning as image, that they carry pictures, yet.
“Now beyond that—even syntax—you are into the confusion it will be how a man and a time uses these as to what rules of order you will be running up against. And because we are in a time when the American language is more and more self-isolating—and we are as good as we are, as good as we are—it behooves us, I should think, . . . . to get the words to preach what you practice.
“Rhythm itself, if understood as what it means, flatly, what damn well “flows”, is what turns out to flow. And that’s what a man makes, if he makes it. And it hasn’t a damn thing to do with a foot. Or with the red-herring you drag over the question, “quantitative verse” either. Nor does it have to do with rhyme or no rhyme, even if rime (to get that word back to some cleanliness too)—I mean the agreement of terminal sounds—has a strong tendence to create backward along itself an order which is, in fact, meter. But meter is not rhythm: it is meter, measure, regularity of foot, something which may or may not satisfy as succeeding also to be rhythm.
“If you do without rime . . . , then whether you know it or not, the agents of . . . your powers over arhythm are the quantity, breath, accent of your words, and the image and thought you give them. And no more . . .”
I am impressed—to put it dully. At least, even in the letters to you, I felt first (and most particularly) that for my part, the attempt to ‘state’ the rationale for this character of verse I have felt you, in effect, have introduced and/or made the most complete evidence for was not damn well to be done with words like ‘measure’. Perhaps I yank in Olson much too quickly for a shield—but what do you think? In many ways—some ways—the mechanics of the poem are both as absolute & as intimate as the act of love; which will not be stated, but which will be known—or else. At least no guides to complacent marriage will help; but the end is the marriage (literally in the sense of which you have spoken—a thing), no matter. Anyhow, I’ve felt that when you say, an order by which may be ordered not only our poems but our lives—that it was the poem as an absolute which you were asserting—as absolute as anything gets, which is in some cases, completely.
I am being more vague than ever. But —we don’t need a “measure” so much as we do need, desperately, some sense of our materials, the elements if you will from which the poem forms, to be the form, that will dis-embarrass us. Isn’t this the goddamn dilemma—otherwise why is Leonie Adams such an embarrassment. Aren’t all ‘irrational’ forms an “embarrassment”*—sometimes as horribly as the man singing somewhere down by Houston street, who was kicked to death by some kids, for just that. I.e., they asked him why he was singing. They ask you—why this ‘form’. Good christ, etc. Anyhow, let me get this off to you. Please write when you can—I will too.
All our love to you both,
Bob
[note in left margin] *to such as Leonie Adams—good guy or not? And yet there is no possible agreement, unless one go to the poem.
•••
[Mallorca]
April 23, 1955
Wd you please also send what makes it for you, names or whatever, to me, i.e., anything you can think of for this BMR? Cd I snitch one of those Beckett stories—there I damn well envy you. He is good. Anyhow whatever you can as you can. New format etc now in press, goes ok.
Dear Alex,
It’s goddamn kind of you to take such trouble—i.e., that’s the softest rejection I ever got, and it matters, like they say. Certainly the ‘style’ is studied; I hope at least among confreres I don’t pull over wig of divine inspiration for that ‘manner’, etc., etc. And I think I know what you mean re manner/matter, etc. It may simply be that the content of that one, doesn’t seem worth the twitching (wherein I wd disagree with you), yet that’s a point—and where my own gamble comes in, etc. At the moment I’m sitting here putting things down like:
“Jason Edwards lived in a mansion. (stop) Jim Stuart lived in a shack. (stop) Jason Edwards lived in a shack. (stop) Jim Stuart lived in a mansion. (stop)”
And:
“Can’t keep his head. It’s over his head. Pillow is under his head, it’s over. Maid on her way. The head. The head is father to the mind? Mind is inside—the head. Dropped on his head, as a boy. Cats land on all fours.”
Which is ridiculous, like that—literally, jawbreakers is all I’m after, things, anything, to break up set sense or sense patterns I fall into. (Viz, these are not ‘from stories’, etc., etc., etc.) Too, the syntactical seems my own crib, usually, so that too I want to examine with more care. I suppose it all begins with: “He over took—them. He took them—over.” And so on. To hell with it. But will try to keep awake no matter.
So to hell with that, really. It’s suddenly begun to rain, which—after the dryness here for months now—seems a much more relevant thing. Wow.
More to the point also—let me put down those few I myself respect, i.e., writers, and then you say, and don’t feel that any show of interest obliges you to a damn thing. But I’ve been reluctant to ask people to send stuff to you, since I’d worried that might argue presumption on my part, and a possible embarrassment finally to you. Anyhow, like this: Robert Duncan; Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Irving Layton, Denise Levertov—and perhaps a few others, though I cannot at the moment think of them. And of those, Olson, and Duncan, seem to me the most able, i.e., all do interest me, often very much, for one reason or another,—anyhow that’s enough goddamn rambling abt it. Too, as I wrote you in that last note, there are certainly people like Paul Goodman, I think would be interesting—also Louis Zukofsky? (He has a thing on Shakespeare, part of which was published in the last ND Annual, ‘Bottom Dream’.) And there are other materials I hear of, that I would like to at least mention, eg., possible art notes by Harold Rosenberg, possible notes from John Cage, et al. Stuff like that. I cannot use all of it, nor do I mean to suggest here I’d be using you at all, for a watershed, etc. Nor for any ‘community’, and so forth. Thank god that is well dead . . .
I wish I could see you now, though at the moment it’s not too hopeless here. I.e., a friend from NY C I’d met there last summer, a painter, John Altoon, is now here—and that’s a pleasure. And also Duncan, who is very damn sharp, and good company. I wish you might meet him sometime, and will hope that you do. I think to try again sometime soon to get to Paris, yet you know how tedious said attempts usually prove—so leave me shut up till it’s for real, beyond all question. Ok. Also—while I think of it—can you give me rough deadlines, i.e., before, say, next two or so issues, so I can send you several things at once, rather than one story (as this last time, etc). I’d rather do it like that—and think it would be better for you as well. And having a rough date, then I could make it, I think. I am a hell of a procrastinator, I believe.
So, wild. Hope it all goes well there, and will write shortly—and do tell me what I can do to be of use, ever. That’s really what bugs me, as is—viz, my goddamn vague activity. Voila.
All our best,
Bob
Don’t bother to send back copy (story) if you haven’t. I have another here, etc.
•••
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain, N.C.
September 5, 1955
Dear Spicer,
Thanks for your letter, and under any other circumstances but those which we now face, I’m certain that the college would be very interested in your qualifications as a possible addition to the faculty. But, sadly enough, we are at present in no position to hire you. I spoke to Olson, and his suggestion is that I keep you in mind; and bring the matter up as soon as things are a bit clearer– which I hope won’t be too long from now. In any case, I will write you if any thing looks possible.
Both Jess Collins and Robert Duncan spoke of you very warmly, when I saw them in Mallorca. I also like both of them, very much. I hope sometime that I may meet you. If you have anything, or can think of anything, for the Black Mountain Review, I should be very interested to see it.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Creeley
•••
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain, N.C.
Robert Duncan
Banalbufar
Mallorca
SPAIN
September 6, 1955
Dear Robert,
I’m very sorry not to have written, the past week or so has been exciting to say the least, eg. last week I was a passenger in a car which found itself being driven into a house at 40 miles an hour. The Asheville paper reported it, under a picture of the car, as: Driver Hits Own Residence. Anyhow, the past month has seen a pathetic variety of attempts to ‘make it’, one sleeping pills, one wrists, and the car was the third. All of which, here, seems simple enough to make a bit ridiculous, nor can I, I guess, not find it that in some sense, i.e., my own dilemma never seems to take on that cast. I have at that a horror of being ‘ridiculous’ not by my own choice, so resolve on no such things as the above. Anyhow I got a twisted shoulder, from the accident, and a bang on the nose—and a never to be forgotten ‘view’ of a house rushing out to meet us. Somewhat like a Triumph of the Home, at that. The car was completely demolished, and the house was not even dented. Dan Rice and I were sitting in the back seat; Tom Field was driving, such a mild young man usually, but of course with this thing very much under it, and Jorge Fick, who was in position to be most hurt, yet survived with very little to show for it, as I did. Dan fractured a vertebra, but will be all right, praise god; Tom dislocated his hip, and will also be all right. It was all unbelievable.
But, in such a milieu, which is nonetheless sane enough god knows, I am not able to be broken by such things as Ann now sees fit to do, or John for that matter. I mean I think, that I have such an intensity of human confusion, hope, god knows what, present daily, I live with and in that. More to the point, the last few weeks I have found myself more and more ‘separated’ from her. I don’t know how to ‘qualify’ this sensation, it is in any case organic, to the extent that it ‘grows’ in me. You are kind, so very damn kind, to recognize this ‘strength’ in me; at moments I would much rather flop down & cry, etc. But then, I am much too involved, here, to manage that. Next week I am going up to New York for a few days; and will, I hope, see Zukofsky, also [Philip] Guston, [Franz] Kline, and what other people there I can. Certainly Dennie. But that will be a damn deep pleasure. Too, we have just managed to sell some of the property, which by no means solves everything, but does help very much. For the past months we have had no salaries, and I have been living on what I could scrape up from Divers book sales, etc. Anyhow the sale helps that and also will probably mean that the magazine will continue for another number at least. (Do send me some poems for it; also either the Olson article, or the one on the imagination we had talked about? You say, but send them as soon as you can, please.)
Well, Robert—what the hell, really. I am ok, I hope soon to be writing some more prose, and have been possessed lately with almost painful sensations, senses, of space. My laziness proves a much more substantial difficulty now than my ‘despair’. I can’t manage the latter, i.e., I am eating, in fact, much better than I did there—thinking of those nightmare meals. A young lady all but proposed to me, if it’s my future that’s the problem. I find my head filled with all its old tricks, and so on. And the pleasure of Olson, Dan Rice, et al, has been as tangible as any I might hope for. Then I wrote to the girl in New York, whom I think I told you about, i.e., the ‘witch’, John was in love with her too at one time—and after not having written me since I last saw her in New York, this time she did, even with a (goddamnit) lovely poem, in Spanish, about riding a donkey through the corn, etc. Well, you know. I should finally like, enjoy, believe in, something very much like that. My loneliness is no thing I care to keep, but to betray its reality is something I cannot do. To have lived in a house with a woman as far from me as Ann was—that was and could be now no good. So I have taken the lead, like they say, and started to find out about a divorce myself. I think she will be willing to pay for it—we will all ‘pay’ for it. Wow. What I don’t say here, is my fears for the children; yet I must trust to her, and what else she is, in that. And you as well, i.e., as you had reassured me, that they will know me, still. And, that for me to take hold will allow them a father they might otherwise not have had. So that is ‘work’ enough, and hope enough too.
Too—I saw Dan, in the hospital after the accident, still in much pain, being fed intravenously with his stomach being damn well pumped out at the same time,—I watched him hope, literally with his eyes, that Cynthia (now in New York) might send him some word, at least, even if she couldn’t come. Not a goddamn sound. So I have been spared that death, at least for the time-being. I was not hit when I could not keep upright. Olson says, rightly enough, we can neither look for equity nor generosity, in a woman, i.e., they are not possessed by these things. The ‘loveliness’ of Ann, in those stories, was also another component, I guess. It would be very pompous to consider, now, even that something had gone ‘wrong’. God, to learn how not to ‘possess’; that possession is always, has to be, a seizure, an act we recognize by only that fact we are its end. I learn it a little, I hope to god I do.
So—let that all go for the moment. I have had several checks for your book, one from Ruth Witt-Diamant and another from a lady whose name I forget (I am writing this from Jonathan’s, where I’m staying (very comfortably) for a few days), amounting to $20 which I have forwarded to Ann’s account; and have also written her to ask her to give you a check or pesetas for the am’t. Then a couple of days ago, more money ($24) from Ida Hodes, being a collection from several people (Moore, Carmody, Onslow-Ford, Helen Adam, Schaenman, Psaltis)—I’ll send this to Ann’s acc’t too. And get you a note of the other woman’s name, actually Ann will have it.
The announcement is a real lulu—very damn good. I tacked it up on the board, and everyone admired it hugely. If they only had some money . . . However. Once the shipment of these is in, will do my best to put them to good use; Jonathan can also be a help with them.
I’m sorry, only, that all this goddamn mess did separate us, i.e., did not allow us a summer I looked forward to so damn much. Yet that will yet be possible, as I know. Your place in my life is as certain as my face, if it comes to that. I am sorry you have both been so damn ‘used’ by it. But the ‘good life’, Robert, I do believe in—one night at the Olson’s, we had all been drinking, etc., I had gone to the bathroom and overheard him saying to a somewhat puzzled listener, ‘but you have to realize that Creeley always believes in the impossible, and has to try it, always . . . .’ Etc. I know what he means, and so does he. Thank god.
Write soon. I hope things go well for you both. And that all the mess there escapes you. Gossip yet. Ah well . . . It’s probably a preface to ‘recognition’ at that. Et pauvre John . . . Eh bien. ‘Be me’ & that’s what happens. So—write.
All my love to you both,
Bob
ALL THAT IS LOVELY IN MEN is now in proof, and going ok—which defiance pleases me. I even wrote my own jacket-blurb, as you will see. Your sense of GOODBYE [CP I, 159] is a good one, but I don’t dare ‘touch’ the book, I want to let it go. I think GOODBYE would be the end, also, to that ms/ I made up, before leaving, i.e., to have it follow, as an ‘end’, after THE DRESS; technically it has that place, I think, i.e., it’s a relief that things that way continue to move, no matter. By the way, ask Ann for the ms/ if you see her—and I hope you do, simply re the kids now & again? I’d like you to hold it for me, if you would. I am anxious to ‘vacate’ that house as much as possible.
[Stefan] Wolpe also spoke to me a few days ago, about doing something together; he is a fine ‘old bird’, old world in a new way, etc. Anyhow I think he means poems, but I should like more to improvise. He is very clear, on how to do it at least. Perhaps I could spear him with my own impossibilities—and hence, the thing. He told me he had met & planned to do something with Charlie Parker, not too long before the latter’s death this spring. He is a great admirer of Miles Davis, so we can begin with that—yet.
[note on envelope] Everything finally that I say here of her is not even “true”, i.e. it must be that only things present can be—and she of course isn’t, which is what I survive at that. To hell with it all. Wow
•••
[Black Mountain, NC]
September 24, 1955
Dear Robert,
I owe you so many letters I begin to blush, but let’s get the goddamn business straight first, after which I can tell you of my journey to New York, etc. That check from Ida Hodes, together with the addresses of the people who had ordered, was received safely, and deposited in Ann’s account. The only announcement for your book I’ve yet had, was one you had enclosed in a letter; but I should think the bulk of the shipment ought to get here shortly, and I’ll then mail them out to your list, plus what Jonathan & I have, etc. Today I had another letter from Ida H/ enclosing a check for $6.00 (3 more orders) & addresses; and also an order from Harvard, for a limited edition. If you can mail them a copy there, enclosing invoice (i.e., Divers Press, 1 Caesars Gate @ $10.00, etc), I’ll take care of the paper work from here, i.e., bill them and see that you get the money. Otherwise I have an order & check ($2.00) from Larry Eigner, which I’ll also deposit in Ann’s account. I think Jonathan has one or two orders independently, so that’s a little more to count on—perhaps. Anyhow I checked with him, and try to keep the whole thing clear, i.e., $$$-wise. Ok. I’ll send you a list of names & addresses of all people who have ordered, as soon as I have a minute here, i.e., am just back & class starting, and usual hellish confusion. But I won’t forget it. As to your manuscripts—nothing to date, but I shouldn’t worry. It takes 3 weeks to a month, sent straight mail. A package from Ann just arrived, which seems to be papers—and it may be Jess’ ms/ is with them. In any case, I’ll check all such things very soon.
So. New York was god knows a relief, if a very exhausting one. I had two very pleasant visits with Zukofsky. I like him very much, and found it possible to talk immediately. Also, his wife and son were a great pleasure. I looked over, like they say, quite a bit of ‘A’, and also ‘Bottom’, and will have about 25pp of this 2nd section for the coming issue—plus a poem sequence I had taken earlier, ‘Songs of Degrees’. I also heard him read some of the poems, from ‘A’ and earlier collections, i.e., he had a record made when reading on the West Coast, and this was very interesting. I’m actually still engaged, very much, by that time you played Marianne Moore for me; and have since listened to, I hope carefully, her reading In District of Merits. That structure is extremely close I think, or is to what I sense (if I can’t take hold of it) as my own concern. In terms of this, Zukofsky is also relevant—god, is he a close writer! For example, ‘A’-9, if you read it. Anyhow all of it was a relief, after my harassments here—and/or to sit down to this character of conversation and concern. What else stays, at that. ‘Devotion’ I damn well suppose is it, as you say. Anyhow it gave me a friend.
I also went out to see Williams, along with Dennie and Mitch; and that was an equal pleasure. He seemed better, insofar as health goes, than he did a year ago. He has a book coming next month (the ‘Of Asphodel’ plus some shorter poems) and is working otherwise on a couple of stories & a play. He gave me the ms/ of that opera he mentions in the Autobiography; but it turns out witches & communism, and not too happy. He is a goddamn curious juxtaposition of qualities literal ‘qualities’ I think. He was in any case god knows generous; I like him, very much. There are literally instants when I feel myself speaking with him altogether; and then actually a vacuum. Dennie had persuaded me to bring out a record Charles & I made here, a year ago, to play for him; which we did, and clearly he was moved, by it, i.e., he got the poems as obviously the page had never given them to him. And spoke, then, of how it changed everything—and I thought of Kenneth Lawrence B/ of course. Yet, at one point following, he took my arm and said, you have a right to demand what is necessary to you for fulfillment, it’s not as though you have been ‘static’ . . . And after the hell of the past months, there and here—I cared to hear that, as you may suppose. Hearing of Ann’s and my separation, I had to tell him at last else we could not speak clearly enough—Z/ said, might we write her a letter. I want not to hurt these people, over and over, Robert. Sometimes it seems I’m a solicitor simply for ‘sympathy’. Z/ said something too about, perhaps the gentleness in your face will be hard enough, to show her. He walked with me to the subway till at last we were standing there, shaking hands, over the turnstile. Both said to bring her,—jesus, they don’t know, poor devils, in their own right—there is nothing to ‘bring’ anymore anywhere. But I was very moved that they made that try to help. I am soon going to be beyond all this altogether, if anything at all is to happen.
Otherwise, I saw dozens of people it seems. The time with Dennie and Mitch was very good; her mother looks like aging & alert elf, etc. They say they are going to Mexico almost certainly in January. I saw Al Kresch briefly, who was just back from Europe. I had several very pleasant evenings drinking beer with Kline, who tells very damn good stories, eg., a lady and her lover are in bed together, when there is a sound of footsteps on the stairs, whereupon the lady answers, oh yes, here comes old Nosey, now everybody in town will know about it . . . Ah well. I stayed at Julie’s for a few days, the same things happened, i.e., on way to see Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet with her, we passed lady wheeling fat baby in large baby carriage, holding two cards in his hand—and when we passed, I looked back to see what they were, and could only see one: the 4 of hearts. So that was a happy introduction to that scene in the film, which I’d never seen before this. And so on. These things take on such a persistent quality in her company, I can never remember them all. I also saw Joel Oppenheimer, and others from that company—and even Vacuum Victor, who said to me: you’re making it very hard for me to live . . . Gee whiz. He looked very ugly & heavy, like synthetic wood. I didn’t talk with him, i.e., he actually doesn’t really exist, in a funny way. Anyhow. I saw Cynthia the last night, and suddenly all that was back for me, again. And for her as well, I guess. Though what now comes of it, god knows. But at least for the one evening we had, I felt alive again, in a way I haven’t since summer really. I was surprised to find how deeply all that had gone. She may come here, I don’t know. I couldn’t find energy then to persuade her, or in fact to ask ‘questions’ at all. I still stay ‘out’, in a sense. I am very distrustful about ‘arranging’ anything, hence could not ‘arrange’ for her coming. I hope she does anyhow, but wonder. To hell with it. It was a very clear evening no matter.
Things here are also now much better, we are getting salaries of some sort; and the place is secure through December at least. Charles will probably not be here, but he needs god knows to get away. The class so far has been much better than last term; and things generally much more possible. So. I’ll write soon again, I’m still stuffed like a boa constrictor, hence must think about it etc., etc. Wow . . . Write soon. When will you be leaving there? I hope all goes well for you both.
All my love to you both,
Bob
•••
LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
[Black Mountain, NC]
October 31, 1955
Dear Bill,
I’m sorry not to have written long before this—I’ve just had a few days in bed with flu, and before that a dragged out cold—and to write anyone in such circumstances is only to depress them. Anyhow, that much is done with. It’s very kind of you to help me out with the Guggenheim business—and certainly it is impossibly hopeful. I don’t hope, really. I thought to try it, anyhow, since it’s there to try; well, even that isn’t quite true I suppose. In any case, many, many thanks. That you’ll put up with it is ‘prize’ enough.
Your new book came, and it was a great pleasure—actually, a thing to hold to. And now, it seems, more than ever. As the opening six lines of Book 3 of ‘Asphodel’—I hold there. To all of it. I like ‘Shadows’ very much—literally what you say. At the moment I find myself so ‘broken’ in forms, more in manners, casts, of thought, or call it I guess what I had attempted to secure as ‘values’. It seems, now,—well, it is, now, that everything is attacked, and thinking to come home, there is none, etc. That’s my own dilemma, I hate to see it as ‘common’, I hate to suppose it is—yet it is, much of it. Anyhow I can’t give an inch, in my own apprehension of what you stand for—as you once put it, in that address I heard that time back in N.H., ‘knowing as you must, what I stand for . . . ’ It’s impossible to avoid, or mis-take, in such poems as these are. I don’t go to them now, seeking ‘relief’—though they are that, for me, very much—but to say at least, there, goddamnit, is the thing I care for. In no simple sense, I hope. What else is there but form—and (god bless the ladies) the energy wherewith to make it. I think you do it, over and over.
I have been writing little—trying to ‘think’, yet; but get something done, now and again. Here is one, an ‘ayre’ of a kind. I wish I could sing it, but suppose not—but I could.
Cat bird singing
makes music like sounds coming
at night. The trees, goddamn them,
are huge eyes. They
watch, certainly, what
else should they do? My love
is a person of rare refinement,
and when she speaks,
there is another air,
melody—what Campion spoke of
with his
follow thy fair sunne unhappie shadow . . .
Catbird, catbird
O lady hear me. I have no
Other
voice left.
[CP I, 165]
I finally got the ms. of the next issue of the magazine off to the printer’s in Mallorca. I used your article as the ‘kick-off’ piece—I couldn’t have had a better, and thanks again. Things with the college continue uncertain, but, for the moment, we are all eating. What else.
All my best to you,
Bob
Some of the students are still reading your opera, but I’ll take good care of it. Don’t worry what I think, etc., please. Tonight being Halloween, perhaps I’ll be visited for my ‘taste’. God knows the moon is very beautiful—and I, like they say, believe.
•••
[San Francisco, CA]
May 17, 1956
Dear Charles,
I’m out at Mill Valley trying to pull myself together like they say. Yours came just before I left. I’m sorry not to have written, but have had, almost literally, no mind nor face nor much of anything for a couple of weeks now. The city is all right, god knows very comfortable, a bit loose from an eastern sense—but easy—which has been a help to me. I have a small apt for $27.50, and have been doing odd jobs of typing, etc. People are very good to me, and I haven’t really wanted for much of anything. But of course I leave little alone, and at present am up to my ears in a perhaps impossible relation with Marthe Rexroth, who is very great—and god willing, we may make it. But you can think of how Kenneth takes it—and so recently come from my own part in such a thing. Though I claim this is not the same—though that matters very little at best. Anyhow, I give a reading Sunday, and think to take off for LA the coming week sometime, and then from there to Mexico City, with Marthe at best—and without if that’s what has to happen. I can’t fight about it, and here already gets like that. I have that money from NH now—and it would hold me, or us, there for time enough to let something happen other than what now does. Well, to hell with it, for the moment—it’s been on my mind so much it’s not possible to say much more about it that would say anything. Ok.
I liked that long poem, very much—and brought your letter on weights & all out here with me the first time I came, so Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Jack K/ who was also here saw it. As it happens, I’m out here with Jack now—he has just walked into town to get a fifth of port—and he has by this time read Mayan Letters, and I’m giving him Maximus, and other things of yours I have, when we go back to SF Saturday. You’ll best get a sense of him as follows: 34, Fr/Canadian (Breton), about 5’8”, a little stocky, from Lowell, Mass. He writes novels, a lot of them actually. [note at top of the page: (very blue sharp eyes)] Anyhow he is god knows a pleasure. Talks very little, listens a lot—could have been a wino, but isn’t—likes to be by himself. One of those slightly red-faced quiet men. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship, was star football player on Lowell team that used to play Salem, Worcester, etc. Ed is sending you a note Jack did—but the prose is really, often, much more interesting, i.e., a curious light skipping and merging of images, a real continuity of changing im-pressions. I’ll copy out a bit to enclose here, to save time—ok. I like him very very much, i.e., like Dan, and yourself, and Robert, Franz—he has a beautiful will to endure whether or no he would think so. He manages.
It’s very damn good to hear of Marshall’s poems, I’ll hope to damn well see them once I am again, or ever, settled enough. I’ve bought a sleeping bag and will get a rucksack the first of the week, and to hell with what can’t go into it for the time-being. I guess I’m finally about to do that wandering I have really wanted so much to do for so long. Now that I’ve made it this far, I begin to trust it, and to not worry so goddamn much about what can, does, or will—happen. Voila. In the meantime I will not fuck up on the magazine and will try to keep you on re addresses, etc.
Take care of yourself. I hope things there are all right. I think of you very often, and wake mornings sometimes finding myself quoting the poems. So. I’ll make it—it’s just that I have this despair to break, and seize upon whatever means might conceivably manage it. That won’t have to be it forever, or I can’t see how—but anyhow I follow my nose as ever.
All my love,
Bob
You can get me: 1108 Montgomery, SF, because the fellow who is taking the place after me will forward mail all right.
•••
P.S. Say goodbye to Locke + Valery and the kids for me, please. I’ll hope to see them too, before too long. Say goodbye to Neal for me too—I’m sorry all the time was so short.
If there is such a thing as fact
it is possessed by happy Jack Kerouac—
who sits in self-possession
and climbs mountains to stop smoking.
He had a dream
that things were what they seem
and since that day or night has not broken his calm,
no matter who tries to harm him.
It is this wisdom which he has given to me,
that what is is not, and it is all one or two or three:
or many numbers, or none.
It is all one.
Thus blessed be the Diamond Sutra
which so allows men the wisdom of Buddha—
and blessed be Jack too,
because what he says, is true.
May 26, 1956
Dear Jack,
It doesn’t now seem I’ll get out there, for which I am, selfishly, sorry. Anyhow things here have not been impossible and god willing, we will make it. I leave for New Mexico probably Monday—or Tuesday at the latest. I’ll write when I know where I’ll be there. Take care of yourself. I’ll hope to see you soon and thanks again for everything. My love to you,
Bob
•••
[San Francisco, CA]
May 28, 1956
Dear Charles,
I was just going to write, like they say—and there was your letter in the box. It’s a very great day, this aft/ I take off for New Mexico—it’s the right direction, finally, as of any at least—and also it all comes clear, and around, with Marthe, with myself. I spent the weekend talking, drinking—then yesterday started writing, viz poems, feeling them as I haven’t for months now—and making it, viz, ok, you sons of bitches, this I do. The occasion was both my own break-thru, and felt wonderful; and the fact a man here will do, or wants to, a small book, and had been bothered by one ms/ I gave him, because some of the poems had been printed before etc, so in trying to get ‘substitutes’, I got 8 more in one wild day—which, than which, nothing gets better. Then last night Marthe, at the end of her own rope—and all of us about to swing, thank god, to another—stayed, and I talked & talked, and what a deep clearing, just to lie in bed—and talk; that thing of Othello’s, I only talked to her, always seemed to me my truth too. Anyhow she is coming Friday, with the kids—and it all begins again. I have to have it, Charles—as you certainly know. It’s my so-called ‘form’. It’s awfully damn good to feel it there again, sans too much will—finally. So—you know. Ok.
Also very great yesterday—an ms/ from Winchendon, Mass, a page & half ‘story’, that has speed—wow. It’s the goddamn NE renaissance I think we begin to be up to. Or who cares for labels, when it’s happening. Anyhow very shrewd fast prose, like:
‘Thighs, breasts, feet,’ he thought. ‘I love a sister. She is too thin for me. Not like Maggie Owens up at the farm.’ He wrung his hands together desperately, gently, and thought of an old barn in wintertime . . .
Also, an ms/ of three very wild poems, very jagged, from that David Lyttle, friend of Jonathan’s, who had been in Mallorca. No letter, and perhaps he does not know I am there, etc., or here, etc. Anyhow they are something too, viz:
The sea
Rocks on edge,
And the minnows fly
Like vultures in the foam.
She slouches on the sand
Between the sea and the forest-land,
Under the sheets of rain,
Encumbered by the rudiments of pain, etc., etc.
So—again you know. I got to pack my (mah) gear, like they say. Got a real out huge old ruck sack now. Hmm . . . Feel good. Like size, being (be) there. Very good. We had dinner with Ed & Helene [Dorn] last night; also a pleasure. They are very great to have there, thru such a scene as has just about concluded god willing. Ed talks. And we did.
I’ll put in a few of the poems, another thing it was a breakthru, a bit, re ‘form’. Let me know what you think when you can—and send me what you have, please, as you also can. There’s only one bizness. Ok. Take care of yourself and know I damn well do, always. Voila.
All my love to you all,
Bob
[Enclosed with the following unpublished poems were “Just Friends,” “The Picnic,” and “Please,” CP I, 163, 82, and 156.]
NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE
I know where they keep it.
I saw them put it there.
It was late. It was lonely.
But I know where.
I DON’T THINK SO
No one’s going away
who wasn’t here to begin with.
It doesn’t matter what they say
who wasn’t here to begin with.
I don’t care what happens anymore.
It doesn’t matter what they say
who wasn’t here to begin with.
HOW ABOUT THAT
It must be horrible
when you are dead
to know you planned just a little
too far ahead.