Part Three. For Love, 1956–1963: New Mexico, Guatemala, Vancouver

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

Duncan wrote and liked	c/o Imported Motors
you. Never worry—	610 Central SE
though one does	Albuquerque, N.M.
	October 11, 1956

Dear Jack,

I’ve tried to write a dozen times, but don’t make it—but please believe it’s through no lack of will. God, I would like to—like they say. Anyhow things here are fair enough, the teaching job asks nothing of me I can’t do, and it’s $$$—which I can use for an eventual stake, and that’s happy. In the meantime this city as a place is ok—because it fits me, and/or how I feel—very out of it. I think I’ll be translating a novel for Ramon Sender, but have not as yet begun; I am really pretty busy with the school, because it’s all new to me—and the kids are of course kids, and 8 hours a day is 8 hours a day etc. The magazine is now 1/2 at the printer’s in Spain—and the rest will be sent shortly. It is all pretty much together, though I cannot say when it will be out (probably midwinter, now).

I haven’t heard from Marthe for about 2 weeks. I don’t know what happened precisely, but imagine she could not make it. We very nearly married—I wish we had—but then, she didn’t want it to be a defiance of K/, and I am sick to death of him, utterly—and imagine he has a like feeling. Anyhow she is not here, and it would now be hopeful to think she will anymore be. That way—it’s god knows lonely, and I hate the failure of it—but it was very great no matter. So.

It’s good to hear of Grove, and all that—very damn good. Well, god knows you earn it all. I’ll hope to see you sometime around Xmas, if you’re still down there. Let me know. Tell me what you are doing. I enclose card re book will be out in Dec/, and that’s about it for me—other than poems from the past months. At least I’ve done something. Please write.

My love to you, and take care

of yourself,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO MITCH GOODMAN

P.S. Another joke: two Japanese shepherds out with their sheep in a field; and they look up &there is a big atom bomb, coming right straight down at them; and the one shepherd says to the other—let’s get the flock out of here!

November 4, 1956

Dear Mitch,

It was good to have your letter—though hardly happy to see that things are not very simple for you. I had thought of you waiting 14 weeks with no word, and thought of how that would have felt—and that was not good. A few weeks ago, at Sender’s, he told me of a letter he had just got from Wm Faulkner, who had apparently been approached by the president of Random House, concerning a very large sum of money which the latter wished to make available to American writers, in one way or another. Faulkner enclosed a special delivery airmail self-addressed stamped envelope and asked what Sender thought the money should be used for. ‘Do you think it should be used to collect all the writers & ship them to Siberia? To make registering personnel available? To catalog all American writers and make dossiers on them? To kill them? etc.’ We do not have any status as ‘writers’ in this country. The most feeling or trying-to-feel men will ask you: who are the 10 greatest novelists of the last 50 years? ‘You can’t make a living writing poems.’

So what, etc. I don’t see reason to lament—I don’t god knows mean that word uglily—that you find yourself living where it is most cheap. One time in SF talking with Ed Dorn, we were suddenly able to see and to name the areas of economic activity—and it was a very strange knowledge, to see it in each thing. But it answers Pound—it was right he described a past area. Where money comes most hard it is least available; and many other things have more room. We can’t despair that we have only ourselves. What ‘hell’ there has been for me, the past months, has mostly been lost arrows. I can’t find where they’ve got to. Most of the time I am in a fairly lonely condition, and suffer a state of slight shock, due to discrepancies I in no way can control. For Marthe’s part in it—she is a woman etc. I can’t blame or think of her at times. I blame myself of course; I always do that. Though this time it has been a little foolish & weak. More, nothing has changed between us—it is as actual now as it was when it first happened, and that way, all I say about it is finally there. (I am very hungry for the sea, for room of a more deeply felt nature. But I did things with her, and much was informed and lovely, that never was so before. I saw things I never had: merry-go-rounds, parks, hands, eyes, children, growing up, love, and what’s due.)

Dennie’s sequence of poems, in ARK, were very beautiful. It was a deep pleasure to read them. Don’t worry that I have changed, in my letters for example—I have to be what I am as I can be. I don’t ever know what next. My loyalties as a poet are engaged completely by poems like those she has there. Perhaps it is even holding-on, hoping that my own nature will give me a like completeness, someday. I picked up a copy of a large group of Baudelaire’s art criticism (The Mirror of Art), yesterday—he writes very well of Delacroix, the 19th century ‘cartoonists’ (British & French), & laughter (humor & wit). It’s good that a man writes well, it makes order & peace—as James (whose essays I have also been reading, et al). My own order was more important to me, at the time we ‘argued’ about him; but he has held me very much this past summer—no matter how it sounds to say it. I’ll send you a portfolio of mine that is just done, If You (about 8 poems)—a ‘last-of-it’ collection. Not too interesting, but some I do like, as Cat Bird, A Marriage, etc. The Dress will be more a book & also more interesting. Anyhow, I’ll send this one, et celui-la . . . , when I can. All is well enough here, i.e., I haven’t lost my job. I don’t as yet know if I can come down, or will come down—but I will tell you as soon as I do—and am sorry that I don’t as yet know. It is very good of you all, as ever, to let me come. Anyhow, that’s true. I’m a little out of it just now, often very out of it—and that takes doing, like they say. It’s a world like what’s now happening in Egypt & Hungary. Who are you going to vote for? And—as a friend said on the telephone just now: I’m voting for Henry Wallace. Take good care of yourselves & with luck I will see you.

All my love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

c/o 610 Central SE

Albuquerque, N.M.

January 1, 1957

Dear Bill,

I’ve meant to write often, to thank you for your letter, as always—also to tell you how things had been. I got a job here teaching in September, which has had the use of giving me a means to eat for the moment—and also to pull myself together, for some more concerned attack. Perhaps it’s the very formalism of how I acknowledge such things, that separates them so much at times from me—I don’t know. For awhile I was certain I had fallen into a means of living, i.e., the teaching, which was both reasonable and sufficient, even to the hope of a family; but restlessness or not, that soon enough became untrue. I’ve been teaching french and english—caring nothing (per se) actually for the 1st, except for the delight that teaching a language I don’t at all know sometimes gives qua improvisation (like they say), and caring too much for the 2nd. Tomorrow I start work again, there are 6 classes a day: English 7, French 8, English I, French I-A, French I-B, and English 8—all of which jargon means 12 to 14 year old boys, about 10 to 15 in a class, a finally lethally oriented group of eventual people. That is in fact very interesting, and (selfishly) makes the year no matter: the facts of a society which these ‘children’ at times provide. About 1/2 have no fathers, either widows or divorced, etc. There is no clear social ‘referent’ at all here, eg. Albuquerque is both new in the sense that it’s the atomic city, from 50 thousand to over 150,000 in less than 10 years—and also is New Mexico, less than 50 years a state, and Mexican, Indian, and Anglo, etc. The kids give vivid occasion to see this, very often. Teaching them french (of all things) is often to see what ‘artificiality’ can effect—and leads to awareness (to call it that) of why clothes, this way of speaking, that hat & so forth—very much. But I can’t clearly do it forever— and another year (because at the moment I have to tell the ‘headmaster’ whether or no I think to stay) would mean didacticism at best, and repetition, staleness, and—I don’t really want any of it very much. It has or so I hope satisfied a fear that I couldn’t manage, i.e. could not hope to earn enough either for myself or the family I can in my imagination sometimes find—I see that it’s either easy, or hard, and not very much at all can be seen before the literal occasion. My salary, of 250 a month after taxes (!), has been adequate, has in fact allowed me to rent a comfortable house & to buy an old car—but again, I don’t really want the literal size & bulk of either one attached to me. I was most content in a way, with the big knapsack I got in San Francisco, and also the sleeping-bag purchased in the same place. So—so much for salaries; and having the need for same, I think I can do it, eg. earn food & the like.

More to the point, I’m just back from Mexico, in which I rode endlessly on buses,—really delighted, and tongue-tied, but trying at least to speak spanish, sitting as straight in the seat as possible—god knows looking at all I could. I went from Juarez 2nd class to Durango, then to Mazatlan—by luck straight through the mountains, over 10,000 feet up, with drop-offs of 3 to 4000 feet on every other turn, and the driver (Indian) at one point putting the bus into neutral & letting it roll! It was good, i.e., the ‘why not’—not caring, ‘about such a thing’—the whole bus completely unconcerned. We went through towns I wouldn’t have believed possible, labor towns so remote, hovels of rough cut lumber, all grey, kids running after us, everything in god’s world getting on the bus, from ‘conchitas’ to one actual mad man (who cried so loudly at its being cold, he kept the whole bus awake, sullenly etc). In Mazatlan (too much like a deserted ‘spa’) I decided to keep moving, and went to Guadalajara—I spent Xmas eve in a cheap hotel, on the Calzado, 1st floor facing street—lying in bed tired out & reading Beckett’s Malone Dies (and thinking it small, tired, and not enough). The next morning I took another bus to Barra de Navidad, on the west coast below Manzanillo—following Mitch & Dennie Goodman, who had left the city to spend the holiday there, Mitch having gone some time before to copy his novel & correct it I guess. The trip was another 12 hours, a dirt road— wonderful towns with huge cathedrals, always broken & falling apart (at one I watched a group of women with babies, waiting I guess to have them baptized, poinsettias & the like growing around the bars of the fence (iron) surrounding, two boys coming then to pull on a long rope, that came down from the (broken) bell tower, to make the clock (as it happened) strike three (in the afternoon)— then, at last, when the women had gone in (a high large wooden double door), I looked to see a big grey pig looking out through the gate, at the people going by.)

I got to Barra de Navidad about 9 it must have been, all dark—the town is a line of low thatched ‘houses’, on a strip of land between the sea (at the front) and a lagoon (at the back). There are ‘hotels’, for people from Guadalajara, etc. I was given a room, like a huge crypt, with no windows, dirt floor (I think), an army cot, and a candle & table,—and could hear the sea all night, hitting the beach about 50 feet from where I was sleeping. I found the hotel where Mitch and Dennie were staying, and found they had contrived to get the upper floor of an old building opposite, so went up through the dark, down a rickety corridor, toward the glow of a light & voices from behind a door—and knocked to find Mitch reading to their son, and at last could say Merry Christmas, to people I love, and hope to show care for, somehow. Dennie appeared, wonderfully, in a wrapper, from the next room—she had said to Mitch, what if I came etc—it was all very good. So we were able to spend two days talking, she showed me her new poems, written in an oblong copybook, with a picture of a tiger on the cover—beautifully dense thick poems, from a world that grows surer, on her, very much so. We lay on the beach all day, when hot went in, then back again, endless sand & water, a small bay stretching out, to the open sea—tropical, e.g. papayas, coconuts, strange birds, lots of pigs, also some beautiful young women I couldn’t take my eyes off—and sat (we ate dinner all in a big room, i.e., the ‘visitors’) watching one girl’s long hair, thick and heavy down her back, who also turned to look at me, often, in spite of herself, she was so curious, and had huge black eyes, very attentive & wide open with her curiosity. It was a relief, all of it—I have it seems so ‘contained’ myself, so intentionally, so long (although it’s been 4 months only). At one point, on the beach one early afternoon, Dennie had not put her bathingsuit on but was wearing a summer dress—she wanted to swim with us, and suddenly ran in, laughing and it was very damn lovely to see—she was dripping, laughing, her hair wet, and the dress wet and hanging to her as she came stumbling (gracefully) out. Ah well. It was hard to leave. But I’ve come back (not ‘at least’ but) quietly enough—a test thereof was or is, that the ‘headmaster’ just came a minute ago, to wish me a ‘happy new year’, and I could reply decently enough, because he is a decent enough man, knowing I’ll be telling him this week I’m leaving & so forth, i.e. I don’t ‘agree’.) Anyhow—to complete the so-called contract, to try to save a little money, wherewith to move again in June, I think to Oaxaca, where I can live cheaply and also, Mitch tells me, hope to earn a living teaching English to covetous Mexicans, who have the advantage of being adult, their own, to make what use they will of—hence not the sometimes pitifully undefended thing of being a child still caught in vindictiveness of a (failing) adult pattern.

I thought of your, ‘I am a poet. I am. I am . . . ’ I don’t want any other ‘excuse’. God knows a trade, of some sort—perhaps teaching can provide it, I like the improvisation that at least a new occasion each time gives room for—anyhow there are ways I find to eat & I had worried about it. My ‘old’ life gets far away, though at times painfully close too, in dreams, say—or the like. Anyhow, the image of what is left of the ‘family’ I lived in, we lived in, is hard to manage— not the children, who must be happy there in New England, sliding now, snow, woods etc, that has to be good—but Ann, who wrote me a day ago: “It’s pretty dull going. I’m learning to trade on the stock market on a pittance. Much reading of the Wall Street Journal and no profits. A neighbor is giving me lessons . . .” She was the first woman I ever made love to, which I don’t know if I wear like a cross or a flower—though I hope. She was an orphan and I was a hick. It was pretty great, like they say. I was going to be a writer, and we lived on 215 a month she got from a trust fund no less,—like heavenly bird droppings. Embarrassed continually, that I did not ‘support’ her and the children—but equally endlessly covetous & anxious, of the time it gave me. I suppose. One time when she miscarried, I delivered what there was, of the baby; one time a baby born to us prematurely died in NH, and I & the undertaker buried it, in a plain white pine box, in a hole in a local cemetery (on the road to Littleton). It’s hard to let go of it—the intention really, partly the man’s part perhaps, at least of the hoping. Not being able to admit that the Wall St J/ is suitable reading for a woman as lovely as she often & must be. As this New Year’s Day (no rhetoric) it would truly be a new world, again, were we able still to look for one another. But who is she, like they say—and likewise, who am I. There seems a lot to do; for my part, I’d like to find a wife this year & write a ‘novel’ at last. Thanks for the strength your own gives me—a hard thing to ever say, but true, continually. I hope all goes well for you. And—to end the rambling—I have your notes on Ford & Marsden Hartley safe, and the magazine itself ought to be out with luck early spring (it is now, partly, at the printer’s in Mallorca).

Happy New Year & my love to you

& your family,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO DENISE LEVERTOV

P.S. I’ve read Davis’ poems—I like very much the ‘big handedness’ of them, i.e., farm-wise, rough & red & careful. That is a ‘tenderness’ I have great respect for, both as memory (of it) and as here. I used to see men handle things this way as a boy.

January 23, 1957

Dear Dennie,

I have not written, god knows—but seem to have been 50,000 miles away (perhaps underground) since I left that day, so almost unable to etc. Your letter is a great cheer—the poems you enclose are very lovely. (I haven’t as yet read the other poems, but will in a day or two, and will write you & return them—it will be an occasion like they say.) I would like to put ‘Action’ with the ‘Everything that acts is actual’, for this coming issue (now coming together)—is that all right? Write me as you can.

I am bursting in part, albeit (at last) quietly—but met a few days ago only & by chance a girl here—which (myself included) changes everything, and I should die (beyond talking about it) if ever that should become impossible. I think I will marry her, eg—‘just like that’. I am going somewhere it seems, and, beyond loneliness, want very much to be out of the (I suppose) old shell, husk, or whatever. Not however as contrary—as Marthe perhaps (?—she was very good to me) but as use of myself as a form, too, not to speak, of love, but to be where it is—hence, why talk.

She’s asleep now—or ought to be. We seem most together over tables & dishes, because she works nights as a lady disc-jockey, and I have not as yet lost my job teaching etc. She is Irish—which pleases me very much—I trust that— and has two daughters who cheer me up (one is 3½ and the other 6, and both are very literally beautiful)—and it’s good not to prepare, argue, defend, etc—but to sleep—& to smile with a goodnature I thought had become sheer irony.

(That’s a note for me!)

Anyhow, not to talk about it—please [arrow drawn from this sentence to parenthetical aside above]. You will see. I am sorry to hear of your having been sick, viz take care of yourself too. Tell Mitch I’ll write him soon at Barra de Navidad—and not to think of Mexican ladies for me, they scared me as it was . . . Or perhaps not enough (I think).

It’s all ok, thank god. To see you both again was very very good: What plans etc turn out I don’t as yet know, but will see you no matter. Ok. And will write again soon. Please do as you can.

All my love to you all,

Bob

[note in left margin] Robt is as ever very good to be so concerned, but (as ever) it is that there isn’t that need to—not as he does. We all live, like they say—and always would—and no one wanted to be careless. I think sometimes the ‘world’ a mind manages is almost too surrounded. Better we do shit etc.

[note in right margin] I haven’t forgotten the bks and wrote Briggs (Books ’n Things) to send me some; and will also send the others (I have) soon. If you want anything, let me know—eg billboards, beer bottles. OR just plain desert.

•••

LETTER TO ALLEN GINSBERG

1826 Griegos NW

Albuquerque, N.M.

February 6, 1957

Dear Allen,

I’m ashamed almost to say, nothing much at all has been the matter, i.e., I’ve wanted to & have thought to write often—and have had you & Jack & Peter much in mind if that is not pompous to say. Over the time I had off at Xmas, I went to Mexico, and caught up with Mitch & Dennie in Barra de Navidad (on the coast), and had at least some time with them; and so, as well, heard about your visit very happily. I wish somehow I might have been there as well (too).

Things had been (there is a past tense to it) pretty impossible, although the job makes it enough; it is never much work, and the kids, being kids, allow me space, like they say. But the continual & finally bleak loneliness of always going home to an empty house (no matter schmaltz) shut me up altogether. I had no actual complaints yet felt continually restless & misfitted—and so on, eg. dull, out of it—and with no real thoughts as to what now. That way, though I’ve written, in my fashion, more or less continually since I saw you, it’s been pretty hopeless, and there are about 5 poems that make it at all. I had hoped to try some prose, but haven’t yet. Anyhow, that was that.

About two weeks ago, very stoned one night with my friend Max Feinstein, since left for SF, we ended up at a radio station, to see a girl he knew there who is a disc jockey, 12 to 6. I was tired, drunk—and wanted most of all to sit down, in a quiet place, so she spun discs & so forth; and soon enough, I guess, it was very quiet, and for once comfortable (no matter), so I stayed till she was through, then went with her to her place, where she fed us, then finally to school—where I got through a very far-out day, eg. kids asking me at last if I had been drinking (wow). Anyhow I married her last week (my way, not ‘theirs’), and it’s ok—which phrase, so to speak, has to seem I also suppose, also dull—but I am so sick with the élan (is it?) of whatever, the goddamned intention, so dead it has become, in so many ways. I am in short now living with someone, to put it socially—and beyond that, it is at moments very closely unspeakable, thank god.

It’s good to know you saw Fee Dawson, Joel et al—I wish I might. I still don’t much know what happens next, but that is a pleasure, too. But I think we won’t stay here beyond the end of this time I have to teach, up at the end of May. BMR #7 will come at last, don’t worry; part of it was trying to get it all together, and that is done (I took one of those poems Gary had marked—it is in the mess of my stuff at the moment, so the title I don’t have—so that is straight.) I’ll write to Phil and have missed him, as yourself & Jack & Peter [^ And Locke]. It is a very strange place here & someday will hope to tell you about it.

God knows—again, happily. Who else, etc. Thanks for the notes re places to try poems etc. I wish I had them to send, but ought to have something soon, viz I’d like to have, very much. You’re welcome always to use whatever you want from past ‘books’, i.e., whatever you can & tell me what etc. But guess it is too late now, so no matter.

It’s all ok, old friend. Wow. But I can see the humming bird in the window, and your faces. So—there. Take care of yourself, all of you. Please write as you can.

My love to you all,

Bob

I know O’Hara’s work some, and knew Kenneth Koch at Harvard etc. But think both are lightweights, whatever that means—and/or finally dull. They don’t seem to have much for blood. But I dig the line, at times.

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

April 27, 1957

Dear Ed,

Your letter was a great cheer yesterday morning, viz it was Saturday, and seemed that something should happen, I guess we both face that feeling of not many people around like they say. As to change of tone—for one thing it must be that so much else has changed. The conception of one’s self as one self etc is finally an embarrassing one. Anyhow for myself it becomes so-called acts of feeling, etc. Wow. Ice cream for breakfast. Again.

I like your playing on rhyme, I think this poem just sent (Bowl of Flowers) is less to a center than others—but, re technic, is very interesting, eg.

& I

unwise self, will while

it all, dwindle the hours

pick

a bowl of floweres,

leave

a water bowl of floweres

disk of yellow, upon the shelf

before I go . . .

Could you get it there, you might well be interested in reading H. D.’s war trilogy, viz a series of 3 books published during the 2nd world war—by Oxford University Press; I’ve forgotten all titles. (One is something like: Let The Walls Come Down.)

She uses couplets, and has, qua ‘problem’, the job of moving same through a variety of ‘feelings’, some for example so-called conjectural, reflective, and likewise simple narrative, also dramatic-narrative: the whole is very interesting, as rhyme. As is, always, Wms, with the same thing:

Liquor and love

when the mind is dull

focus the wit

on a world of form . . .

That series of three quatrains, the second verse of which breaks out—as I echo it in that poem for Dave, i.e., Juggler’s Thot, etc. Campion is always a relief in this—Wyatt, et al. They seem about the last to allow apparent (at least) improvisation. By Donne it’s a box for me. Until Blake etc. One thing I think is to be worried about: the tendency that rhyme has to slow, i.e., as any repetition, it ‘brings in’ (as sail) the so-called movement.

I’d also just got Joel’s book, The Dutiful Son—and feeling far away from him at present, not having written in some time etc., it was very possible simply to read it. I think it is a very good book, that Approach To Le Bain is a beautiful thing, likewise: The Friend -

whatever we have

repeated it is

too much to have said it once.

this is obvious.

each rose is different.

if that is not too much

to consider.

serious i mean.

i mean i was

repeating myself.

it will not change it.

I don’t know that anything ever ends the work. Just now I feel as though everything had of necessity, to be begun again. Writing, the simplest sort of maneuver has to be managed as though I had never heard of it, etc. It is the difficulty with acquiring a ‘way’, it becomes almost directly a contrary force, and must be broken down & out of. Another very pleasant tempered book I just read (I don’t manage to read much now): Ford Maddox Ford’s Joseph Conrad—written very shortly after the latter’s death, called ‘a novel’ in form, or so he does. There are some very interesting comments on structure, etc. It has, all of it, the grace of F/s intelligence, plus much of the airyness, but the emotion so to speak stays ‘solid’. It is in part a competition; it must have been a strange arrangement, i.e., the collaboration between them. (Have you ever read any of those books they wrote? I haven’t.)

Partly it’s to believe, to continue to, that writing continues a levy upon the intensive actualities of this life. There was a time when it could be, itself, one of those most prime. Now I more or less hurry after—at moments with the feeling, it could be brought up to the front even; yet still passive to the extent I expect rather than put it forward, to see what, etc.

I know so damn little at the moment, and so damn much, at the same time. I know what won’t do it, almost perfectly. I am summoning what guts I have I suppose, to think of a large form, physically big, finally, wherewith to get a ‘field’. The stick by stick process of what’s given to me as ‘earlier work’ is, now, too implicated with ideas of continuum I have rejected as I have been able to. I want a nearly frigid aloneness, or at least as much as I can take it: to have a completely white field etc. I want an ultimate humility of this ‘I’, in part: whereby he can attend, old style, upon events he is surprised to find himself included in. A witness involved by his own existence, etc. That has to be learned again, because I used to know it, at least. Bitterness always seems to me a sort of forsaken superiority; and most intolerably placed in one’s self, etc.

My wife’s name is Bobbie, i.e., I guess that is why I did not write it. Think of that. I suddenly hate information of any kind—in any case. But not at all ‘really’. So much for that.

I liked Chan’s picture very much—she is a crazily sweet child. Viz, if judges have to be, they should be like her. She is very good to me.

Phil Whalen wrote a few days ago: it seems that Jack sold rights to ‘On the Road’ to an English publisher, and is coming back to the States, and will try to bring his mother to Mill Valley, etc., as he used to speak of it. Allen, tho broke, wants to stay on there. Gary is going into seclusion etc. Phil is as ever—a great pleasure, i.e., very sane. The 2nd edition of Allen’s Howl was suppressed by customs & presently a stink being raised etc., with Rexroth on same etc. The latter reading at The Cellar etc to accompaniment of that bad jazz. Layton got a Rockefeller grant, and Jonathan a Guggenheim. So that’s good. J/ is due by sometime early June.

It’s a lousy day here, dust storm—but Sunday. But then I should have waited, but then don’t damn well write, putting it off—which I do mean to do. So—so. But it is a bad day to tell you what poems I would like for #8, Anyhow I think: *Pcocek and Vaquero, from those you had sent earlier. But—for god’s sake—please don’t let that bug you etc. Please send whatever you have as you can, because there is no immediate scene re time, and I would like others, etc. Ok. There is no real need for me to hang myself etc. Ok. Write soon. I will do likewise. Tell me how you are making it there.

Our love to you all,

Bob

* This one I

like very much

in part but at times

back off the “I, . . .” Better to use “Hid

of Mr Mothers”—ok?

P.S. Can you get Zukofsky’s ANEW in library there? That’s a fine book for ‘tones’, and writing.

•••

POSTCARD TO DONALD M. ALLEN

[undated, ca. 1958]

Dear Don,

I saw Frank O’Hara’s book in the local shoppe, and I think I could cut him. I have enough now for a fairly decent book, size that is, taking the work from after The Whip. Doesn’t anybody want to buy a book of poems. The Whip sold 30 copies at the 8th St Bookshop. That’s famous, no? Ah well again—but someday it wd be very happy indeed to have a book it didn’t it seemed came out of my back pocket. Tho where else I suppose. If ever, please say.

Bob

I can write jazz poems? Wow!

•••

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

General Delivery

Alameda, NM

January 31, 1958

Dear Jack,

I’ve got some start into the Subterraneans, and yesterday On The Road came—so that’s it. Your style is pretty incredible, old friend, i.e., how you hold a thing, in a haze, then sharpen, then fade—I like it. To me—and it’s no simpleness—it means more than the content—or is the content, a disposition in itself. Or ‘all to be talked about’—a sharp, sliding web of consideration. So that again is it. Beats is for supper, otherwise—but you pick and I’ll read it, and feel very honored in sd process. You are very damn good. Again, it’s what you can do, that makes me think about it all—the topic is already history, [^ but not what you say to it] e.g., I see by the papers there is something new in the heavens etc. I suppose I (not sickly) want to be handed the goddamn dream of it all, the island just above the mist, landfall, and all the rest of it. Some things you don’t talk about, but you will.*

I wish I could get to NYC for the movie. It would be too much. And, selfishly, I should, viz it would again be too much. But then I equally wish you cd come here, for the place—though you must know it. An hour ago I was getting my hair, down over my ears, cut, with the radio on loud, Mi Corazon, and the crazy vanity of the Mexican, two kids getting chopped as well, then waiting for their father, to get the same, etc. The whole place, the Ideal, floats in the coming downedness, of pot, and ‘there’ll be more . . . ’ It’s good—even to sit gringo, and be NH, and Mass—awkward, but they are very polite, and ask how I am, etc., etc. Anyhow I dig very much the shyness of their formality, in the big white city,—in the desert. Who doesn’t want to go home.

I like you being famous. You make money, you hear—like they say. Voila. Your business is otherwise but it’s good they pay you for it. Marshall just sent a gig, a letter, via Olson—off Dahlberg & Read, etc.,—wherein he cites you as the sound; which matters, I think. Likewise Selby digs you, etc. It’s good, to be dug—it lets one take off, and figure the home remaining, etc. My sister arrived a few days ago with my bros in law, flying home, and was talking abt Keh/roo/ ac—accent on the 2nd syllable—how abt that. It seems some yng man in the english dept at Colorado State was reading you to the ladies.

This is Saturday afternoon, and the heat’s off for awhile; but I want to read the books, and write a decent letter. Take care of yourself. You are very good to me, so I have an interest. Bit by bit—which is the way—I get back together, and will shortly be with it, I think. It all feels good. I have kids to insist on it. You should know that. Ok. Write as you can.

All my love,

Bob

Duncan today wrote: “there is a sense in which Kerouac touches everything with his own life, so that this reader will go anywhere with him . . .”

[note at top of page] Later: *What made me say that god knows, but my own dilemma, not yours. I just finished On The Road, straight thru, and it’s a beautiful solid & completely heart-open thing. I like it—which to say sounds glib, except that it has so much of the wet, half-struggling thing; viz, hope. So I’m the one that needs it. Ok.

[note in upper left margin] This was re The Subterraneans. The length of the other is a curious obtainment so to call it, viz all that movement, always about to stay—and then moving. By Mexico it was all ‘must be . . . ’ Too much.

[note in lower left margin] The fade off on Neal is very moving. He just stands there as one moves out—it hurts to read it.

•••

LETTER TO PAUL BLACKBURN

I think you met Fee Dawson (?)—who can god

knows be impossible—but I like him +/or have known him

otherwise. Ah well. It could also have been Victor . . .

March 8, 1958

[New Mexico]

Dear Paul,

Your comments on those poems help very much—as always. It’s very good to have your reading, i.e., you are very sure & sharp. Ok. I’d myself finally either push that Tunnel harder (?—if I cd think how), or whatever; I think it’s that I don’t think light is the final image, that has always hung me up. Ah well. Equally the Friend poem: it is from the other side, like they say—I expect I wanted well written & gracefully stated bugged-ness. Anyhow, that you like The Ladies is pure joy, i.e., it’s the last written (the end of New Year’s vacation)—and the first real swinger I’ve felt in some years now (except for Just Friends, which equally bounced at the time, except it was on bottom/SF ’56).

So. I’ll take Myth, No Myth—with pleasure. Equally your Mexican bandit, if free? And please send me anything else you can, as you can. Perhaps I collect it all against nothing ($$$ being very scarce, though shortly I’m going to try to figure angles, of which there must always be some, etc.) I like for a Cool Departure, very much—the end is very good. I like your line, Paul—I always did, god knows—but you hold it very quietly & I am held by it. Also, no one else I know can take an angle of ‘description’, and move it as a ‘counter’ of perception. This gets very sure in your writing. At the Crossroad is a beautiful thing, also. Ok. I think you work hard!

I’m sorry to hear about the Oxford dons, i.e., as the man just sd on the radio, Jesus Christ . . . But then it’s Sunday. Oh well. Wdn’t you know it was to be the old hassle,—wow! And for 180 years almost nothing. But I am certain there will be someone to do it, i.e., porque no—because it’s done.

I have been waiting for some copies of some poems to be in a book, The Dress, to get a ms/ of some sort to Allen (it was my own idea); so don’t be concerned abt that, i.e., I have myself done nothing abt it as yet, but want to. The catch just now is, and perhaps you can help me find out what’s happening—this friend of Larry B/s (I’m quite sure they are, i.e., Ian and Liz Robertson) undertook to print a book for me, very damn decently, abt 2½ years ago now. The text was done as of last May, and when I was in NYC last fall (August), Ian R/ told me on the phone it was to be ready end of Sept/. And a letter last month sd it wd be ready end of Feb/ etc. But nothing. I was also told by them I’d been part of a hostage in argument they were having with J/ Wms. Hardly happy. The bk (small edition, 100 copies, so that’s why I am anxious to have the poems for this ms for Allen) has a drawing by Philip Guston, and is they told me almost completely subscribed—so I am damn well in the middle all round. I don’t have any copies of the poems in it, which is why I am now anxious, since there are abt 12, I cd add in effect to this new ms/ etc. Cd you ask Larry when you see him, if I have it right he knows them & all, to check what is happening? This distance as ever is the headache—usual but never much else.

I’m reading Wm Byrd’s diaries for a gig in US hist/—only thing that begins to keep me awake at the beanery etc. As exemplum: “March 10, 1712. I rogered my wife this morning and rose about 7 o’clock but read nothing because Mr Mumford was here . . . I neglected to say my prayers but had boiled milk for breakfast . . .” So it goes.

I hope Freddie is better soon. It’s been a godamn miserable winter eg. Bobbie has been sick for nearly a month now, ear infection. Again, I thought that poem in Origin was very straight—so. And yr book was never part of my clouds etc. Poco a poco. Write as you can. I will do likewise.

All love,

Bob

Back at the Ranch etc.

P.S.

It’s a little more possible to write here, i.e., that’s done for the day—and once out of it, at least it’s quiet and begins to all be more possible—each time more. What thing I was thinking of, re your poem, turns out a misprint on my part, i.e., both drafts you send are the same. Ah well! I think I was trying to play sd ‘asshole’ back on the line before (?):

. . . the pistol. My asshole

dropped out

and crawled all the way back to El Paso.

Or perhaps by itself on that line where you have it. Or perhaps—because what I read is what I read, and what you wrote, and so I took it, in my so-called head at least, no matter. So it stands as the rhyme intended. And it’s yr forte at that, and always was. So send me more poems. Ok.

Again, it’s very good to hear the Provencal material is all together, and off to Oxford—and goddamn well good luck to you. I hope. Likewise it’s good to hear you are reviewing in The Nation; as wrote, I had seen some of your things there. Where have you been publishing? How about the Black Mt Review, yet? Granted a beneficent god, #8 may yet make it. I’ve missed you. I’d likewise like you to see what I have as of about 1956 (?)—since then it’s been mainly figuring, though now with abt 20 poems that shoot in 70 directions, but at least at moments make it. Anyhow do you have If You? It’s only 8 poems, but I think you wd like some. Let me know. Viz, I’d like you to see these things if you haven’t. I wrote Don Allen abt a book, taking that and what’s in this The Dress, ‘due anytime (but never as yet etc)’ plus what I have since, about 50 odd all told. I never thought I’d weigh these things like hamburg. Eh bien . . .

So it makes it, vous avez. I have, that is—poco a poco. A crazy sort of endless openness.

•••

LETTER TO DENISE LEVERTOV

April 22, 1958

Dear Dennie,

I’m sorry to hear about all the ugliness, and that you’ve had Kenneth on you in such fashion. I can remember it pretty damn well, eg the time he came up and harangued the Dorns in just the same style for six hours straight. And—the anonymous phone calls, and the threats, and viciousnesses, and god knows what all. Then of course it was hard to suggest what it was he was up to, at least apparently—but these ‘psycho dramas’ are I think even a pathetic necessity for him now, and god knows after two years unrelieved they must be as clear to others as they were to me then. Anyhow, I can relieve you about the supposed quote. If I’m right—and I think I am—the only thing you ever said to me on that subject, at all, was that you were very sorry Kenneth had to be hurt, because you knew how much he loved his daughters. You offered no sympathy to me, because you did not know what circumstances were present— nor the situation literally; and could not, as I am very sure now you did say, take sides against loyalties felt on both sides. In short, you were sorry to hear what was happening, and reasonably, could not be involved in judgements, etc—regretting that it had happened at all. So much for playing a large part in wrecking his marriage etc etc—which same he wrecked long long ago, helpless to act otherwise or not. Again, I am helpless as you to understand what occasion I’d have for quoting your letters to Marthe—if at all, it could have only been to show that my friends were by no means taking sides against him, but were in fact tending to assume his position god knows more tenable than mine, granting I was the aggressor. God damn him in any case. The irony is, well listen: (from Don Allen) [^ 17th April, ’58] “I’d like to see the 4 uncollected stories—to consider them along with Gold Diggers. No hurry about this. Rexroth has also been pushing this book with me—he’s here reading at the Five Spot now.” So in effect you are used, pretty obviously, to titillate an outraged & shot emotional system long after the effective causes (not even me enough) seem out of reach. I certainly did not see Marthe in SF, I would hardly even attempt it, knowing what it might provoke him to take out on her in retaliation. As for guns, he said that once to me on the telephone, and I answered, I’ll be there in one hour— whereupon he said, I don’t want any more trouble, etc. It’s sick and impotent and dead. A utter patheticism. Anyhow how much of course he would like to involve you, wasn’t this always the form.

If you can get out of range of the voice—let it all drop. I’m not a dope fiend and I’m not anyone’s lover, and I know the old pattern so well, of involving others in his excesses—a big huge gooey sick mess of insane preoccupation with his own despair, not even faced or written out, but indulged and fed till it’s nightmare for everyone who ever cared for him. To hell with it where it damn well belongs.

I’m sorry the whole letter is taken up with it—I wanted to tell you 1) at Robt’s we heard a half hour of your reading, rebroadcast on KPFA—wow, wow, wow! It was so damn lovely I had tears in my eyes, looking out the window, hearing you move thru it all. Well, you know!! And 2) it was a great trip & visit & all, and I read—and that was good too, to be back in business, with Robt smiling—and so on. I needed it very much.

It’s good here too. I figure to stay on, I got a raise to 4400, and it’s easy—and the house very great, and Bobby & family much more than I ever thot wd happen. So. I’ll write soon. Please do likewise. All love,

Bob

[note at top of page] P.S. I’ll get that copy of the damn review SOON! Wow, again . . .

[note in left margin] P.S. Nothing very wild ever happened to me, i.e., an “orgy” wd scare me to death—not to mention “debauches.” It’s a New England limitation like they say. I’ve smoked marijuana* but that’s not what he is saying either. Viz. that world I can’t even imagine. So.

[note in right margin] *never in any relation with or to Marthe—goddamn this DEFENSE!!! TO HELL WITH HIM!!

•••

LETTER TO DENISE LEVERTOV AND MITCH GOODMAN

c/o Homire

Juan Enriquez 66

Veracruz, Ver.

August 13, 1958

Dear Denny and Mitch,

Our Odyssey made it this far, and this I guess will be it for the 12 days remaining. Oaxaca was good, that’s where we first went—and stayed at Los Molinos, but it got expensive, the Americans suspected in the plaza were very damn much in force—and soon the almost blandness of the situation got impossible, I flipped after my fashion, and one morning we were gone like they say—so quickly I never got to see your mother as I had planned to once settled, or any of it. Our next stop was Las Casas—and precisely as you said of it, god knows fabulous. I went to see Blum, who was most kind—and again it was all very good except for weather, cold and wet, and also a yng English professor who came wandering in the day we arrived with the kids, who had been playing in the park—much to his distaste I later found. So that same day we spent mostly at his place, he assured us we could find one very easily etc. But things soon got involved, he graciously gave me a sheet mimeographed, with 19 examples of enjambment, I got drunker—at 1 AM that morning I seem to have insulted him too finally, and he threw me out of his house (13 rooms, $20 a month like they say—“and at last the pretensions are ours!”). It was all so dreary it colored the whole situation and it was raining, and so forth. We made our way back, getting here finally about July 24th or 25th—and have a decent apartment for $20 a month (fuck him!) and with all of us, it is simpler to manage everything in a city like this, which same I like, very much—i.e., the openness, people, and ocean, and all. They are things we get little of in the desert, and the kids in particular are delighted.

But the damn summer seems pretty well lost, with 12 days now remaining before we start back. Yet that too is fair enough—I’ve banged myself about hard enough not to have to worry longer about that capacity etc. No ‘vacation’ could make it, in that sense. So it has to be figured otherwise, god knows quite how— but no terms can be managed with time limits. But to hell with it all here.

I’ve been reading Rousseau’s Confessions, just finished. What a book—like they say—so painfully short a goddamn life, viz so aching and small and bewildered. It’s a crazy image of what ideas are contained by, viz the can wherein, the beans. Wow. I kept thinking, this man drove how many years of hope, and/or romanticism, and like a kid, his note of masturbation, to make the dream that won’t come true. All the sad sad smallness—with the largeness of self-actuality he keeps trying to drive to. Wow again. It took my head off like they say.

Otherwise I read Under The Volcano—liking mainly (and almost only) the sudden images of bars & conversations; but the ‘plot’ dreary & pretentious & finally childish, i.e., the end etc. He could certainly write as he surely gives sporadic detail in this book I was very struck by—but the goddamn groundwork seems like a drenched pomeranian to me. No good.

I hope things are making it for you. I wanted to write much sooner, and did in Las Casas, but then ‘events’ changed so quickly, it was no longer relevant (what I had said etc). Write as you can please, i.e., here (though there is not much time now but a letter would very much help get us back god knows) or anyhow to Alameda, where we’ll be again about the 1st. Take care of yourselves.

All my love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

General Delivery

Alameda, NM

November 16, 1958

Dear Ed,

I was reading that long poem of yours re yr mother, I have had for years etc: it’s very like my mother in law,—and god willing will one day appear. I.e., things have been impossible re $$$, and as yet there is not much hope of getting out another issue. But Jonathan wrote last week about trying to start another magazine, twice a year—it seems ER irritates him & that is good— 123 pp or abt that, and who knows: perhaps. Have you sent that poem around elsewhere? It ought to damn well get printed before we are all old and dead and bits & pieces etc. Ok.

What are you doing? It’s an impossible scene of bits & pieces already, with 3 courses (horses, forces, bourses, mabel etc) At Night:

At night

I see the light

I am afrightted, etc.

English 5280b—the being b, depends you see,: how are you Eddie boy, howr yer making It. Etc. Hearty handshake, harf harf: bull yer. Viz, go son: make Aceodemic: ach, viz aches Only When I Sit Down, etcl: ecetlee, viz et-settle her, Un-settled. Settee—it all comes back to yr point o’ vision: I see/ a settee. In my mind’s eye, of course. I (doctor) am continually beset by image I am tired and should (sewed, sued) set (beset, settled, suttee . . .) Down (dad) but that’s what I am tired from (fro, fru * go in & out the rainbow, go in & out the rainbarrel). And pieces navel dripping from the sea. The blood you wore the last we ’twere engaged . . .

Anyhow we are making it, and how we are ‘making it’: Douglas Woolf told me he had bilt himself a cardboard house within his house: viz illustrative of Yr common function of Yr common metaphor, etc. Go dumborn dad, tell them’s that wastes yr time & me, etc.

Ite, liber que no hablar: dige quibus, etc.

I wanted ‘Ed’ to write. God & all the saints preserve me. I mean, I want to write you—goddamnit. It is snowing, the desert, the place here, like they say, is awash with same—Y r dust & damned small indeed particles of frozen water. (9 odd chickens huddled out in the Gt/ Beyond: Our Responsibility). I am writing ok, ok.

I never have excuse for silence, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ upon Yr leaking roof.

MY LOVE

It falleth like a stick.

It lieth like air.

It is wonderment [^ and] bewilderment,

to test true.

It is no thing, but of two,

equal: as the mind turns to it,

it doubleth,

as one alone.

Where it is, there is

everywhere, separate,

yet few—as dew

to night is.

[CP I, 181]

We survive fair enuf. Life goes on, also enuf. Bit by bit I begin to construct something of it all, not a goddamn self-improvement or damn self denial, etc. Write, please. It’s a favor I be asking. Ok.

All love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

San Geronimo Miramar [Finca San Jerónimo Miramar]

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

August 20, 1959

Dear Robert,

We are still in the process of settling, but each day it all looks more possible. The first somewhat chilling recognition like they say, was that the economy is by no means Spanish, i.e., there are simply two classes, those with it and those without which last group lives something roughly pre-Columbian, whereas the other mocks the latest imports from America, thus Log Cabin Maple Syrup and transistor radios from Japan in a store smaller than that one in Banalbufar, etc. Ah well! Prices for such things (which our appetites happily lust after) are incredible, e.g. a box of crackers selling for over $2.00, and a can of Crisco for $2.10. The problem is that if one doesn’t live on frijoles and mais, then the alternative costs a good deal more than expected, since there is no in between.

More happily, the house is comfortable, and the countryside around us very beautiful—old volcanoes, a sort of half-lush half-tropical vegetation but not at all impossibly hot, etc., a very lovely lake some ten miles to the north, and a glimpse of the sea from the house of one of my two employers, etc. So that rests the soul. The people themselves likewise break into two halves, one (the finca we are on) very simple to get on with, a young couple from America, the husband of which grew up here (Italian) and a simple decent loneliness for other people that moves me. The others are more complicated, particularly by the husband—ex-Tennessean, who wants an ‘image’ of his power, and though their house and the grounds, like they say, are very lovely (sort of olde Connecticut), his personality is not. But I can stay away, and his wife is a sharp harassed woman who seems to feel a good deal more than she presently mentions. The kids as expected are all very uncomplicated, and the only problem being their poor English but that can be got around. The course materials are fabulously ordered, even to the hours of the day, etc. So that will work out.

Otherwise, we keep wobbling between diverse reactions, sometimes wishing we were anywhere else, and sometimes feeling it can prove what we hoped etc. To hope is the problem of course, yet how and/or why not. I think in part we remember how happy the visit with you was, and wish that we could be there now. I’m going to see if I can’t get some kind of job there, against another year, or say after a year or two here—which will in any case be enough. In the meantime the ambitious employer has now two tape recorders (got since my arrival, to record, he says, meetings in which he is ‘active’ etc) so as soon as ours is going again (something gave out a week ago, and it’s now being repaired), I’ll make a tape of Charlie’s, and also of the one I got of Ed (noisy because of the children but fair enough) and will do the rest myself, and mail it. Just now I am reading Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, which I’ve had for a couple of years, looking only at the pictures. Somethings are provocative, e.g. green is the feminine color, four is feminine, three masculine, men facing a unknown area project the terms of their unconscious into it, etc. It tends to be very damn ‘enclosed’ but I have time, etc. Otherwise reading Burckhardt on the Renaissance, too slow I think, diffuse, too much off the center of the materials—I don’t know. Again the anecdotes, the few, and the illustrations are fine. But I get to dislike very much these inclusive/exclusive intelligences, which read however subtley the terms of their own reaction as necessarily more relevant than the objects from which they derive: fair play would make an equality at least. Hence this in Jung seems wiser: “there was no “either-or” for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose characteristic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as a material form . . . when psychology has at the same time to admit that there are other forms of psychic life besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness—in other words, when psychology too touches on an impenetrable darkness—then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes to life again, and the physical and psychic are once more blended in an indissoluble union. We have come very near to this turning-point today . . .”

I read in places relevances to Charles’ preoccupations, e.g. ‘homo maximus’— but more exactly, like that ‘new combinations of old personages’ etc. It seems to me that his investment, or recognitions, take from Jung, as surely the premise of Maximus himself, a curiously ‘alchemical’ figure. Anyhow his idea of objects declaring their presence, their nature, seems to play back to this use of Jung’s in part, albeit with much differentiation, but I can see why Jung consented to be on the Board of Black Mountain, and was so polite in sending me that piece for the magazine, etc.

So it all goes on. As yet we are in a sort of half chaos, but get to bed early, etc. Write please as you can, because this is beyond all else (or so it seems) a place wherein to answer. Wow. I had missed that feeling and/or ability in Albuquerque. If you see any books that look useful, and inexpensive, tell me and I’ll get you money for them, since books coming in have no duty. That will be the only problem here (books to use) as it was in Spain, and since there will be time for reading, I’d like to make good use of it. Please send me Maddy’s and Jimmy’s and Jack’s addresses, lost in getting here. Give my love to all when you see them. Ok.

All our dearest love to you both,

Bob

P.S. I am supposed to get proofs of the book any day, so assume that goes all right. They have turned down Louis’ Test which is a shame, and seem to be interested in nothing else. J/ writes he is trying to get something of Charles’ in, more acceptable to them. Also, a long letter from Donald Allen, contrite and humbled, and says he will try to make amends to you for past horrors. I’d be very grateful to see you in that anthology so-called, if only for my own security— but god knows appreciate the difficulties . . . Wow.

•••

LETTER TO ALLEN GINSBERG

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

September 7, 1959

Dear Allen,

We made it like they say, and glad to hear you did likewise. So that’s that. It was a very good ride back with you, and the chance to talk and all I’d been hoping to have. There is no one who makes more sense of the politics of the so-called scene than yourself, and likewise I think what you’re making of the unresolved areas of communication & control, etc, comes in very usefully. I.e., when is a man a sandwich, if you ask him to, and so on. That stroboscope image still hangs in my head, like who controls rhythm controls, as Olson used to quote somebody or other. (Nirvana, the great mystic, etc.) Reading that part of KADDISH in BIG TABLE #2, hearing it again on the tape recorder (and I’ll send shortly a tape of poems etc), it makes it, thicker, denser, more variable, than heretofore (HOWL), the ‘message’ Norbert Weiner style is registered in a wider range of ‘frequency’—it anticipates, and leads, giving the reader less area to ‘reject’ in, etc., etc. Ah well! The ‘feed back’ of your own terms, as they occur, declared, in the poem, i.e., as you, say, get them, add to the interest likewise. That way I read Burroughs as coming to ‘terms’ in his writing, coming to not so much abstracts of the so-called experience, but patterns that amend and fix it. He uses his mind as a way out IBM machine, seeing what kind of charge the thing can take—because take it must, etc. Or else it can’t matter. That humor of his is fatal (mortal) as is all same—only people who really want to live forever, or who don’t get the joke, so to speak, never laugh. I am very damn taken by everything of his which I read.

I don’t know that any goddamn ultimate (wow) solution is to be got here. It’s jungle out of mind pretty much, very tiny in a strange way, you can look at it, it looks very crazy but to use it I haven’t yet found the way. The whole scene is feudal, Burroughs’ location without as yet the characters, Connecticut landscaping with volcanoes for a backdrop—and after the desert, my eye is very damn arid and calculating. So it ain’t mecca yet. The people are tied up, strung with the whole scene, you know just where you can get hold of them—or the finceros do. There will always be someone to do the ‘job’ though it may take three weeks to accomplish, etc. So they are growing coffee on pretty little bushes, a red cranberry like bean, and they pick it by hand, each goddamn bean etc. At this occupation they make about $10 a fortnight—they wouldn’t make anything otherwise, but it seems ridiculous, when costs are high, no exceptions, a wool sweater hawked for their benefit selling for $15, to Indians, etc. It can hardly last. So the next life maybe they’ll pick me and I’ll be drunk on Madison Avenue at high noon.

I saw Gregory’s picture in TIME. It’s curious the way they keep reporting. Well, it gives the picture, does it not. I can’t yet get the fact of the ‘audience’, it’s sentimentalism no doubt, I hope not a snobbism, but I would give much to be able to register what it is such people think they are hearing. Obviously there is a so-called current. Maybe we goddamn well inhabit an existence where anything happening is a miracle. Hit me again, etc. The age of majority. Getting here, one of the bosses said, first we got a homo, then we got a lesbian, and now we got a beatnik—oh no. He himself is deep in with political gig called Union of Christian Agriculturalists. What would Jesus say. They drive madly about the landscape in Mercedes Benzes and drink (it’s expensive), and bull shit each other, and the Prez when they can get hold of him. If you come across any old copies of the PAC political organization booklet in bookstores etc, that would be a good one for them. I sit and drink beer in guise of a literate employee etc. So:

NOT NOW

I can see you,

hairy, extended, vulnerable,

but how did you get up there.

Where were you going all alone,

why didn’t you wait

for the others to come home

to go too, they would

have gone with you.

[CP I, 228]

I sent that to Leslie (?) with one other, per request, and thanks for giving him the word, like they say. Write me when you can, what’s happening there, who’s on the cross these days, what regrets, and so forth: is Jack now in Florida, how does it look for India—and if you can, because we got a phonograph pickup (left in the ‘school house’) that record of Jack and yours when ready? Write anyhow and no matter. Take care of yourself, and likewise, Peter, and likewise, you. Ok.

Our love to you both,

Bob

“In this world one hand washes

the other . . .”

(Verga)

[Unidentified newspaper clipping enclosed]

Feb. 1 Tonight I learned something—how to keep squirrels from climbing up a pole and eating grain from the bird feeder at the top.

Hurried from the office to the dinner meeting of our men’s rose club. Most of us aim to get there early, so we can have a gabfest beforehand.

The main topic of conversation tonight was squirrels. Seems these little pests worry the daylights out the brethren who feed birds. “I solved it,” said Doc, the dentist. “I greased the pole. Now the squirrel just slips back. Can’t make it to the top.”

•••

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

September 28, 1959

Dear Jack,

Hola, como se dice, i.e., have been trying to make it across the wastes to you for months now. Faint silences, no less. I wangled a copy of DR SAX out of Don Allen and I like that book, like they say, very much. Allen had given me the plot on the way back from SF, so it was (plus my own growing up in Acton, where you get to eventually after Chelmsford, likewise in the Nashoba Fruit Belt) a gasser. I used to go to Lowell once a year to buy a suit. The big city, which it still is, to my mind. You were the kids I never saw! Wow! It’s a lovely book, very straight and with everything but what comes later in it—i.e., you don’t jam it with corrections which so many sick people do these days. (I met Herb Gold briefly after one of the readings in SF, it was strange to see what he wanted (?), and here was this dapper, sharp, shrewd, little commonplace cat, so to speak,—what in god’s name did I have. Anyhow a cheap thrill was had by all. I can’t read any of that anymore. I don’t believe in their world, or, more accurately, in the ‘objective’ fingers with which they think to pick it up. There is always a sly chuckle somewhere back of it all, viz ‘but you and I . . . ’ Anyhow that’s out.)

Allen said you might be coming to Mexico, Mexico City—and hopefully it would be very good somehow to see you, i.e., either if you could make it here (which if you climb the volcanoes high enough gets like a Japanese movie, with trees blasting in & out of the fog), or else see you there, somehow. Does it look likely? Guatemala, such as I can see, we are on a finca about 15 miles from the one main road in this country (fair enough), is like they used to say visually the end. People-wise, there are still witch doctors, so somebody still believes. But there is a GOLFO IMMENSO between Indians and owners, everything is hopelessly marked up, it’s all a big plate glass window for those who can smash through and grab it. And curiously dull, also—because there is little edge to the politics (as with Mexicans) or anything else. But it god knows is lovely to look at, like a song yet. So. We can make it, just about, with our six heads, twelve feet, etc. Wow again. At this point we contain our own weather.

Anyhow please write as and when you can. What are you doing? I just ‘marketed’ a poem involving you, viz I like to involve my friends, anyhow for you, to POETRY, so I am respectable. I’ll put it on the backside. I liked very very much the poem in YUGEN, Florida—every year my mother & her sister for a few months make a monolithic trip down in their old car, to live in a trailer, because my mother won’t leave her, and can hardly blame her for that. In Florida. Write soon. Take care of yourself. Ok.

All love,

Bob

JACK’S BLUES

I’m going to roll up

a monkey and smoke it, put

an elephant in the pot. I’m going out

and never come back.

What’s better than that.

Lying on your back, flat

on your back with your

eyes to the view.

Oh the view is blue, I saw that

too, yesterday and you,

red eyes and blue,

funked.

I’m going to roll up

a rug and smoke it, put

the car in the garage and I’m

gone, like a sad old candle.

[CP I, 219]

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

Everytime I hear the Webern I can’t believe it!! He has a beautiful mind.

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

[undated, ca. October 1959]

Dear Robert,

There is a break in the day, i.e., noon—when I am back here to refuel, and then off for the older members of the school’s community, which is, at that, increasingly the only one I find a place in here. I.e., the rest turns into an increasingly drunken rot of self indulgence. Hence I avoid it. We live here, in the house, and with what we can see out the windows. Curiously, fair enough— because Bobbie starts to paint, and I am writing, no matter what. Anyhow there is no fiber such as there was in Banalbufar, of people to be looked at, then responded to, i.e., tangibilities of presence and warmth. It’s a damn shame that there should be such visible beauty all about, and so goddam much a wear and tear of people. Well, the same is true of a cemetery, etc. Pues!

I have that tape on the gizzmo, of Antheil, and just now Stravinsky: my contribution to the racket of trucks passing et al. So I think of you both, and that’s a pleasure. I try to keep the damn day opening, bit by goddamn bit. I hate to see it go closed and locked around me, i.e., all that anticipated displeasure it can turn into. Viz, ‘didn’t I tell you, etc.’

Also just now I’m looking for my book, to boot me out again, and to start a reformation of any kind at all. I’ll put, backside, what I’ve done, some of it, since I last wrote. I’ve also been rereading PATERSON, and then all of MAXIMUS— which latter I curiously find more variation in, than in the apparent changes of Williams. I think it’s because the counters are literally larger, like the turning over of huge fish, a real change of the dimension. Whereas Williams works closer to the signal detail, etc. A sort of scuttering too often, and the main line stays main line, etc. Though that’s too quickly said.

I reapplied for a Guggenheim—this time asking all the professors I could think of, and leaving friends out of it. Viz I want a vacation with pay. Ha.

Please write as you can. Give everyone my love, and if you can send me Jimmy’s and Maddie’s address, I’d like to write them. So, none of it is impossible, but proves too often sterile—but either I am or am not, and what more there is is gravy. So, again.

All our love to you both,

Bob

P.S. I sent the tape off to you last Saturday (October 10th), and it should take roughly a month. It has the Olson, also some of Ed Dorn’s, and at the very end (of Ed’s), me: THE DOOR, THE HILL, and one or two newer ones, etc.

[Page 2 consists of the poems “The Wife” (CP I, 252), “The Joke” (CP I, 214), and “The Women” (CP I, 234). Also, the following note, handwritten at top right]

I also like the Cage

altered piano very much—

e.g. they make tangible

for me this headache of

rhythms, suspended +

otherwise. But does

the Reader even hear it -

I wonder.

•••

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

October 20, 1959

Dear Jack,

It was very damn good to hear from you, i.e., the more so, grey day, not so happy place at all it gets to be, with the people on our necks, we are locked in with them, so all the wear & tear of that. Anyhow I’ll put some poems in & use whatever you and Allen figure makes it. The hat one and the one re pride goeth are as of an hour ago—so they are for you particularly, like they say. Ok.

Thinking of Steve Allen, also like they say—and he seems straighter than many—could you get them to send me a copy of that record you made with him? Viz not to beg, but I want it, and we are broke—and so. I think the only damn thing I would ever want from any of this bizness is chance to get such things I want, and too often perhaps too stingily or stupidly don’t have the money to get, i.e., just now we make it and nothing more. Ai-yi. We are rarely hungry in any case. Ok.

I’ll ask Wilentz Bros, 8th St Bkshop, to send you book A Form Of Women, which ought to be done soon, i.e., take also from that what you want (as from anything else?), but clear with them please any things re copyrights, which they seem to have all wrapped round with huge ribbons, etc. Though good naturedly.

I was thinking of one thing, that ‘greed for views’ Gotama, i.e., what he said, like they say. That was a good shot was it not. I used to know rambling & amiably drunken painter who wrote poem went: too soon, too late, too late too late, too soon too soon too soon, too late too late too late, etc. But I am here, he used to say.

As & when you are in Hollywood, and me without the TV yet, if you have time to make it, John Altoon is there, an old friend, and very straight man. I like him. He is married now to Fay Spain, Allen & Peter & Bobbie & I almost made it there, but were impatient, and kept going. Hence, if you get time he is at: 4837 Agnes, Studio City, Calif. Has phone, etc.

Jack I sure wish you were around! I talk so much out of the side of my mouth these days it comes out the back of my head—at best. Always backing out of the room, smiling, etc. I should have been a butler. Anyhow we are cooling the fort, and it’s ok. We saw W. R. Hearst’s castle I think, there’s an image for you. Setting sun, off she was there, over the gently rising hills yet. I have a quote like they say from Peter, at the Grand Canyon no less: viz he first stuck his head over & yells, anybody down there got a cookie? Then later, a sort of taking leave etc: Anybody down there seen my dinosaur? But people are getting callous all over. Perty soon won’t be no place left to walk. A tall. Take care now you hear?

And youth replyed: Ah will.

Write soon.

All love,

Bob

Ed was finally the only one there—but for Judson Crews, who is rock, rock, rock. That sure stays put!

•••

LETTER TO GENEVIEVE CREELEY

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

October 26, 1959

Dear Mother,

I’ve been concerned, like they say, not to have heard from you since we got here, but Bobbie’s mother had written that she had a letter from you. Is everything all right? Have you sent any letters, i.e., it seems possible enough that the mail just isn’t reaching us. Anyhow, write me when you have time to, and I as well will try to be a little more communicative.

We got here safely at least, and now, after three months more or less, know our way around the limited area, finally, we have to do with. It is not very much as we had hoped, sadly enough. It’s not the look of the place or the climate— both lovely enough for anyone. But the people are limited and depressing to be dependent on, and there is little (in fact as we’ve found, no) way to find alternatives to them. The whole country is sharply divided into two feudalistic classes, i.e., the owners and the peons who work for them. The culture of the Indians is about worn out, and hangs on a kind of ghastly pre-Columbian survival. Well, maybe that’s not true at all, but we of course see them only in the context of the coffee finca, where they work for very little indeed and seem mired in a hopeless life of dependence on the German, Italian, or American owner whose own security depends on their extensive exploitation. The whole form of living seems a bitter anachronism. I don’t myself see any very expectable solution, since each government in turn seems only to invest itself with what it can take, etc. Hence the usual political formulas are not very applicable. Ah well!

Anyhow life takes on a defensive sort of form. My work is simple and I have it pretty well ordered. Bobbie equally has the house running smoothly with the one maid we are finally able to live with. The kids are over their initial sort of exposure, to stomach upsets and the like. And the rainy season is about down, which was the last of our worries in that sense. But we have only ourselves, I mean not even the pleasure of a common street nor store—every damn inch of human intercourse seems prescribed by the deadly feudalisms, e.g. the Indians of course do not expect to be looked at humanly by whites and a quick invitation to total confusion or contempt is any jump over that. It literally stands as a cultural pattern, and I’ve met as yet no valid exceptions. The ‘bosses’ are, both of them, pretty unhappy men. Neither is out to do us damage, yet they breed about them that desolation which any man or woman, basically unsure, unsatisfied, and hence aggressive, seems to, always. They are ‘nice’ to us, they are all contemporaries age-wise, but there isn’t an inch of common ground between us (certainly not one I’d ultimately admit to, even to survival!)—and it takes a conscious sense of ‘not rocking the boat’ to make an evening with them pleasant. But we go, when asked, just to have that variety. We can’t make our house do for it all, although it helps a lot simply to be a family, and to damn well believe in the values of this life as not finally commercial, sexual, or dogma. Wow. They are bored people as well—and that is catching.

So we again manage with what we can make of the house, and ourselves. In Spain, despite the unhappiness in just that area, there was always the place, and the people, just outside the door, and whenever it got too much, you went out to it, walked by the sea, talked to anyone, who always seemed to have a lucky sharpness of sympathy, people that were human likewise. The dead eyes here, or the live ones left to some Indians, reasonably have their own concerns. The roads are too poor to let us go anywhere without fear the car will be wrecked in the process. And the costs are high, to our surprise, e.g. a 3 lb can of Crisco sells for $2.10, and there is no local alternative to many, many things of this kind. It is not in any sense a cheap country, and is, in many ways, more expensive than the states. So, on the $3000 I took to come, we have the same old squeeze to survive—one of the main persuasions, that we wouldn’t, that got us here to begin with.

Well, to hell with it. God willing we’ll see a little of the countryside before going, because that is lovely, very much so—as from our porch there are three or four volcanoes, crazy green lushness of trees and flowers, and a beautiful climate. It’s only unhappy that such a paradise, in so many ways, has to be a cultural swamp and burial ground. I guess the Mayans were the last men to see what a world it really made possible.

And the kids learn well—I sink myself in that sentimentalism, i.e., look to them for my pleasures o’ the day. In the meantime I’m writing to divers colleges and universities, in hopes of a job for the coming year which seems likely. More than one here would probably break something permanently. Also I’m writing, which is a pleasure, and it seems to come well enough. Jack Kerouac wrote me from New York: “Everyone has the highest regard for you now, I guess you don’t know, about your poetry, the secret magician . . .” That was very damn kind of him. So anyhow we all manage. And next letter I’ll try to down my spleen and chagrin that it is not the idyll planned—and give you a better blow by blow description. I saw nothing but blurred or painted photographs, i.e., postcards, in Guatemala City (itself a blurred suburbia); hence have sent none. But we have a camera with us, and will try to get some of the surroundings and all.

Well, nothing is perfect. But, as Ed Dorn wrote, ‘Cheerfulness is still a misleading humor . . . ’ Only Sam Smiles himself could make of this place a ‘happy time’. But endurance being an old New England character, I can at least try to live up to it. All the kids are at that thriving. So. Write as you can, please. I hope you are all well, and that the trip south went off all right. I’ll write too, again, soon. It’s just that I don’t want to spill over on you this present disappointment, nor make it seem a day isn’t no matter very often altogether otherwise. It’s the ‘long range plan’ I’d thought to make of this move, that convinces me no plan is always the right one. Ok.

All our dearest love to you both,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

October 26, 1959

Dear Ed,

I’ve been trying to write you, and get too goddamn sunk in the local pit, etc. But the rainy season has about lifted, so we’ll soon have a rash of them ironically blue skies overhead at least. I.e., we stagger on with the white man’s burden—and the Indians look more distant, out of it (good for them) daily. What a ridiculous life it turns into. When my head isn’t splitting with, Oh look. See Dick, etc—and how can I blame ANY one for that, like they say—it’s the patrones I have before my wavering eye. God they breed unhappiness, this pair. You get around people, too much, who have some goddamn sick self-indulgent wear to that old hunch and huddle, viz a drinkee, a quick one, a dog knows what next, etc—and the whole goddamn landscape exclaims TILT and off you damn well do slide. Having once been a carrier of substantial proportions, I can almost smell the rot long before anyone opens the so-called mouth. Sick. Sick. Sick. The hell being there is no one else to say good day to, but the mirror, the children, and my wife. Why I want more I don’t know, and I’m fast learning not to. So—how are you all. I hope well, happy, cherished, good natured, blessed of god and mankind. Goddamnit, WHY NOT. Ok. What we don’t damn well know we soon enough learn, and life, to be lived, don’t take a bunch of ultimately if not immediately EVIL fuckers just a sucking and a squeezing the old dumb ones, for some mythical balance in the books of one million dollars, as and when they surely will drop dead. I.e., this is the hope of one of the two lads I play peon with. This—and a real hot time in bed, etc. Like the inner wall of some pimply adolescent’s ‘mind’.

I make it ok, despite. We all do, despite. I’m writing, viz back side, but whether coherently, or anything at all, I’ve long since lost track though it loads on all that paranoid bit of ‘is it good’. Write please, i.e., help dad help. The shot heard round the world. I even wrote you a poem: (for Ed)

PRIDE

The end of the song is the end of the story,

I’m five feet high, huge and gory,

piddle pussed, scraped, lean, hard, and vainglorious

also.

There are like big creepers all over the wall here

and they have been growing for three thousand year,

and like when I think about it, you hear,

there is nothing I don’t fear.

Jack writes you are a great writer, which you are, so write me a letter, ok. I.e., have you written since my last because I suspect everyone, i.e., of mails not delivered like they say. Anyhow this to resume contact, over & out:

All love to all,

Bob

I’ve been reading (finally) Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to Gk. Religion: a beautiful damn book—and keeps me SANE—and HAPPY!

START OVER!

[“Kore” (CP I, 206), enclosed]

•••

LETTER TO ALLEN GINSBERG

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

October 31, 1959

Dear Allen,

Your letter was very damn good to have, i.e., don’t think my silence is ever anything other than the usual hang-ups. Y pues. We make it ok, it is dreary, often, but what the hell. The main headache is that it all costs more than figured, hence we are squeezed for money—but that too passeth away god willing. He usually is.

Jack wrote about the anthology you and he are editing. I sent him some poems, I don’t now know if they are worth it—but most to the point, as I told him, please take whatever you care to, from anything, and let me know and I’ll clear it if there’s any hang-up. (I.e., the contract I have with Wilentz states I should clear all use of the poems from the book with him, i.e. subsequent use, but he has been very good, and I don’t see any problem.) Also I’ll put a couple of new ones here, like they say. Let me know what you figure to use as you can.

Too, that damn tape you gave me is sitting here, and that I want to do and get back to you. I tried it once, got all through, and then playing back a day later found it was recorded when the current was too low, so all went higher later. So I’ll do it over, and thought as well to copy for you Duncan’s ODE BEGINN ING WITH A LINE BY PINDAR and THE OWL IS AN ONLY BIRD OF POETRY. And a little Olson, if I can get room. I.e., a clutch, since I’m scared by myself! Ok. (I asked Wilentz to send you a copy of the book when done, which it ought to be by now?)

I’ve been looking for Burroughs’ book, and thanks—but that will take timeto get here I would guess. That “IT is sending a message through Burroughs . . .” Wow, i.e., that says it. You know, that ‘IT’ is certainly an old time business. I begin to wonder what it does come to, to ‘speak for yourself’, and if all history, like they say, read as only a lot of little you-me thrusts, etc., wouldn’t have just been a lot of dull, dreary, draggy old clothes. Though I’ve always liked them. But the ‘speaking thru’, in B/s case of such a curiously vacuum-like yet substantial ‘thing’,—it is eerie. He was never kidding, clearly. But you say it, of this world: “. . . even if it’s only growing realization that the brain is mortal . . .” I.e., I guess is at that the only ‘thing’ by which we can, if we choose, keep track of such mortality, like they say: no one else would even notice. Meaning the ‘voices’. Wow. But I listen too. But very little to my ‘brain’ except as via ‘here they come again . . . ’

So, that way, we are very happy. God knows prices are high, damn well impossibly so, for the most part. And our means of getting around, since the front of the car sounds like a bag of iron, are not good, and get worse. And time, that way, with kids, is short. But I wander all over hell here, in my head, in and out, and days, walking up divers roads close to the ‘school house’, fair enough. Crazy sky, look, lush greens, all the damn growing—really crazy, more and more. Theoretically there are no immediately active volcanoes, but who knows. It happens here very fast, all the whole goddamn world. No local intoxicants but for lush, that I can find record of, sign of: I can’t even locate reasonable connection for myself & the known, like they say. So am growing what I can, though the deluge of rains & crazy sun, after, is almost too much for it apparently. Also caterpillies that eat so fast it looks like they’re making disappear what they’re walking on. I’d like to be able to do that.

So/so. I’ll write soon. I want to get these poems down. Please write too. Take care of yourself. Am growing full beard, half-way, so I can turn my face around & look inward: BOO. No one will know where I’ve gone, and neither will I. Take cares! Four times daily. Ok. We make it, oh ho. I’ll try to get on with some of the people you’ve sent me, thanks—by god you are kind, decent chap, you. Duncan: “Allen Ginsberg has carried news of and his enthusiasm for THE FIELD across country and sent it on to England . . . (I) find certain virtues in Part II of KADDISH appearing in YUGEN . . .” I.e., I don’t think it’s simply a bargain, i.e., D/ finds that world scary, and passes it, too quickly—he knows who you are. He’s coming back, and he always will. So—write when you can.

All our love to you and Peter, Bob

[typed below: “Kore” (CP I, 206), and “Young Woman” (CP I, 238)]

P.S. Roi Jones sent Ron L/s book—which I thought was a very solid first shot, i.e., he had humors & ways of saying that brought me wide awake. Which is it, always.

•••

LETTER TO LEROI JONES (AMIRI BARAKA)

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

November 8, 1959

Dear Roi,

Your letter came in yesterday, along with battered but substantially intact, like they say, copy of A FORM OF WOMEN. It both cheers and scares me, or now that the first wave of pleasure washes over, I get scared it doesn’t make it, all those rhymes this time, god knows. It keeps changing and changing, never any of it done, at all, at all. I wonder what I think to do, etc. The problem of the ‘public voice’, no less, heared tuned to a personal wail, etc. Ah well. But it never will be done, will it? That’s hard to learn, not until one is damn well dead—the final unreality. Wow! I feel as though I had blown myself out of my shell, like an uncooked egg, and sit here with all that necessary ‘tentativeness’,—which way to collapse?

Anyhow, also a fine wash of a decent sadness, like they say, listening just now to that Miles Davis blues album,—it fits. I think of Autumn in New York, forgetting of course the tedium of a day to day sound, but remembering the sharp air, colors, friends, etc. Ah well again. No, I am not impossibly fixed, at all, and bit by bit we manage to make a little more than make do. The house is at that the best we’ve ever had, with the most room for all of us. Resources, otherwise, always are personal—I take what I have for same with me, by virtue of a long apprenticeship, etc. I don’t want the fight of living there, if it can somehow be avoided, so of course I am cheap to kick, and forget it so easily. Duncan’s distinction between solitude and loneliness is a good one, i.e. in that recent poem in MIGRANT. The latter is I guess world ache for kin, but becomes destructive if indulged—should be, I guess, confined to remembering ‘ole Bill’ when with ‘ole Harry’, and sufficient liquor to add the right vagueness etc. Wow . . .

Otherwise it comes to so-called impeccable ‘times’ of crossing someone’s path, like they say—as Ed Dorn and family getting off an early train in Albuquerque, New Mexico—Olson first standing in his door wrapped in a towel, at Black Mountain—Duncan reading from his notebooks, straight off, in a pension in Palma de Mallorca—Dahlberg followed down the hill there, to our house, by taxi driver & piles of luggage—and so on. I.e., the handholds that make the swing through the jungle possible. Well, you know.

I haven’t got Mike M/s new book, and should much like it, if possible? I.e., can you spare a copy sans scene? I hate to freeload, but am, in present circumstances, i.e., the tightness of our so-called money (jingle jingle), brought to it, viz run to it. Ok!

Looking at the book, there is that SOMEWHERE, in it—so that is probably best not used, i.e., there is in the contract with Jonathan and Eli Wilentz clause to the effect no poems can be used without etc. Which would not be hard to get, but if it’s there already, it probably serves no purpose. I don’t have anything else on hand free, that makes it enough. So, this time at least, why don’t you use if agreeable what you otherwise have, i.e., WHAT’S FOR DINN ER (in form backside, I’ve made a few small changes) and THE JOKE—which latter you are very welcome to use with ‘drawing’ (!), i.e., it’s pretentious, of me, but who cares. If you like it, do it. Likewise, if there is anything of use in that earlier letter, use that also—if Gil would not be too much bothered by it? I think use of things from letters is good, i.e., makes a usefully quick pick-up, so long as it does not describe a ‘club’ etc. Anyhow, let me know what roughly will be the deadline for the issue coming after this next one, and I’ll promise enough to choose from to satisfy you, i.e., here it is November 8th, and five days for a letter to get there, and none that is too close to hope for anything more.

I wish I could hear some of those readings. And see Phil and Mike, and everyone. I wish home movies etc were simpler. But—it’s a fine day here, now that the rainy season, like they say, subsides—crazy vistas, views, to all sides. Most to the point, I’ll get there one of these days, no matter. In the meantime, I hope everything makes it for you. Ok. Take care of yourself. Give my best to everyone there. (I’m going to try to get the tape done for Allen this coming week, now having the book, etc., and that ought to get there someday. I’d be very happy to have you hear it, if that is possible, i.e., that’s the hard part of this business, that distances make that difficult—except for tapes. I’m going to put some of Duncan on it as well, reading ODE ON A LINE FROM PINDAR, etc. Like Billy Goat Gruff . . .)

All my best to you,

Bob

WHAT’S FOR DINNER

Only from the back

could I be seen clearly,

merely the fragment

into space hanging.

John jumped on Tuesday.

We had a date

but I was late, and he unduly

unruly.

Today my time come I

am hung from this 7th storey downtown window

to say hello

for the last time.

[CP I, 93]

P.S. Also I asked Eli Wilentz to send you “review” copy of the book. So save your money too!

•••

LETTER TO JEROME ROTHENBERG

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 16, 1959

Dear Jerry,

Thanks for your good letter. God knows what to say of that poem (The Animal) finally, i.e., I’m inclined to say, if you like it well enough to use, by all means do. In aNYCase, my own (pretty hasty) judgement was really that the rhythms seemed to ‘hold’ the poem longer than the statement (in your sense also) called for. I.e., at divers places in it, it got a little sparse in the latter character. And too, I feared the close struck too much as ‘punch line’, literally, i.e., the weight given to those last few words. But I’m not the reader, for this one—literally not as it happens, since I no longer have a copy. What I’ve been doing lately are poems following on those like THE WIND, in the book—domestic-social I suppose one could call them. Wow . . . But that area, pretty much as ever, stays central for me, albeit means and the sights thereof change thank god. Anyhow let me know what you think—not to put the onus of it on you, but if you like it enough to use, then do—because just now I’m a little badgered by divers ‘possibilities’ and obligations, and also—what with this Xmas to-do—dulled; and it may be a time before I can get you anything for another one or two, etc. (Whatever,—if you would please send a copy back when you next write; perhaps not having looked at it for awhile, I’ll be able to see it better. I.e., often I in a sort of hopeful fit of judgement throw a hell of a lot away I later wish I hadn’t, e.g. a story written years ago called UNGRATEFUL JOSIE & RICHARD THE LION, just because the copy I’d sent out got lost, and my own wiped out in above fashion, etc., etc, I’m sure was greatest ever, etc., etc. Y pues . . . Well, good luck!)

What you say of ‘statement’ strikes very close, and the more so since I, for the most part from Williams, believe in that character you describe, i.e., he somewhere says (in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY if I remember rightly), ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that is the profundity . . . ’ or words to that effect. But I do not, as I read you to agree, consider the thought of a poem (taken either as content or attitude or hopeful surmise etc) to be extricable from its ‘place’ in the poem. Hence I remember at the time my own deep pleasure hearing that said by Williams, as he god knows says it otherwise in something like the preface to The Wedge: “When a man makes a poem,” i.e., the revelation of the poem is this inherent statement which it bears, etc. Too, for myself, whether from early and then continued isolation from those who would have made it external, so to speak, anyhow I’ve used my own intelligence as a counter and/or term, in the poem, to find a purchase on what emotional charge, or fact, had first brought my attention, or intention, to rise. That’s said badly, or you say it better: “almost intrinsically a statement beyond statement” since it is not extricable, but follows as a recognition within the very body of the poem itself. At best the intelligence devises the means, stands as witness to, and follows as it may, that which bears the poem more deeply, i.e., what for me is the otherwise inexplicable ‘emotion’. Because “only emotion endures” seems true to me also. Certainly in a poem.

Anyhow you’re right that, often, in my writing one finds a sort of monologic dialogue, so that even literally, writing, I wake up to find myself talking as I am writing, i.e., talking the poem to ‘hear’ it back upon my own mind—which, saying it, god knows clearly enough shows you what I conceive to be the function (or one of the functions) of intelligence, intelle-to (?), light o’ mind, and so forth. Aperiens tibi animum, as Pound says; it is a complex. And it is curious, and perhaps even ironic, that Yin and Yang are in that way for me reversed, since the apparently amorphous, passive, pervasive ‘emotion’ sits as leader, always; and mind follows. Voila. So of course there is that ‘dialogue’ you mention, in that poem (it has to be there, even without a copy to read now), the subject so-called if roughly, partially, etc., etc., nonetheless is the above. I suppose I distrust the poem because I distrust an overt invitation to this occasion, i.e., don’t like the mind’s provocations to lead to such considerations, etc. Well, to hell with this. It’s simply to say the “feeling of a conversation inside the head” is a constant pastime, if no mania, if not schizophrenia, if not something less interesting. Ok!

One thing: que es Sonia Raiziss, viz la bomba, etc. That is a strarange nambe [sic] for a magazine: The Chelsea, i.e., sounds like old hotel etc. Or back end of Boston, etc. Anyhow I got a carbon letter from her listing something approximating the Roll of Honor, etc., but no ‘word’ like they say, just huge shadowy suggestions etc. She says you suggested me (?)—but I can’t make out for what (?). Anyhow thanks, and I wrote her back my gratitude, to get the letter you dig. Ok again. That’s too bad Chester Gould is a schlemiel, viz too rich, too long, too often, etc. Anyhow write when you can, and will do likewise.

All best,

Bob

MERRY XMAS!

[RC’s hand-drawn star and moon]

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 24, 1959

Dear Bill,

I heard last night from Renate Gerhardt, the wife of Rainer Gerhardt you may remember as the editor of that German magazine FRAGMENTE some years ago. Miserably enough, he died some years ago, the whole thing becoming too much for him (or for anyone faced as he was with so many impossibilities). I’d not heard from Renate since I left Spain, but in any case she writes me now that she has a good job with Rowohlt Verlag as their American and English ‘reader’, and wants me to start again where she and Rainer had left off, i.e., to publish a new magazine with the same cross-joinings of European and American writing. Also she wants me to act as her American editor—and god knows that is a pleasure, here with the jungle, the coffee beans, and los finceros etc.

So, briefly, may I use something of yours, nothing that will I hope prove a bother, or complication for you, but anything you either might want there, or else, if it’s a problem now to be bothered with such things, might I use the poem which James Laughlin printed, To Be Recited To Flossie On Her Birthday, i.e., that’s a very damn beautiful one. God knows it would be a pleasure to have it there—or anything you can think of. Ok. (I don’t yet know just when she plans to get an issue out, but she is an old friend and will do it if she says so. Voila.)

Things here go well enough. It’s a dull country, beautiful at times beyond almost the power to see it—and locked in people so goddamn familiar, the old exploiters, etc. So that prices on anything but beans or corn are sky-high. Y pues. It’s an easy living for us, however, and proves time to write, and to be together—which same had been too long lacking in New Mexico. So, it’s ok. I hope there things are all right. I think of you, very damned often—well, that’s my hold. Ok. Enclosed is a belated Xmas card, like they say—and to correct the so-called blurb on the cover, call it ‘privately offered in goddamn embarrassed homage to the one man I most revere, and love, in this so-called world of writing’. Ok.

All our love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 24, 1959

Dear Charles,

I’ve got a couple of days more or less clear, so had waited for that to write—and, happily, last night I got a letter from Renate Gerhardt, crazy, and she tells me she wants to start something again like Fragmente—and asks me to be American editor, etc. It hardly makes much room, or a time, but it’s good no matter to be doing something of that kind again. Because one picture is always worth a goddamn million words, etc. That way I want to ‘pose’ and/or put Allen G/ for one in the context I read him, i.e., not in the popular image—though god knows that’s a part also—but qua writing (which, for me, is of course the continual seepage, lost, of what now occurs; that the attitude starts too far back of the poem which is then meant to contain it. And yet Allen clearly, as Williams said, “thinks with his poem. In that lies his thought. And that is the profundity, etc.” I.e., the poet, the poet, the poet, etc.) With Mike I read the poem too goddamn often as an extension of ‘Mike’, i.e., a personality stake, though that may be wrong, too simple—but what is stated, in the poem, say (as very much opposed to what Phil does, who, for me, from Williams buys the above, etc), plays back to Mike—and that’s the wrong direction? Or something. The ‘self’ gets awfully goddam sticky, is not an occasion, place, another ‘objective’ finally material—but is rather, as Robt has it elsewhere in that piece: “McClure (who believes the self is an independent entity) . . .” Perhaps it’s simply that I don’t? But something bothers me there, some ‘harping’ quality—hardly permitted me to blame, since I equally ‘depend’, etc. Fuck it. But most to say, what I’d want to write of all these people, agreeing that Gary S/ is back, is ‘substantive’ in the old sense, the Rexroth/mistaken Pound way, etc, viz ‘black dog bite house moon sink all gone, etc.’ So that verbs, curiously, become only terms between master nouns, and though they is terms, that ain’t quite true, they is only . . . I begin more to think all that happens is verbs, and nouns are more the what a verb throws off as by-product, than other way round. Well, goodbye Victoria, etc. Anyhow what to say is 1) technical—that here if anywhere is a continuum for the writing writing part of it, so goddamn much more than anything elsewise contemporary; 2) that also here is the fix from the structure of ‘world’ these people get, viz there Mike rings true, likewise Phil (with intelligence), that again finds only floppy mistakes elsewhere; and 3) that IF the cult of self begins to ride, what then IS the premise that will both extend it, and acknowledge it, i.e., how do we go from there. Well, that’s an old fix, surely—as you had it in MAYAN LETTERS, re Bill W/s problem, of the self as, etc. That the shift is substantive—which Phil and Mike again, variously Phil by intellect, Mike by feeling, recognize—and Allen by society, I’d suppose. Make a manner these days, and the ‘world’ follows—not the other way round. The ‘world’ becomes a term of action, located by that occasion, etc. Because there seems to be generally (ah weh) a sense that no world is really there manana, or even was yesterday? But that’s slippery. Anyhow, these several people bespeak a world, substantive insofar as it, substantially, provokes and carries their references thereto. That’s something, and curious, in itself. But objects, i.e., who sees Phil, say—where is her, he, etc. Because in conversation with Allen, he was telling me of experiments he had made on him at Stanford, involving stroboscopic biz, wherein he ‘learned’ that a statically repeated light-flash duplicating the wave impulse of the vision becomes ‘thought’ in the mind, i.e., takes over beyond ‘hypnosis’, i.e., thinks you, as you, etc. And Mike moves too easily that way, for me.

Otherwise, myself I’ve been trying to break out, in several ways, i.e., where the poem is, for me, writing, has to be in the terms peculiar to it, and ‘he who controls rhythm’ (as with stroboscope) controls, or is controlled by, held together by, the structure then maintained. So that, rhythm, in the poem, again and again brings me back—how the hell to, for example, make it as close, to the mind/hand, as you in, ‘and nakedness / is what one means’. And again I see you after the same thing in JABBERWOCK arrived also last night, Good News! from Canaan, etc. I am trying to find how to play the suggestion of rhythms, back and forth, throughout the goddamn line, breaking more easily ‘terminals’, and likewise, carrying it as closely as I can to what each word ‘means’. It’s only, all, fly by night, but repeated, maybe gets learned. I don’t know. But I am sick of ‘I’, as only means, again and again, and want, ‘to be taken away’ too, etc. But I don’t really want to come back, so to speak, to writing, to then tell all—but writing writing, make it there, somehow. God knows, i.e., I feel always about to fall out the backdoor, but I’m hardly a virgin anymore, etc. Anyhow as this (done a few nights ago):

The love of a woman

is the possibility which

surrounds her as hair

her head, as the love of her

follows and describes

her. But what if

they die, then there is

still the aura

left, left sadly, but

hovers in the air, surely,

where this had taken place?

Then sing, of her, of whom

it will be said, he

sang of her, it was the

song he made which made her

happy, so she lived.

[CP I, 240]

I seem to be lucky in that anthology, i.e., he’s got a good so-called group, and reads ok, i.e., from THE INNOCENCE to the last one for you, THE AWAKENING; and then prints some prose notes as well. That’s fair, and useful, I think. But an anthology would be per se a particular headache for you, i.e., that’s not so damn simple, to show scope, variation, all of it, in a relatively short space. But it will be useful, no matter—viz, don’t worry! You’ll be surprised. What do you think would be good for Renate, of yours? The goddamn german, i.e., that they won’t know what’s what, is a headache—so tell me? Also, she does not tell me what I can use for space. But I’ll know soon and meantime, please see what you think looks good for it. I god knows depend on you, siempre. Y pues . . . i.e., Xmas, Xmas, Xmas—like a (happy but sticky) shroud about us all, and time, time, time. Fummmboooo. Write soon, and I will, i.e., what a goddamn pleasure to have your letters again. Ok. And a HAPPY NEW YEAR, that’s for sure.

All our love to you all,

Bob

[circled] 2

Later

P.S. I.e., your letter just came, with those two goddamn crazy poems, i.e., how abt that—there IS a god. Ok. Anyhow what do you say to for certain taking that second one, the ‘pah’, (wow), for this gig of Renate’s, and the first too, because I am goddamn grateful to make that company. Ok. Ok. Ok. That second is the fastest most lovely thing, it happens with such a crazy swiftness, like nature, yet. Well, I have not read anything so quick in years, and it makes a goddamn huge difference. So, as of first of letter, have you got any more at home like same. That’s exactly what would make the USE of this space I expect she’ll have for us—and what would rock those goddamn germans ich bin gewiss, like they say: aber gewiss ja! (Thank god we’re not german, etc.) Anyhow, GO!!!

I don’t know a damn thing about the KULCHUR magazine, i.e., no one ever told me nothing, but for you. That’s the goddamn hangup of so-called communications, i.e., they are making it like a goddamn delicatessen (fressen), and reasonably enough I suppose like a little ketchup here, a little geschmaltz there, and a great big hunk of ice cream on top, etc. So if I don’t make the menu, I don’t make the scene. It gets, I think, despite letters from Jack K/, or personal assurance of Allen G/, and god knows friendly and devoted letters from a lot of the heads there NYC, hard to ‘take’ me, hard to goddamn well make my ‘nice’ manner, maybe. I don’t know. I have had head & address for a long time, yet none of this—except from you, Robt, and old gang, so-called, and LeRoi thanx to Allen G/, ever gets to me. So anyhow I am not Kulchural. I want to be,—wow. It sounds good, i.e., where does one talk anymore. As Robt is making it in Jack Spicer’s mimeographed bull-e-tin (and Jack hears); and I fiddle-faddle with something like Doc Turnbull’s joye & travaile, etc.,—and where the hell is EVERYBODY. That’s the damn loss, i.e., you know what would make it, just now, fast and hot, and UNconsidered, would be newspaper type gig, bi-monthly or more quick if possible, just shunt, shunt, shunt—and pack in all of the angles. I think. And would damn well do it, or would work my ass off for anyone who’d make it that clear—but no $$$. But ‘love’, but ‘please send me zomesing’, but ‘oh how goood’, etc. That doesn’t move an inch. How abt a slow boat to China, dad, make the RAIL scene, the DECK bit, etc. Like LOOK . . . wow . . . Y pues. Nosotros vamanos manana por la manana y despues . . . The morning for the morning. Ah well. Nobody gets up anymore, that thinks to damn well call me, at least.

So, I don’t know. Viz, Robt wrote me, re Credentials, like ‘I had a prize from Poetry for poems I’d thrown away, and Rosenthal reviews me and Snodgrass . . . and WHAT will I say to them, etc.’ Like—wow. And me, everytime I make that scene I ‘tune’ up, and blast like it was a clearing in a fucking jungle two feet square, and they was out there—oh please god SOMEwhere. (I hear Rexroth was to read in London with his All Stars, but the band didn’t make the scene, so he just had to go ahead and read any-how, poor old fellow . . . Like.) Let’s be PROFESSIONAL. I.e., if it has to be via Hamburg, via Hamburg it will be: a good three inches thick, etc. Wit dripping. Anyhow I think I’m being pulled out of the line-up, because like Corso sd, I’m intellectual gangster, at best. Y pues . . . How do you beat that. He’s ok. I had a letter tonite from someone wants to start mag on basis of ‘detachment’, I don’t even know what he’s talking abt—i.e., ELEMENT, what burns out is a FILA-ment? Ai yi . . . We ARE in a fix, as G/ sd. Oh dear, oh dear—and here it is, Xmas eve!

I tell you what, i.e., I applied for the goddamn Gug/ again, gone again, gug again. Gug, gug, gug, etc. BUT let’s just suppose, there, say, I made it, like. How wd it be to come up there, pues? Like, NEAR for a change. I think. I can’t make it with the jungle drums or smoke signals anymore. God civilization ought to mean something. How’s for rents thereabouts: there are 6 of us, etc. Ah well. But seriously.

Anyhow let me send something back, slow but sure, and write please whenever you can—and send more, i.e., you took ten yrs off my goddamn life with these too [^ + too is four.]. It will take that long to damn well catch up. Write! Ok.

All dearest love to all,

Bob

[enclosed in hand-drawn circle:]

Love comes quietly,

finally, drops

about me, on me,

in the old ways.

What did I know

thinking myself

able to go

alone all the way.

[CP I, 249]

[Also circled:]

THE HOUSE

Mud put

upon mud,

lifted

to make room,

a house in

form of cave,

cool quiet

and colder night.

To sleep

in, live in,

to come in

from heat,

all form derived

from need and kind,

built hard

with that in mind.

[CP I, 237]

That ‘least action . . . ’ really stands

me on my head, i.e., drives so close, so

finely. Well.

[handwritten, sideways on the page:]

P.P.S.

MARIMBA now wailing which will

continue avec las bombas from

time to time (“¡POW!”) for three,

SOLID fucking DAYS + NITES.

Wow . . . . I mean . . . . Those Catholics are too much!

•••

LETTER TO JONATHAN WILLIAMS

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 5, 1960

Dear Dad,

Mr Henry Rago suh of Po-et-ry is a-dunnin’ me for proper enclosures of yr olde self-address-ed stamp-ed envelope, etc. Wow. But the poor devil probably has to account for every stamp to the Ladies, etc. Anyhow can you please send me, for the enclosed dollar bill 6 15¢ air mail stamps. Wow again—but it would be a great help, since he has 5 poems in hock there, and want to keep him good-humored. He has taken 5 to date, for a new ‘group’ (the one shot a year club, I guess). Anyhow I sent him another po-em and said help was on the way. Ok.

Sort of battered, Tuesday becomes the hump somehow, not Monday anymore. That’s a change at least. Bobbie’s in on the bed reading the Saturday Evening Post (me next etc). Ain’t we got culture . . . At least it’s not Harpers.

I got copy of Allen G/s record I’ve been trying to hear since Sunday, i.e., came after lights had gone off with current—Monday Ruth washes her clothes in her automatic washer so there is none that day, likewise Tuesday (tho did get a brief part this morning before they cut us), and on, and on. Ai yi. Pretty crazy, no.

Do you know address (and cost of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) of Olympia Press? I want to get it. I.e., what I’ve seen I like a lot, for its own sound, etc.

So what’s new in little old NY, etc. And do you remember the time we drove to NC via Brooklyn. I don’t.

All love,

Bob

*“Keep the change . . .

—Old Saying—

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

Still trying to get the damn bk to you, don’t know

what happened, i.e., my mother

likewise awaits & divers others.

January 9, 1960

Dear Ed,

Re the so-called magazine, let me get this straight & hence right away, etc. The poems you send I like less than A Country Song, a goddamn dull criterion I know. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve been used this side of the Atlantic as long as their circulation in Deutschland has been minimal. Hence reprint is frequent in all the so-called selections. But (perhaps more to the point), to make your sound—or part of it, since the longer poems as those of the past summer make another place, etc—I want the compressed, flat, clear lyric you have in that set, i.e., in for the rest I suppose, to make a ‘piece’. But let me show you what I’d thought of, all together, and perhaps it will come clear.

Duncan, that poem from THE NATION: ‘Out of the Black’—do you remember it at all?

Williams: that poem for Flossie on her birthday, which ends: “you will believe me / a rose / to the end of time” (and perhaps another short one he’s sent depending on Renate, i.e., not as good)

Zukofsky: 6 from Barely & Widely, that goes: “Send regards to Ida the bitch / whose hate’s unforgiving . . .” and a stretch from “4 Other Countries” per:

..when their hymns

and prayers

Brought no daily

bread—and for fear no

other speech than

out of their wild eyes.

Olson: a new one: “Least action love sat within the fire the spider / over the flame: ‘pah’ went the fingers (the spinnerets . . . )” (a wild one!)

Allen G/: Section II of Kaddish, with that:

“The key is in the window in the sunlight

at the bars the key is in the sunlight . . .”

Then you, i.e., that 2nd part, with the:

Thru the window

The man stood

Against a rake

He broods

By a burning bush

He thinks of the ground . . .

I love the pace of that poem, viz absolute, held so Christly sure, etc. Ah well. Well I’m trying to twist yr arm of course—but most to the point, send what else? There’s time—though not much I’d guess since I want to send the stuff off to let her get to work? Would it be ok to use above to start? Then others, later? Because if anything happens it will be continuous.

Agh/ etc. I’m sorry to be like a bull dog abt it, but what else.

We go to Gut City once a month, to stock up—a dreary city indeed, i.e., like Mexico suburbia, with ugly modernistic mayan cartoons on public buildings, etc. No thickness, no life—just commerciantes. Pretty damn sad at best. Though anywhere—the drive in—is crazy, the mountains sticking up like Mother’s Milk, and everything growing, etc. Y pues . . .

That music sounds great and best I guess is to wait till we get there, and will record it then. Viz will keep. And stuff coming in is apt to get hung up. As it is, recorder now in getting repairs, condenser or something let go. We live in any case.

Just now we is all getting over something, last night the Boss shot us full of streptomycin, and take variety of capsules—look so good in brite plastic wrappers—etc. Bobbie’s stomack falling out, my head whirls . . . Otherwise fine. Certainly is warm, tho. Impossible to register sense of SNOW with sweat rolling off me in the late aft/ heat, etc. But I try/ till I die, etc.

Write. I read Rechy’s gig re Los Lost Angeles, pretty funny. Like Juarez/EP bit better tho. Viz he knew the latter like he don’t seem to (nor do I) former? Something. Ok. WRITE. I said that, and I will.

All love to all,

Bob

P.S. Viz later. (Alligator). Kirsten got a PARCHEESI set for Xmas, from a lady who felt sorry for her no doubt—so we’ve been PLAYING PARCHEESI, you dig? Howsa bout you turn the volume up on them records, maybe we could, hear them, down he/re? Pues. Anyhow Bobbie sends the en/closed.

He walked in the en closed night etc

Anyhow. What makes me out of those poems like you dig that sound you dig, is that, I think, the pitch is too much out of it, Ed. I am trying to say, you dig. Altogether seriously what bothers me always in such a poem (s) of yours is problem of you putting down your own pick-up,—somehow, i.e., the satire implied is goddamn painful, but of a kind of pain it doesn’t let me off. Which is good? I goddamn well wonder. That way is in the longer poems too but placed among, so to say it, other ways, i.e., eyes, of looking & so forth. Anyhow the play of the so-called intelligence, it is something, in such a context, is I would guess even the curious shame-faced bewilderment of so-called intelligence, faced with definable minims of relevance which go crashing about like elephants etc. Like girls who shouldn’t but do, etc. What about poems like the one ending ‘I refused to go’. Or else—way in, viz deep as possible, as ‘endurable’ (?)—relevance seems to be the tension in them. The irrelevant is the edge of reality (?). Somewhere a voice is calling . . . Wow! To the tune of 3¢ in the foun-ting: THREE TRREEES IN THE FORRRESTTT . . . Anyhow. “We went thru the lumber mill together.”

Because I think with very goddamn little extension, any of those would come home, viz like the way you IN-habit that terrifying woman in one of the longer, i.e., the one who ‘digs’ everything ‘has a use’, etc. In that context, there, she is given size by ‘her’ weight of interruption. Singly, viz as a single shot, I wonder cd she have, etc. But she sure does make it there. But by juxtaposition, reveals (call it weakly) the term of interruption, the waste, ludicrous, leaving one weak, ashamed, vicious, angry, laughing, sick, etc. That’s good. And then on, etc.

The whole damn thing is a like emptiness here, bridged, broke, by not much—but family, solid, at best a crazy rapport, at worst a conglomerate lump of dissatisfaction, etc. So we live. After a time landscape becomes like could you fry an egg on it, with it, in it? Eh? How much em them cosas, cuanto questa, pues. You can never tell but you may go someday home with the wrong arms, etc. A common fate, like they say. One for all and all in one.

Wouldn’t you? (I would propose it) [^ DIG] bing that thing? On the roof yet? Boy oh boy!!!! And that’s a nice coat that guy is wearing. Dig the verticality of them fire escape pinnings, etc. I’m scared to death of HeighTs.

I wish I had a poem, something. Make the goddamn sign here, saturday night is the emptiest at the moment. Nothing but Saturday Eve-ning Posts, yet.

[Cut-out newspaper clippings/ads with RC’s commentary follow:]

LIVE FLY BAIT: If you can’t match a fly hatch, or even if you can and the trout won’t take your artificial, try the real thing. Strip a small hook, say #14, and fasten a live fly to it with a drop of Duco cement.

Boy I’ll bet that HURTS!!!

Trefflich’s is the vision of an animal age,

and he goes gazelle-eyed contemplatingTHE VISION . . .

the shapes of things to come:

If I had had . . . . . . . .

For the woman who

has everything . . .

[note in left margin] You know anything abt LANDSCAPE, edited there Santa Fe by JB Jackson etc? Looks pretty good.

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 10, 1960

Dear Bill,

Thank you, very very much, for those poems, and for all your kind words. God knows it is a blessing only you can give. I’ll send them off to Renate Gerhardt, and I ought to hear shortly how all her plans are maturing, like they say. Then I will be able to tell you more exactly what is happening.

What you say of “structural elements” of course seems to me all the purpose. And I could, at that, make my own definition of the character of a poem, for me, from what you have written on this subject, e.g. the preface to THE WEDGE, the statement in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY that a poet thinks with his poem, “in that lies his thought,” and god knows much much more, from the poems themselves and all the area they inhabit. Just now a new plague seems likely, or not really a ‘plague’, but a disposition toward the poem as though its character were given to declare a ‘self-hood’, actually a sort of re-investment of the old ego center, familiar enough from the worst of the Romantics. It must be that many of the younger writers, blasted as they are in their common living, secure themselves in the poem; or rather attempt to gain a presence less vulnerable there, i.e., from ‘outside’. The very accomplishment of their techniques, at times, makes me wary of the outcome. I can’t believe the poem can occur as a world partial to any nature, so to speak—or put it, I can’t believe in an exclusive partiality, one that needs a ticket. But god knows we are blessed, any of us, younger, by having someone like Olson ‘out there’—wow! He clears a lot, just as you do—the example is unforgettable, and forgives no embarrassment on any count whatsoever. Anyhow, I’d rather believe as he has it:

. . . He left him naked

the man said, and

nakedness

is what one means

that all start up

to the eye and soul

as though it had never

happened before . . .

For my own part—at times I feel the damn slippage, looseness, and become bewildered, lost in a kind of half-assed foray of what the hell next, etc. Sans the emotional tensions of the earlier marriage—which were always a spring-board for ‘comment’ no matter the vicious occasion, etc—I learn quiet again and more to the point perhaps a new term of endurance. At times the stakes seem high to me, the fact that we gamble daily (or not so dramatically, yet there they are) with a family of six people. Looking ahead is, at times, desperate, seeing myself so little equipped except by will to provide for us. Yet I begin to know how goddamn general is the usual ability which gets a job; and given opportunity (which is likely), I can make it.

But more to the point—it would be in the structure of the poem, long or short, that I would myself hope to see the ‘world’, not in the descriptive words which might otherwise attempt to state it. That accident and surprise, call it, revelation and violence have means to state themselves, there. Again and again the formal character of a poem becomes the crux—I don’t mean that as inherited form, rather the nature of a poem in its own peculiar presence, etc. For me that would be where the moral takes hold, i.e., in the term of the building, not in the ‘what’. I don’t often know what I say, so to speak, or why I say it; but god willing am quite aware how. To think with my own mind in the vocabulary given me by my experience is work. It’s such a temptation at times to grab the ready example, of a manner, and to let that carry me home. Free verse did make one very useful thing, i.e., a very particular self-consciousness about the use of any form—so that it would be, I think, very rare to find anyone now writing in a manner of which he was not aware. Perhaps this also breeds a lot of specious ‘experiment’, or loose imitation of the patterns of free verse, such as you have mentioned at times. But, thinking of Allen Ginsberg (god knows a conscientious man), it’s curious to me that he speaks of HOWL (on the back of a record album far from any occasion that might ask the question) as “those poems are a series of experiments with the formal organization of the long line”. He says other things too, but he says that. So we make a connection, he and I—we did anyhow, but I feel with him clearly, and it helps.

Anyhow just now I’m trying to keep moving, like they say—pursued by the things done and running like hell to catch up with what’s to do, etc. An ideal state at that. God knows I can afford it, and what a pleasure that is. I.e., my boss here, fincero that he is—and he tries—comes over now and again and we find ourselves deep in a wish to get to common terms—and that’s good. I.e., he wants communication, as he puts it, god knows as much as I do. That much is almost everywhere. A few days ago I went with him to give an intravenous to a sick Indian girl with a baby 7 months old, and the day before she’d been out washing clothes; this day she was it seemed in a coma, or so deep in resignation she hardly roused at all. The next morning she was dead. Here that is common, not quite daily but all so frequently it hardly is uncommon. What does one say to it, i.e., that life is not qualified by existence? I don’t know. I see such a plethora of so-called riches in some places here, such a nothing in others—and yet no form not organic, a literal growth, could right the balance of it. All the more marked, it is, by the crazy growth of everything, all around us. Well, please take good care of yourself. Whenever you can write that would be wonderful, but I know you are busy—and I know you are there. Ok.

All my love to you all,

Bob

Here’s one poem, like they say, y pues:

[“The Rose” (CP I, 246)]

•••

LETTER TO DONALD M. ALLEN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 16, 1960

Dear Don,

Your letter was good cheer, like they say, and I’ll be starting on that review (using the books I have) over this weekend. That should be a pleasure. (It will be simple, even necessary, to refer to Charles’ PRO/ VERSE, yet to include it specifically as a book being reviewed would tend to confuse it as major reference, and to sell it a little short by virtue of context. I.e., it ought to go into a general discussion on poetics per se, or else be given a single fix? I think.)

The BMR anthology idea is an interesting one, i.e. my wife had thought of it earlier and we had both been interested in what might be done; yet again I am loath to do that kind of work sans much hope of publication, etc. But what you suggest ought to be simple enough. (I don’t have copies of the magazine here with me, but remember contents well—and most to the point could get some easily enough I think.) One thing in my own mind, though, is that the magazine stays an entity, a definition, and an activity—if allied to the college—still well distinct from it, and more a subsequence of ORIGIN’s activity than of the college’s, despite they paid for it. They paid for it because Olson talked them into paying for it, as a possible add for the place. Rightly or wrongly, at the time I think both he and I felt ORIGIN was getting diffuse—and/or Cid’s intent to use so much foreign material meant necessarily less space for our own concerns—and would not run much longer; so that another magazine, taking over that area and extending it if possible would be of use to us all. That was what BMR began as, so to speak. The first issue was edited in Spain, with no referent to the college except title; and that was pretty much the case for all subsequent. I had complete freedom, from the college, and complete trust—two goddamn valuable things indeed. But I do not think BMR could be taken as a fair representation of the college itself—or if it could, it would only be the last two years of its existence. The college was apparently in constant process of change (one of its virtues, if one of its problems also), so that under Albers’ administration, you would have found a totally different emphasis. You must remember that Black Mountain was, when I was there, never more than 20 odd students, and often less than a dozen. And of that number, Olson of course was my own center, and the magazine involved only Ed Dorn, Dan Rice, and one poem by Stefan Wolpe’s wife, Hilda Morley, otherwise—as from the college directly (oh yes, Hellman, but he was an import, also). So descriptions or evaluations of the college per se in such an anthology would be misplaced I think. (The college was a support for the magazine, literally a backer. I forget above Mike R. [Michael Rumaker], Tom Field, and Duncan, who later taught there. I forget also perhaps the later associations the name qua place no doubt had, as instanced by the magazine, etc. But it was, or seems to me, an unreal predication. The magazine was a term of correspondences, among roughly a half dozen writers, who defined its center; and its value was that it had no geography or locus except in the work which they did. By that token it defined or related to a geography as variable and multiple as their attentions or situations might provide.)

Anyhow I wanted to suggest an alternative, granted it could be got, i.e., the divers letters on magazine editing—or sections from letters relating to that—from the letters I’d had earlier with Pound. They would make a very valuable statement I think. If he would allow their use, which is questionable. Anyhow that would be my own sense, plus a short note of introduction. The balance of material I would define a little more sharply, than did an actual issue of the magazine i.e., a greater weight of poems, prose, etc from the people I then thought central and continue to, e.g., Olson, Duncan, Layton, Rumaker, Zukofsky, and so on. Pound taught me one thing, for example, I never forgot, that granted a magazine must have a program—else it is all random chaos and uninteresting—that program must be felt as a core around which, not a box within which, every item. So that such an anthology could, usefully, make clear the core. Anyhow it’s a fine idea, and I’d like to try it. Ok. This just to get back, and thanks for everything.

All my best,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

March 16, 1960

Dear Bill,

Your letter, and the two articles, were a great cheer and help, i.e., I think your own preoccupations are central for anyone now trying to make some sense. So the notes in SPECTRUM secure a lot for me, renewing older emphases of yours and citing the points of contact with the so-called tradition—and such a paragraph as that bottom of page 156, ought god knows to be clear to anyone. Ok! I suppose I read Mrs. Solt more cautiously, but then the commonness and reasonableness of her manner is, I think, very useful, granted she does grasp what you are doing—in general outline. So she makes a very useful and good-natured commentator. And god knows it seems to the point to have more of those, etc. I think she tends to ‘talk it up’ a little, with the philosophical implications—e.g. muddles ‘behavioral’, ‘cultural’, and esthetic (p. 23), and I think the words always ‘beat time’, albeit not to the exterior patterns to which they have been made to conform. (It seems to me Campion’s singular quality, call it, that his ear could so ‘nicely’ place the variant of a minimally stressed extra beat, against the imposition of a pattern implying continuity, etc. Ah well. Anyhow what that was supposed to say was only: I don’t think Mrs. Solt a poet, and I get very wary of comment of this kind—because the last 10 years, or simply those I for one grew up in, were so stifled with exterior regulations from people in no wise concerned, practically, with the issue.)

But most to the point, I think your own concerns find counterpart very widely now. For example, this from THE FIFTIES, re the iambic pattern, written by Robert Bly (who is no revolutionary, nor even a poet, himself, of a very inventive nature, etc—despite what this seems to imply): “(Re Donald Halls’ work) The book was also praised and blamed for its use of traditional meters. But we can see the heavy use of ‘traditional’ meters in the fifties in a new light. The ‘traditions’ in question are not deeply American, but come from English poetry, and of course, for us the cultural ‘father’ is English. Iambic meter is used not only because it is the only well-developed meter in the language, but also it is used psychologically, so to speak, to avoid offending the English. Since within us, the English, the dominating middle class society, God, and the father, all mean the same, the iamb serves the purpose of avoiding offense to all these three.” Earlier in the same article: “Poetry (at the beginning of the fifties, e.g. Ciardi) was writing itself in nice iambic lines, which the middle class in America has always loved, and with which it was long familiar . . .” To make that the issue of course tends to lead off into other dilemmas, social preoccupations, etc. But it’s a sign, I think, of how widely the unrest, and suspicion, of such invested patterns, has gone, that this can be written by such an (ultimately) safe man as Bly. Curiously enough, I think now the danger may be that a ‘pattern’ may derive from free verse effects attempting to carry the same authorities that the iambic line has had, e.g. Mrs. Solt’s poems in the issue of FOLIO after this one you’d sent.

But behind all that, the core of writing is very solid I think, in point of the men now available both for example and for help. I mean that ten years ago I used to think with dumbstruck awe of a time when Williams, Pound, H. D., Marianne Moore, and so on were all present, and available to one another. I’ve since learned that that sense of it may well carry its own distortions. But there is now such a ‘school’ to be gone to, in writing, I don’t think anyone need feel cheated nor without available instruction, etc. I’ve been reading Zukofsky’s work more and more closely, he takes time for me, but as in 4 Other Countries (and too, the poems in Anew and Some Time, etc) I can find there certainly all the intensity of ‘metrical’ concern I could want. I.e., your work holds in my own ear as a kind of ‘ground plan’, i.e., my danger is, often, that (tired) I will write (or have done so) using the memory of your figures as a floor for what I do, etc. Equally Olson (almost Zukofsky’s opposite, in his feel of the line, a horizontal thrust (in which last lies his ‘vertical’, i.e., the ‘energy component, the weight he can push up into a word, or concept, in the line) in large patterns, but singularly close and fine many times in particulars). And too, Duncan, whose Poem Beginning With A Line From Pindar, in last Evergreen Review, razzledazzles the classic mode, for me, in common style, i.e., not a Wasteland of effects, etc.

These three, with yourself (and the Pound I know, I mean take to for myself and said uses), are my own disciplines, or sources of same, in writing. And there are others, god knows. But think of what Dennie has done—by reading and listening. I mean, the means wherewith to control the line, and to invent upon its nature ‘fit occasion’ like they say, I can’t feel lacking to us. Talking last summer with Allen Ginsberg, I find the same concerns in him—and in opening sections of Kaddish, there seems a much more tangible (certainly closer, and more determined) sense of measure. What I do fear is that personal separations, and the size of the horrors surrounding, will break up useful coherences, i.e., too many of the letters I now get from New York, for example, are attacks on this or that man, arguing personal objection and the like. I am out of that here—though even here I get it, people who take that exception to me. Ah well again. But if the whole thing withdraws into ‘teams’, then I can only see trouble. (The ‘beats’ are the prime target at present and yet, and yet, i.e., Ginsberg is a very helpful friend, in many ways, and not least in the range of line he is attempting, no matter just now with what success, because the very width of the divergence attempted seems to me useful. In 1940 it seemed there were only five or six ways possible to write a poem—and now the ‘security’ is beginning to break. I hope!)

There is a sudden line in the introduction to Zukofsky’s “All eyes!” (from BOTTOM, printed in this latest issue of FOLIO): “. . . the contest any poet has with his art: working toward a perception that is his mind’s peace . . .” quoted from him. If it is one’s nature, that the whole world must be subject to his desire, then I suppose only monstrosities can be the issue but I can’t believe that would serve a ‘measure’, if only because words are common, eventually. I talked once to the painter Philip Guston, a wonderfully gentle and kind man, with wife and daughter, who told me, if he were painting, then even that his house were burning down and his family with it, he could not believe could distract him. That is ‘amoral’ but of such a kind that it seems only, to me, an issue of loyalties. Which same is endless, of course. Well,—thanks again, i.e., please write whenever you can, it’s a great help to me, selfishly enough. I hope all goes well for you. Jonathan had told me of a new poem, The Italian Garden—and I certainly look forward to seeing that. I’ll enclose a picture of us all, all six of us (by god!), and in this world that’s probably amorality enough. Ok.

All love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

March 30, 1960

Dear Louis,

The book got here safely—and thank you very very much. I think it is a complete success, in all possible senses, i.e. most minimal perhaps (though not truly), the format is excellent, sturdy, quiet, and clear. The writing is of such order, to my mind, that there is nothing simple to say about it at all. Viz you are a great man. Ok! More specifically, I’m very caught by the image of ‘time’ in the book, and/or how it details a time, of the years of its writing, yet comes (as ‘12’) to a round of itself, again and again, clear and solid. It’s a very damn beautiful thing, I think. I don’t damn well know how, very often, you manage such diversity of emphasis, and such a lightly graceful variation of line. Well, wow. And an image such as ‘face of sky’, as you play that, recurs to secure me, reading.

But look, like they say, rather than try to make clear, here, all I want to say about it (and to tell you all I hope to learn from it, selfishly enough), I want to wait a little till I’m not sitting here, waiting for lunch, and then through the afternoon, then the drive to Guatemala City to see about a stolen passport (mine, in a jacket that was taken out of a car there, window broken, etc.) I.e., that your book again gives me the ground whereby to use it. Ok! The essay for Paul is equally lovely, or if not ‘equally’, is lovely, well, is. That’s it, isn’t it. The note on you is a curious one, and I begin to realize, like they say, a curious thing about Dr. Williams, that the more he respects a man, the more worried he becomes about the statement of it. I.e., Z. plays a funny tune in his mind, and clearly one he listens to, of necessity. So that’s good too. God, you have fine-ness. I really know of no one more exact than yourself.

A sort of footnote: since this edition is 200, I hope you will put aside one good clearly inked copy at least, because I must believe it one of the books of the century like they say. And I should think, soon, some publisher like Grove, or whoever, ought to do it. Offset from this format would be a simple and inexpensive means, e.g. Edwards Lithograph Co. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, could use this text, I’d think, and make a book in no way less than it is. Well, that’s presumptuous and future: the two great sins I believe. Anyhow.

Is Spring there yet, i.e., I’m hoping. Unhappily we will not now be coming to New York (I couldn’t get any readings, since it was a bad time of year for them—and I’m a ‘bad time of year’ anytime I think. So.) But we will, one of these days, no matter.

This is just a note, like they say—but I’d been concerned to tell you how much I do like the book, albeit I’d like to be more clear about it all, shortly. Ok. I hope all goes well there.

All our love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO PAUL BLACKBURN

c/o Hall

520 San Lorenzo

Albuquerque, N.M.

[written in Guatemala]

April 24, 1960

Dear Paul,

We are trying to pull ourselves together como se dice for the hoist north—god knows many miles of pretty goddamn slow progress in the VW bus we have, but it is, most of it, crazy country, so will drive slowly and observe the view. It’s good to hear that things there are making it. I had great hope of coming and am very hungry to talk, and all of it—yet the goddamn readings couldn’t be worked out for the time I could come etc. So, that was no good. Ah well.

Re our multiple colleagues etc, I haven’t seen much—or just now chance to read is pretty limited, and when I see magazines see them too fast, too etc. For me it is pretty much the same old biz, i.e., Zukofsky (have you read his “A”?), Olson, and Robt for the ‘cosmos’ and literal knowhow (the Venice Poem I think is so-called major, likewise Owl, likewise Ode (in ER lately), and so on, i.e., he knows I think), and Dennie many times, yrself. Then god knows also, Phil Whalen in much that he writes—I think the speed of his method makes sense, often. He is a very sharp man in person. Gary is deceptive, moving so quiet, Rexroth-like in earlier poems, now apparently much more relaxed and ‘common’, e.g., in Galley Sail Review poem called KYOTO SKETCH, viz ‘easy’. He likewise is a very intelligent man. And a very nice one. I’m much impressed by Ed Dorn also—e.g. THE AIR OF JUNE in last BIG TABLE: that line and rhythm sense, very particular to him. He is from Olson, but more ‘evasive’, wryer, lighter—more like Zukofsky in ways. Etc. Nobody very damn ‘new’, nobody really very damn interested in the tecnics as I remember your copy of Yeats et al. Does anybody talk like that anymore? I wonder . . . Jack Spicer is an extraordinary man, one of the most perceptive I ever met. So is Allen Ginsberg—and I think much that he does is missed in gas of the ‘social effects’ etc. Viz I look (contrary to Dennie) to the terms of his area, that’s where (no matter how ludicrously my own relation to it must seem) I think the space will come. The ‘apposite’ reality he’s got hold of in any case fascinates me, very much so in Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH, i.e., the only novel in years to tell a story in ‘apposition’. All the rest begin once upon a time etc. Too slow, I think. Anyhow I both like and buy, so to speak, all that so-called area: from Kerouac’s MAGGIE CASSIDY etc to Burroughs, its apex, and the tension between is Allen G/. Ah well again. I haven’t seen anything come out of any university in years. Okeydokey.

What is Pound’s THRONES like? I want to get a copy once in States. (Re above, I’d agree also on Corso, those shorter lyrics in particular, viz a natural. Y pues—because that’s it, always.)

Things go well enough re the children, but very damn far away, always. There was no difficulty in seeing them that time I did manage to get there—she is remarried (since) and that as well has eased things. But the distance is constantly a problem, i.e., to manage to hold the relationship which I’m anxious to do. The goddamn gossip etc was never very right, or interesting. I write to them simply and that keeps a form at least.

So. We leave here roughly a week from today. I’ll write a decent letter once there, and relaxed again—but please write likewise, i.e., did Macmillan publish your book? I’d like to see new poems anytime you can get way to type same. Our tape recorder was stolen here but have hopes to get another in States. Will get you a tape etc if I can. Things are going really goddamn well i.e. that Scribner’s stories break was a good one, and May issue of POETRY had got ten poems yet. Wow . . . And/or that sure has changed some. Ok. Again please write, and I will. I hope it all goes ok. Your life, the goddamn LIVE one, sounds GOOD. And what else, viz creo que si.

All my love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

September 14, 1960

Dear Ed,

Many thanks for the quick answer. Shortly after I wrote, I had a goddamn fistula, I never clearly heard of same, from a bruise on my knee, where I’d bumped the corner of the bed, viz nothing, but roughly two weeks later is horrible goddamn infection, all under minute scab, they say in horses goes through you dig. Wow . . . Anyhow that struck me down for a few days. Up and hobbling, lovely bad temper etc, today. Onward. Compresses every two hours, face squeezing the goddamn thing morning and night, gives the day a measure. Two shots of penicillin didn’t make it, now on something else, three. Agh. I love it! I have my own little field hospital in bedroom, working with clocklike precision—myself etc. I hate the goddamn interruption, i.e., last so-called writing at nuvvel, was in bed, board over me, goddamn leg aching, and even then, there’s nothing to say . . . What a life. So what’s new.

I wrote 13 single-spaced pages of sd novel, really wailing, then dead full complete udder stop. I hated it, every goddamn sniveling word. Every thing seemed contrived, cooked up, cute, wise guy—partly it is, but partly is drag of not being able to do it all in an afternoon. I liked it, very much, as writing, i.e., as (3) so-called chapters started to make it etc. I think the death must be looking back in this bizness. Have you found that so, like they say. Viz HELP. Anyhow now a little cooler, and more desperate, think to go on, because it is there at least, what there is for beginning. I’m so hung with that squeeze it all up and throw, that it’s hard to get another swing. This so far goes very anecdotal, really encouraged by reading that THE GINGER MAN, and partly tone of Douglas Woolf, [William] Eastlake, et al. Not near as fast as Burroughs, who is, nor as in and out, surreal—but I want to go with stories as they come. Hence in first few pages is a lot of digression, and little ‘purpose’. Fair enough. It’s third person, I suppose closer to THE BOAT and stories like that, than anything else. I don’t know, i.e., it’s doing what I thought it would at least, taking a whole goddamn new kick. I sent last section to Carroll, fool him into taking it and see what it looks like, if possible. Here I read it over and over, etc. Maybe it’s funny? Oh dear.

So we are all alive. Settling more and more. I haven’t started the school yet, due to leg. All the kids are restless. Vague hordes slide in and out of rooms, muttering. No sympathy etc. Bobbie has the house very damn comfortable and clear. Juana, who has as last year crazy way of putting books back in the bread cupboard etc, knives in the toilet, or the equivalent, but a good memory thank god, is likewise picking up. We eat well. Lots of oranges presently, avocadoes, and face the same damn social problem I guess it is, but more sturdily than last year, i.e., have always feeling of being on that limb etc. But we sawed it off last year, so no problem. Lonely at times, as last year. We miss you god knows very much, i.e., unequivocal friends like they say. In ten words or less.

That way it was crazy with John, so quickly getting through earlier hang-ups at Black Mountain, which had then seemed considerable to me at least, cutting into what was present. I like that, very damn much, with people. I.e., assuming someone is not carrying axe he’ll drop when the right time comes etc, who can make it with the gang-angle of, we’ll get yez yet etc. Or qualify the occasion with some goddamn memory that has not been reinvoked (as I felt Ribak did that last meeting, to excuse myself from that non-sequitur perhaps). Anyhow—I can appreciate it even if I can’t always make it etc. But I think I can, or try to. Ah well. But it is dreary to be registered against a commitment so shallow as that I feel Max’s must be, i.e., I don’t know certainly, he don’t say etc. Ah well again. John likewise talking of some young sculptor there he thinks might make it, apparently picked up on him, all but refuses drinks, any contact, takes anything J/ says now, as some involved irony etc. Perhaps Max suffers from that a little, because he’s never once made any sign of using me at all, at all. Max will always make it but he needs angles, a straight scene would see him outside, all by himself, and sans occasion for the side-taking, the jolly conspirator, be it a night on the town, or the ultimate divorce, there is very little. He can’t talk out, only off, the so-called sound. That’s a painful limit, as I’ve had occasion to know like they say. But anyhow again here as last spring, when that scene was, it’s hard to credit as a real bizness. They all stay local to themselves, and that’s a hard union. The pleasure of Jack, for another, or completely Ray, is way they make it out to you, there, want to see for themselves the other term, viz human—not that bit of adding said presence to their own by weird process of osmosis a la Kerouac Serpent of the World. Anyhow I like to take rides.

Fuck Esquire. I don’t think I was being nice etc. If you can control a response to an ‘area’ of speech, viz narrative, a sequence of speculation, terms of self-insight, problem of relationship, sudden ‘objective’ event, etc, that’s better. It must be the idea of the controlled love making, the man in control, the man at the switch etc, that makes one think a novelist likewise has to ‘control’ his subject. Reminiscent of Kline saying, if I painted what I knew, it would be a bore only etc. You don’t ‘control’ what you don’t know, you make a way to it. What then happens, quien sabe. Morals exist in the term of response, complex of registration, or where else I can’t quite think etc. I was reading again your piece on Maximus, place, e.g., “Place, you have to have a man bring it to you,” likewise p/ 9, thinking of the story of Beauty, the novel’s street, bar scene, woods and distance etc. I don’t think you have to change a word, or any word that comes from that disposition. Y pues. I hate the so-called fight, it sickens me completely—I’m never fair! Presently I’m trying to con Herb Gold into being reference for me for Gug/, for bucks, oh city’s stones, my fireplace etc . . . Wow what a cleaner . . . Anyhow I only con when it hurts. Yahooo! I got Hugh Kenner, I know people who know it, don’t say it, to them committee, who can speak to nothing, an occasion yet. Viz they say it but into wood ears etc. So, bring on the Trojan horse etc, likewise wood. I just read that Lawrence book you gave me, lovely goddamn thing—and know more also. So. Things feel good. Write soon and I’ll do likewise.

All our love to you all,

Bob

[Bobbie Creeley’s note in left margin of p. 1] Now it can be told—I did feel a strain the last two times we were there—partly the approaching departure—but was ashamed because I thought “Jealousy?” What night? etc—well not to get schmaltzy but your house feels like home & suddenly I realized all the beds were used up or some such thing—but Ed’s letter describes it too—wanting to sit & talk without—oh I’m sorry was that your foot? . . . anyway______

[RC’s note above salutation] P.S. It’s very happy you met Buddy again, i.e., I think he is there always, and tries god knows, likewise always. So, that’s good. I would very much like to have that picture as and when. Ok. Will hope to have some of this place to send before too long. Vamos a ver.

[note in left margin of p. 2] P.P.S. Later: 2 more pp/ on nuvvel, go go go etc. Five more & I can apply for a Saxton Award . . . Bobbie is writing at hers likewise. Read any new novels lately? Why doesn’t Max start one.

[note in left margin of p. 2] I read Alex Trocchi’s novel again here, much better 2nd time, because argument fades to events call them, also I lose my ‘personal’ investment bred of having known him etc. I’ll send copy next time we get to city.

[Bobbie Creeley’s note in left margin of p. 2] “At least it’s better than Parcheesi”—Bobbie

[Bobbie Creeley’s note in right margin] Letters do make it out—I think people chose the wrong path somewhere way back when they started talking anyway—like if they hadn’t we might all be mental telepathing now—save stamp money etc—also you could think back at ’em. love to all—Bobbie

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

September 21, 1960

Dear Bill,

Yeah! I.e., I agree. As ever that’s a concern, and I wish I could contrive for myself a way to hammer at least the feel, call it, of the argument home once and for all. At times I’ve been embarrassed by lack of a formal evidence, and/or you must have heard that business of, well it’s a common vocabulary by and large isn’t it, and the syntax seems to be roughly the same, in fact very much the same, isn’t it, and there are of course dialect variants I suppose one calls them, but aren’t they minor (“isn’t it”) etc etc. I think that earlier statements of yours beginning “Therefore each speech having its own intrinsic character etc” is the best yet statement of the premise. It must be (as you keep it so insistent an attention) that the context of a language, the-place-where-used-and-by-whom, is the major aspect of its use in poems, not the generalized structure of tradition that may otherwise inform it.

That way, it isn’t simply a question of slang, or small variants of like (dialect) order—but the whole sit of the words to their occasion (the why of speaking) that batters through to new distinctions. Such a poet as Ginsberg is utterly foreign to the English idiom, as are you, in another way quite separate. That way too, Whitman demonstrates the appetite for a new occasion for the poem, for speaking—a new content which the language must be brought to embody, carry, get there somehow. The English . . . (but for Lawrence, possibly Lewis—though like him as I do, he shows still that analytic appetite peculiarly European, not the accumulative, ‘creative’ action of Whitman et al. Lowell, Emerson etc were the Englishmen, certainly were hot for that approval—as Whitman was debarred from being, just by his ‘words’. Curiously Hopkins picked up on the order of Whitman’s line apparently, but seems to have mistaken its purpose, thinking it to be an approximation (as Hopkins’ own) of a nervous pattern, a tension of speech, etc. Hart Crane shows sadly enough a break-down between the two traditions, i.e., in his attempt to wed the impulses, energies, of the American term to that of the English sense of metric (Crane’s weakest link god knows, except for the shorter poems wherein he feels the structure more immediately).) Well, the English—not the same.

Yet this summer, in company with a partly English friend, Gael Turnbull, I found this incomprehensible to him, i.e., he must have thought me a fractious colonial. He himself lives here, and had lived in Canada—but for him it harks all back to tradition, to ‘colonialism’—and that of course ends that. I wish there were a simple means for registering, and/or demonstrating, for such argument the position of speaker in relation to words, and then in relation to intended hearer—i.e., I do think that’s where the terms really separate. Gael for example supposes, English-wise, each poem to be a unit, complete, a finished ‘work of art’ [^ necessarily “in the tradition” . . . ], and that ‘work of art’ is of course another divergence, for the American. ‘Work of art’ for him [^ American] is a pragmatic instance of use, of fit in terms of occasion. Does it go? (Olson echoes this appetite for action, as do all the goddamn painters now with hands and eyes etc.) The English want a misty sort of mystique, of beauty, formed from the world perhaps but ultimately out of it. Where else could Edith Sitwell be a major poet, or Dylan Thomas for that matter? American poets of that school seem almost embarrassed by a tangible reference to something that might really hurt, be not (Aristotle-wise) ‘purged’ (but what do they do with the evidence, viz do they flush that away down the traditional Toilet also?) etc. Well, it is that American poems are often such a close instance of the environment they spring from, are shots from the hip in that way. There’s no time for English brooding etc.

But I’m getting vaguer and vaguer. I wanted to quote this for you, from a Harvard professor of linguistics, Whatmough, a pocket book called LANGUAGE:

A ‘new’ poetry comes hand in hand with new departures in a language, its total resources. The most recent English and American poetry partakes of the great changes taking place in the English language, which are part and parcel of the contemporary environment; the same is true of political propaganda, or of advertising copy. The same ‘emotive’ and ‘dynamic’ components pervade all three, etc.

Not enough by any means, but tacitly a position which would allow for your argument, i.e., would better defend it than many. I.e., elsewhere: “poetic discourse is highly peculiar to a language etc.”

This for the moment, rapidly becoming a digression! And aptly enough. But I would like to speak more of it, like they say—and god knows to say again I agree. Ok.

Just now starting to teach again, a distraction but not much. We’ll be here another year I think and then something else, I don’t yet know quite what. But time-wise, and family-wise, all feels very very happy. I’ve begun a novel, with hopes, but not enough yet to see much—but something to do and to pay attention to. I hear Laughlin is to do a collection of your plays and another book, i.e., I met Winfield T/ Scott in Santa Fe who had seen you not too long before, so that was a pleasure. Anyhow all goes well. And anytime you want to call out the militia, let me know! Ok.

All our love to you all,

Bob

P.S. As contrast to present applause for Durrell—old hat!- Wyndham Lewis’ TIME & WESTERN MAN shows English strength in language. Wm. Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH—however “ugly”—is instance of American language structure put to use with remarkable surety I think.

•••

LETTER TO JEROME ROTHENBERG

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

November 6, 1960

Dear Jerry,

Thank you so much for the copy of your book—which seems to me very handsome and clear. Thanks too for the copy of Robert Kelly’s notes. As yourself I find them interesting. I think, however, that this concept of ‘image’ becomes very general, i.e., generalizes, pretty quickly. E.g., “The clothed percept is the image.” This is too vague for me, since I feel that speaking, or writing, itself becomes a “percept” and in this guise a deep influence on the “thing said.”

More particularly, as a contrast, read Williams’ notes on Zukofsky at the back of A, i.e., Williams speaks of his own sometimes bewilderment at Z/s intent, i.e., “The poems whatever else they are are grammatical units intent on making a meaning unrelated to a mere pictorial image.” I know that Kelly also has more in mind than that, i.e., “pictorial image,” and yet I feel he consciously or not uses the ‘picture’ as a base term from which his sense of ‘image’ derives. That is, I feel he means all to be shaped to the term of an ‘image’ (picture), the “verbalized image” as he says. In my own sense, there is an ‘image’ in a mode, in a way of statement as much ‘image’ as any reference to pictorial element, e.g. the white night, the color of sorrow, etc. Pictorial image there relates of course as any other element, but to my mind not as importantly as rhythm, or structure in which rhythm may operate freely—as a ‘poem’ etc. Again, as a parallel to these concerns, Zukofsky writes apropos some poems sent him: “(one is best) when the analysis comes thru the lyrical; the danger of The Woman and The Plan is that the analysis sometimes becomes melodramatic; on the other hand, getting an image by something like the privation of it or transformation of it thru the physiology of the sound and cadence counteracts it—the melodrama . . .” It is that Kelly describes all this question of mode too briefly, i.e., “The image is the measure of the line. The line is cut to fit it . . .” Of course, but in quite what sense? Isn’t then the image as much that cut, of line, as it is what that cut of line makes, of a reference, pictorial or otherwise? That’s where I myself tend to wander. I cannot agree to that which does not place great emphasis upon structure—in all possible reaches, certainly in Kelly’s also—and so again feel the problem which something even as careful as this seems leads to.

For example, take the discussion of that line from your own poem, in which he drops the “No!”, i.e., the first word in the line, in this case syllable, itself an exclamation, and so obviously of some inevitable weight in the whole term of said line? I at least wondered. I.e., what is a ‘line’ if you can drop such a word, and then calculate its measure. I don’t follow that.

But I don’t want to spend the whole letter with such apparent quibbling, i.e., you’ll see simply enough wherein I am bothered—and why I can’t quite agree.

The whole presence of this sense of image bothers me a little, in present work. I hope I understand what lacks, as Robert Bly might speak of them, are pointed out—but I don’t honestly feel them as a lack, and/or believe poetry to encompass a great many manners and emphases, from ‘epic’ to ‘lyric’, and feel of course that in each a dominance will be aimed at for this or that aspect of the so-called whole. I think translation, dealt with too loosely, has not been able to surmount the problem of logopoeia, and this has made an accumulation of loosely structured poems exciting mainly for their ‘content’, their reference as ‘pictures’ of states of feeling etc. I’d hate to see that generalizing manner become dominant, no matter the great relief of having such information about what’s being written in other countries etc. But I wouldn’t back an inch off the need for as craftsmanlike poems as possible, not at all meaning ‘tidy’ etc. We are too far along, in many grounds so-called, now, to back off e.g., from Ginsberg in opening KADDISH sections, to Dorn’s long line in THE AIR OF JUNE, to O’Hara’s casual line, or Duncan’s formal organization of ‘canto’ structure in POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE BY PINDAR—Olson’s Maximus and ‘field,’ Williams’ late poems, etc. I.e., it seems a bad time to lose sight of those areas. It would make a poet like Corso if he might learn them. It makes Burroughs, in prose, singular in his ability. So . . .

In your book I like for example the first two verses of Invincible Flowers (then I feel it tends to wander out too much?). The first poem in the book, though the ‘little boy’ is a little hard, i.e., harks to almost a sentimentality for me. I like the one for “A Small Manufacturer”—and those of the ‘president’, i.e., where the poem comes clearly along, sans apparently concerned emphases etc, just says it very lightly. Less so, in that way, The Sorrowing Clown. I like “A Small Poem” in that sense, sudden and sure etc. You will know that I have to be at some distance from you on those poems depending on this sense of ‘image’ very strongly, i.e., The Taste of Joy, The Giant et al. I find the under-structure too let go there, i.e., not working as it might, and the line by that let to run out almost too simply. But that again is a preoccupation in which I may well be in error. I cannot so to speak agree to the error, but prove me wrong like they say and I’ll hope to god I can see it. Ok!

It is anyhow a little goddamn specious to pick away like this. I am grateful to see the book, and very happy that you have it out—i.e., it’s an interesting beginning in no sense ‘polite’ (for me to say so), and you will take it from there god knows. Anyhow figure my worry as follows: that the ‘imagists’ had in mind a sharp registration of an ‘objective’ substance, be it tree or woman’s mouth, an avoidance of general words etc—and that proved dull once accomplished, i.e., the poems got awfully quick and then glib and finally banal in their laconic method—they left a lot out because they could only concentrate upon the ‘quick picture’ etc. Now ‘image’ becomes an involvement with the psychology of reference, what the preoccupation with structure tended to forget (and so became often dry in its lack of ‘content’, simply a machine of manner etc)—but I wonder if image can be isolated in this way, or if it will not tend to make sensational reference over-valued. This is the aspect of Surrealism to me least interesting for example—the scarey parts (however interesting on first contact etc). Anyhow that’s what’s on my mind.

All my best to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

November 20, 1960

Dear Ed,

That was a crazy letter, and thank you, very goddamn much, i.e., yourself at the controls that don’t control like a goddamn nightmare: and that fence, and Uncle Billy Goat I did know who was, from time Chan wanted to go down thru there, but Helene thought it better not como se dice. The ogre, yet. Well, jesus christ. Ok. Likewise thank you for the pictures, I like them, fuck it—I can see. Ok. Paul keeps me completely sane with that crazy smile, so it works.

I figure you must have been (which is why no letter before) and may now be back from, NYC. Wow. Viz I am very anxious to hear what and where and who happened, there, i.e., are the streets really paved with gold etc. It seems an awfully long way away from here. Ok. How were the people? E.g., Dennie, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi, Allen, et al. I’m very curious. I hope to god it all went well, a fugging pleasure. Ok. That was very happy news about the new car, and maybe it’s simple (tho it’s not) but Buddy that way has always seemed to me god knows exceptional. Viz one cd say, well it’s easy for him, but he does it, again and again. I like the clarity of his presence finally, the staying in, straight—no matter the present hang-up or I hope to god not. Do you see him at all now. I.e., he’s been a friend for me much as Ray for you in that that sense of him there has always been true. It hasn’t really meant I’ve had that much as so-called years went by to do with him, being elsewhere all the time—but still there, viz a man in a place I knew unequivocally with no changes or false faces etc. You’ll certainly know what that means.

So how’s magnanimous Max, I really goddamn well hope well you dig. I’ve got some hard news for him, viz Scribners took the goddamn poems lock stock & barrel. I’m thru. Wow! Tell Max to think of the bright side no matter. It can only get worse from here, so to speak. Y pues . . . But it is crazy, and unbelievable—and presently a little hung up since must clear rights on A Form Of Women, so as to be able to sign it all over to them etc. Well, wow again. The goddamn sun must be shining somewhere. So if I can clear it with Jonathan, and Eli W/, that’s it. I’ve been scared to death, goddamn two letters stolen, no word but a card beginning ‘Dear Madam . . . We have received your ms/ etc.’ And finally last night it made it, I couldn’t sleep the whole goddamn night, sat staring up at so-called sky, so far, so long, so singular it felt. I’ve been saying the past two weeks, to hell with them, they’ll screw the book anyhow,—but it’s very different right now. Viz there’s got to be a place for us if this can happen.

That aside, and finally it is, Olson’s MAXIMUS just came in, looking too much I thought, i.e., wild. How about that note following Burke poem, viz that’s it. You could knock anybody out with that one—and wow what metrics comes in those later, read of a piece, he is really too fucking much. He wrote he had finally got selected poems straight with Grove, and tho short, it has to get thru, no matter. We need a damn magazine. Start pounding at Cid to let us back in etc. This fugging standing around in alleys gets dreary. ‘I’ll see you in the White Dove Review-who . . . ’ Oh well, but that I think has got to come back, the sooner the better.

I think this gig with Texas may make it, we’ll all retire with Texas oil wells and crazy wild blonde women be so respectable to our wives: like this is Mrs Vast Oil Well of 1982, she blows, filthy bitch, but she likewise gushes. Oh well. I have such dreams of place, all the ice cream I can eat, beer to drink—blow up Winfield Townley Scott’s who is really Edwin A/ Rob/—getting drunk here Ed—with luck. Persistence.

I would love to talk, such an appetite this afternoon, to be with you all, if wishes were horses then beggars cd ride—and we’d be there with you, pronto. I wrote a story hey in which like a line you dig of English song, so nice like that, England type light, etc., and the poor son o’ bitch in same is wandering roughly toward Sheridan Sq NYC to find Hudson St and has rapidly begrimingly becoming copy of book paperback song(s) he is trying to get to woman he (then) loves, miles of intention, 4 pages only. He could never get it. I’ll try to get that to you soon, likewise shot one of even less 3 (?), 2 pages, of man who goes into church thinking it bar very stoned indeed that time, my Story you have to bear with me, carry me all the way home etc.

Did you see Burroughs in SIDEWALK 2, let me know: very good, the ‘cut up’ method, i.e., ‘cut yr way out’—very fabulous in fact. He has the craziest sense of what goes on in socially hip housing developments. Wow . . .

So, no school today. Write soon, please. Again, I hope it’s all ok there. Here is ok, sludge of nada for nothing, no people, whole universe dead here, far beyond Conrad’s ambition or imagination. But uz is no matter. Send other pix soon of local locale, as ground under feet daily, and head sometimes stepped upon can get up after all. Ok. Let’s go see that goddamn gen’l Winflap Brownpee Spot, make him read his whole goddamn poegtic worggs to tune of loud screaming as we fug his wifve and childrun, who hopelessly hang, from ropes (you dig). Ok. Take care. Do write. All is well.

All our love to all,

Bob

P.S. Indians last nite as I was awake weird echo-box sounds as (outside the house) “who (who) ha (ha) huh (huh) hee (hee)” (an + on + on).

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

*“To Be Recited To Flossie On Her Birthday”

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 18, 1960

Dear Bill,

A small magazine in Albuquerque, for which I’ve been a contributing editor, needs a push, and I want to ask you if they may print (or rather re-print from James Laughlin’s first publication of it last year) the birthday poem* for your wife. I had written you earlier about it, for a magazine that Renate Gerhardt was trying to begin in Germany—but I’ve never heard again from her nor know what may have happened. If it is still agreeable with you, this other magazine would be much honored to have it—and their printing is clean and clear, albeit their circulation is small. In any case I wrote them I would ask you about it; and will enclose an envelope addressed to them, i.e., if it’s all right a note to them will make that clear, and if not, simply forget it and they’ll understand it is not convenient. Ok. I’m embarrassed to ask the same favor twice.

Things here are ok, we just now have summer like weather. We do all the time we are here as it happens—and the climate is almost too idyllic if that is possible. But we are (always a but) too isolated finally, i.e., the romance of the place like they say breaks down seeing the poverty of the people, and the sluggish colonialism, forever and ever amen. I.e., how to like it, is of course not possible. I’m hoping for a job back in the States this coming year, in the southwest again, because our children get older and need company and more roots. This is often ok for us, but problematic in its tearing them up each time they get settled. So I think this is the last time.

Too, I had some good news, that Scribner’s will publish a sort of collected poems of past ten years, i.e., all the pamphlets and small booklets at last in one ‘whole’ form god willing. I have yet to clear rights for last book with Jonathan, A Form of Women, but there seems little trouble. So—it feels very odd, after feeling so at odds. I don’t know which ‘world’ has changed in that sense, but can’t see that it’s mine—since half the poems they take would not have been their ‘poems’ at all ten years ago. I think that’s your victory more than any. Anyhow that will come out this next year it seems. I’m trying to write a novel otherwise, or simply to break out of habits, etc. But there is little time just now for it, that I seem to use at least. But it is no headache,—y pues.

I hope everything is well with you and your family. It must be real winter there now. I wish we might all be here talking like they say. I hope you have a good Christmas, and as ever send you all our love.

My thanks to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO JEROME ROTHENBERG

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 18, 1960

Dear Jerry,

I’m sorry not to have written, i.e., both your letters god knows were very good to have. I’d hate to think you were concerned about them in that sense. The past few weeks we have been much involved with getting papers straight for the car, and divers other horrors, which have cut me down to pretty goddamn minimal size like they say. So . . .

Don’t think, please, that I make adamant distinctions between the use of image or any other ‘thing’ in a poem, i.e., I fear you feel me shutting doors on divers emphases that I really don’t intend to close out. For myself, I had first to learn how to manage the very literal ‘sound’ elements in a poem before I felt much capability. It seemed that, first writing, I was constantly falling over my own feet trying to say what I wanted to. If, for example, I wanted to involve a sense of love, or pain, loss, whatever, I could not it seemed place it as clearly as I felt it. So I began, then, trying to articulate as carefully as possible areas of possible thought, call them—to the definition Williams gives in his Autobiography: The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity, i.e., you’ll see very quickly the relation of that emphasis to what you’ve said of my own work. It was a very germinal attitude for me (as his has been more generally, god knows). I am finally a shy man, or was, when younger, painfully so—and began, I suppose, to use the poem as an articulation of all the ‘unresolved’ things I felt and found no other means to ‘say’. It was also an exorcizing in some sense—the craft made exact, and partly absolute, fears or hopes, or literal experiences, that otherwise floated in an entirely personal term of threat, etc. I thought that if I made it possible, for myself as well as for others, to ‘go through’ these situations in a poem—where the formal unity provides a coherence and an objectivity of place—they might both better understand them and also find them at last related to tolerable entity—no longer ghost, etc.

Now coming from Pound as I also did, very much—i.e., for me his prose notes about writing continue to be the best rules of thumb I know, e.g., the notes in Make It New, as the Date Line and others re Daniel etc—I went, as he suggested, in fear of abstractions, though my very manner of thought soon became involved with that process. Yet I felt if I did it with ‘tangibles’ so to speak, at least I allowed for an understanding by the commonness of terms.

So all it comes to is, that, for me, the emphasis has been upon the prosody, i.e., again Pound’s ‘the total articulation of sound in a poem’ or words to that effect. Which gets us to mode again—again for me one of the most determinant aspects of the poem, literally, the manner or way of its going (as ‘mode’ is the same word as ‘mood’ in grammar, etc.). There is, for example, an image immediately present in the subjunctive mood, or imperative—general but insistent, qualifying all that occurs within its term. Just so in a poem, the mode by setting the ‘image’ of address (again you write very closely to my own concerns, in that very generous review). So that mode, for me, becomes the primary arbiter of the poem’s presence in its external (as well as internal) reference. It is in the mode of the poem that I would myself see its relation to the world in which it occurs, in, literally, the way it goes, the manner of its going, etc.

Why I have found it more difficult, then, to specify or make a general program for ‘image’, either for myself or (altogether) for others, is that that part of the writing remains for me very personal and occasional—a question of what proves to hand as I move in the poem, i.e., think by means of it, to a formal entity I qualify as poem. I go much more by feeling here—though it would be absurd to say that I do not go equally by that in other relations as well. Your quote of Suzuki is much to the purpose here—having practiced the ‘effects’ of this or that ‘mode’, and such practice rarely secures anything but a useful knowledge (it does not itself make poems in my own case), one is then able to follow the ‘occasion’ the poem otherwise proves,—inspired or whatnot, god alone knows. But see that this is not to either remove the importance of image, or to slight it in any sense—but only to show how warily I move with reference to it. Thinking again of that ‘psychology of reference’ that the image involves for me, the ‘vision’ by demanding its absoluteness makes such tracing secondary—Blake is a practical workman and hard thinker, who does (I suspect) use all means such as either poetry or prose as a means of statement, a larger thing for him. Coleridge, contrariwise, finds means to speak in the poem that are not otherwise at hand—the poem is more importantly his ‘content’ than are the thoughts one might abstract from his statement there. Not so with Blake, to my mind—nor with Whitman, despite (for me) the great technical skill (often) of the latter. (It is interesting that Hopkins, for example, felt Whitman closer to his means than anyone else, though he also thought him nuts etc—but he recognized the technical ability of Whitman beyond any doubt. He otherwise hated the ‘philosophy’ etc.

What the hell to say, finally. You are very right that in a poem like The Door I am much involved with ‘image’, as Olson also, very very much, in all the Maximus, and in something like The Librarian (that ‘new combinations’ etc). The topography of dream etc, seen as map-making—forms of relation outlined as their impact upon us, or their use in our hands. There is a certain clutter, however, most present in translations at present (not yours, certainly not in that ‘Black milk of morning’—i.e., I agree with [David] Antin in Chelsea you enforce that one greatly), where the image has been translated, but rarely the mode—i.e., see the great variation in translations of Lorca, for example, and yet so few grasp the simplicity of the mode, the manner of the going in the poem. (Jack Spicer has done it best, perhaps.) Anyhow that’s what I fear, that a vocabulary of image will be got too easily, without the mode that placed it in situ, to be a force established in words more than a mere collection, etc. Ah well! I don’t answer you very well at all, nor speak of half I want to, here. Well, I will. Meantime do write as you can. I hope you have a good Christmas there, and that all goes well for you both. Again, my respect for image is probably as great as your own like they say, i.e., I remember that poem of Kitasono’s The Shadow was why that little book got printed. So! Ok.

All best to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO HUGH KENNER

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

December 18, 1960

Dear Hugh,

Thanks very much for your good letter. What happened was that it came ordinary mail—and that’s why it took so long, i.e., they seem to charge 15¢ for airmail letters to this remote location como se dice, or else an airletter for 10¢. Ah well. But it’s good to know the crooks in the local postoffice hadn’t got it—than whom none more, etc. (I hope that tape gets here ok, as and when—but just a few days ago the other people here got one safely, sent airmail, so again I think that ought to work—though, as said, perhaps register it also, to be completely sure etc. Wow . . . )

That’s very happy THE NAME is usable. I’ll put in two others, perhaps less so—I don’t really know. I like the ‘figures’ one, simply for a kind of slow movement I find hard to hold, i.e., a completely quiet manner of statement, as it was about some small wooden figures made by Patrocinio Barela, of Taos, etc—a curious drunken wonder for the most part, poor goddamn man . . . ) Anyhow. The other is familiar enough ‘speculation’.

What you say of the limits of NR’s audience is certainly reasonable. In some ways it’s almost simpler than the more sophisticated, that tends to die very hard indeed. So.

Thinking of Zukofsky, there is one poem of his that makes the term of his ‘range’ (of address, and/or reference of ‘world’) quickly apparent to me, i.e., that one:

Send regards to Ida, the bitch

whose hate’s unforgiving,

why not send regards?

There are trees’ roots, branchtops

—as is

one who can take his own life

and be quit

except he might hurt—as he imagines

here he’s gone—

a person, two; if not the sun.

Which is, very much, that constant shuttle he works between conjecture, and the application, back and forth, a check of his own mind, against his own mind, endlessly reiterated—i.e., suppositional tracking and testing of his own thought. Likewise in manner it is typical, in the syntax god knows—with the possibility of “There are . . . a person, two . . .” i.e., that sequence completed as a sentence, and also, more apparently, “he might hurt . . . a person”—but, not wildly I hope, the double term of personal and ‘natural’ common world, found in that former jump, etc. As also the way he puts himself ‘beside’, in the indentation, the ‘natural’ terms, almost as a parenthesis in a sense. I.e., to the bitch why not say hello, for what common world they both live in, as life is a root, to a ‘top’, a process not to be finally qualified by bitchiness, etc. As life can come to ‘top’ from ‘root’ in one who can be quit of it, except that he finds himself rooted beyond the personal, to the ‘two’, in a common form—again allowing for Ida in a world of roots and issues therefrom—ultimately objective, in “if not the sun”, shines on all, etc. It’s a wild one, I think, just for the crazy condensation of attitudes provided for in it, i.e., the ‘arguments’ posited within its statement. You can read the damn thing backwards and forwards, in that sense—with each phrase suggesting a ‘conclusion’ immediately qualified by that which follows. It also has his wild handling of vowels, and consonantal rhymes, etc. Well, he is very damn good, like they say. I suppose your difficulty, as often mine, or Williams’ as you say, is that so much of the area is this intensely personal limit of the world, as thought, much more than felt, say, despite the clear history in his writing (certainly in “A”). But the lack of ‘conclusions’ finally, the sense what is, is always to be modified, again, again, again.

I.e., what he seems to fear is what he says of Shakespeare, “The risk his text takes when it sees and foresees at the same time is that at any moment creation may become like uncontrolled water . . .” So that in Zukofsky, more than any other I can think of, Williams’ sense of the poet thinking with his poem, is true. I.e., it must occur within, so to speak, i.e., this will to the “Constantly seeking and ordering relative quantities and qualities of sight, sound, and intellection,” that proves all his mind; hence no order more than thought, nor meaning more than in the thinking etc, not the ‘what is thought’ etc. Which is probably much too quick a sense, yet persistent in my own reading of him. The issue being, as he says, “the contest any poet has with his art: working towards a perception that is his mind’s peace . . .” (i.e., this from notes in FOLIO Spring ’60, apropos section of Bottom they print there, etc.)

Christmas very damn close at this point, the which with four daughters looms large, like they say, but pleasantly. I’ll be glad, however, when the year here is at last done—it begins to be increasingly tedious, and the time I had free the first year (i.e., last) now is much less, as the work for the children increases etc. I’ll hope to write again when things are a little more relaxed. I’ve heard now from the Guggenheim committee, asking for more material—so that much is o’erlept, etc. Wow . . . thanks again and again for the push with same. It does seem this year more possible. Ok. Write as you can, please, and I will also.

My best to you,

Bob

P.S. There is a younger poet I much like, and perhaps you would, i.e. Edward Dorn—whose poems you can see most simply in that collection, The New American Poetry (some very nice ones included, etc.) Anyhow his address is: 501 Camino Sin Nombre, Santa Fe, i.e., it’s possible he would have something.

•••

LETTER TO PAUL BLACKBURN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 11, 1961

Dear Paul,

I’ve missed hearing from you, and have wondered if you got my last letter ok, i.e., the damn mails here are often so poor such things happen frequently. In any case I hope you had a good Xmas like they say—it must have been busy there to put it mildly.

Just now I’m trying to clear my own head re ‘deep image’ and the like, i.e., both Kelly and Rothenberg have been writing to me about it, and I’ve seen that recent issue of TROBAR of course. I don’t know quite what to answer—not pompously, but I’m reluctant to jump either way, since I have no base sympathy with such a concern as Kelly’s note outlines, but I hardly refuse it to others. So. Anyhow so far I do not see a clear handle for its use and/or a means indicated that would bring one to anything but ‘symbolic reference’ or, finally, a psychology of reference—which interests me, very much, but which also seems to me a pretty large red herring in the context they intend. When Kelly suggests a balance between Olson’s physiology of sound, i.e., the breath context, with all its reference, and his own ‘deep image’, I do balk because I don’t believe them in this way equivalent counters in a general plan. I think Olson’s notes have frozen in some minds, into an ultimatum of form, rather than a suggestion as to ‘mode’ and/or a calculus of possibility for the line, derived from the most available term we have in its management.

Well, that you know as well as I do, if not better. But with this ‘deep image’ I feel a demarche toward those ‘dim lands of peace’, i.e., a move toward generalization of the poem’s terms which I for one greatly fear. It may well be that I am myself as guilty as any, in such areas—supposing often a content, so to speak, in my poems that does not practically exist. But I’ve felt that it was in the ‘mode’ of a poem (in the ‘manner of its going’) that that which was specific to its effect qua poem might best be controlled. Image for me moves equally between prose and poetry, for example, in the sense that a ‘poetic’ mode will not. Thinking that rhythm is an aspect of all language in sequence, of course it is specious to catalogue some rhythms as specifically poetic, and others as not etc. But thinking of Zukofsky’s mean, of speech/music, with the poem’s mode the term between, at least I can find there a figure, call it, for my own intention.

But in this discussion that they offer me ‘image’ is already a loaded word. It is not a ‘verbal picture’—it is, better, derived from ‘vision’ which I know, say, like ‘love’, yet only so—I cannot specify its actual qualifications. Jerry finally seems to come to the ‘preconscious’ in that that becomes the point of issue for the ‘vision’ which in turn informs the image etc. Well—why not, except that it stays just so an observation on what has happened—more or less defensible as an opinion—but it does not provide a tool for working in the poem that I can see. It in fact takes away concern from that aspect of poetry I think we can profitably discuss, i.e., the structure of a poem as a unit of sound (in Pound’s sense of prosody) and the ability of the man writing in that reference. This, of course, does not at all mean a ‘good’ poem in that aspect need not be a ‘bad’ poem in others. I try to say to them that for me the ‘mode’ of a poem, or more simply its structure proves itself an ‘image’ at times more influential than any other, by virtue of the fact that it informs all the words which it embodies. It is a way of saying something, and being so, has consequence in that sense.

In their poems to date I’ve found really little that impresses me; yet that too I have hesitated to say to them, because it is too simple to say to someone beginning as they both are, that they as yet show little technical competence as writers. Yet I hate to see them off up a garden path that only can lead them away from this need to learn which they patently have. Here I think ‘translation’ has done them a disservice, in that it has given them—too often without an accompanying structure—a vocabulary of image they now use almost too glibly. Rothenberg is the most developed in his use of image, I feel; yet I find a tendency to generalize in almost every poem of his which I see. Perhaps I prove only a Pounder, after all this time, but I do continue to believe that ‘Any tendency to abstract general statement is a greased slide.’ Perhaps they feel me to be against ‘image’ per se, which would be among other things impossible. Ah well! It is this adamant choosing that I don’t like, finally, but I suspect any absolutism of ‘manner’ in a program for poetry—and have really never read Olson’s notes as embodying one. Yet others disagree with me it is clear.

Can you, in any case, give me your own thoughts here? You are there, and know the people—and will be much more able than I to understand the premises that Kelly attempts to define in his note etc. I know you respect his work, so that also ought to help. I really am goddamn confused by them—wanting myself to be sympathetic, because they are certainly so to me, yet not basically believing much at all in what they tend, for me, to argue. Ok.

Things go very well, despite tedium of work here, also people—though we see almost no one. Well, it will be finally good to stop it, which we will about the end of April. I am hopeful for a Guggenheim, perhaps too goddamn much so, as ever—but that failing, I can I think get another job ok. In the meantime Scribner’s have taken the ‘collected’ poems ms/, and have given me a good report on five chapters of novel I’ve done (a piece of which Paul C/ is printing in the next BIG TABLE etc), i.e., it’s pretty certain they will take it if I can ever get it done etc. Too I’m pretty sure we will be east for a visit this summer—but that may be premature, but I think not. So, will see you again god willing. Please do write in the meantime as you can. And I will too.

All my love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 19, 1961

Dear Ed,

I like that note you did, i.e., what you qualify as your relations to writing, and then that second paragraph, with culture as what men remember—that’s very clear—and likewise the last, with its question. So that seems done, like they say. It’s a goddamn curious question to begin with, in some ways—I think I, as you, would say what you do in that first sentence. The dullness is of course that for people who don’t see it that way, it makes no sense to say ‘there is that means which no other seems to provide for’; and for those who would, then I think it is the reassurance it is for me, hearing you say it. Voila.

Re desperation como se dice, I think we are beyond it in a weird way, i.e., this is simple ‘misery’ in Olson’s sense of accumulated wear and tear. The time goes very goddamn quickly, and we have almost no sense of it, but as accumulation toward the end of, that’s the end of it etc. Well, that’s good—having an end. Yet the weather now is crazy, as ever—our physical senses at least ought to be satisfied, and yet a restlessness sticks in both of us. I suppose I use the pot much too goddamn much as a welcome euphoria, at the end of so-called day. I’d go a little nutty without some handy unreality in which to hide. I don’t have the energy (or don’t feel it) to take off into something more substantial. Anyhow the anti-social aspects of said panacea make the closedness we live in more tolerable. We don’t go whooping around the house or anything, but it breaks the monotony a little, and is restful—makes—somehow with reliable continuity—a little difference to things felt and seen etc. I’m about out in any case and what I’ve grown this year is slow coming, and may not finally. I think that’s just as well too, if it turns out so. It gets a habit in the dull sense of, over and over—no need but the familiarity and that it does, in the sense described, relieve much in the present locked scene. So to hell with it in any case.

Partly it is the curious hanging between what seems everything going my way, like they say, and fears re a job next year, e.g. I am waiting to hear now from Texas, it is pretty definite we could not do this again and keep sane, Bunker writes the job there looks now not too possible, the one I tried at UNM is out now, and so on, i.e., that’s about it. We’ll have, by saving here and perhaps from some advance on books of poems, enough to get us through the summer ok. Anyhow that way I fall back a little to previous fears like, partly, those in SF, what the hell to do etc. Not really—however. It would be a little goddamn faux naïf to claim trembling, etc. Much more, a kind of anger that always one gets hung with this impasse of use, no matter what else is going on. It’s an irony that what we do in this world to ‘make a living’ has finally such a painfully corrosive relation to what we might otherwise be said to ‘do’. But I god knows said that ad nauseam this summer. Ah well. Anyhow I can’t at the moment see how to use such things as Scribner’s acceptance of the poems, and now as well a favorable report on first five chapters of the novel—so that that will probably be ok also, as I can get it done etc—I mean that this is politics also, and I would like to use such ‘gains’ for what they seem to be usable for, beyond the work and results they are—already settled long ago in my own mind and with people as yourself I would take sight from etc. I feel like I’ve got a whole bunch of saving stamps and trying to find where to get my prizes etc. Perhaps there aren’t any—that I can take at least. But I hope for example that I can lever myself into some teaching job with same, yet it seems that doesn’t really make it, too fearsome or something to them—however respectful they seem to be. I just don’t know at present. But things continue to break in that respect. I heard from Eberhart at Library of Congress they would like tape of a reading—god knows that seems new to me. What I really would hope was the use of such things is freedom from such as your boss, or mine for that matter—despite he is more human. I want less of that continual business of having to dance in the shadow of some problematic character, so as to hide my own ‘personality’—i.e., moving in what area they leave hidden behind themselves, in the performance of my duties etc. As at that boys’ school, shifting and turning with problematic Wilburn god knows, whose hang-up at times meant he had to twist a few screws to prove his own capabilities. Here I feel at times a slight tendency, or wish, to wipe one’s arse with the ‘poet’, however politely, just to make clear you don’t have to take that pansy shit etc etc. Or else it’s like being put in an umbrella stand, for the look of the thing somehow. Anyhow to be out of that—just getting older making the earlier ‘flexibility’ and nod to authorities more a headache etc a pain in the ass too often. I find myself speaking up to people half my age, not quite, but clearly younger, simply out of that training of self-effacing anonymity that has let me work simply at all, at all. Well . . .

Anyhow I’m not writing anything at present. I’ve got some so-called jobs, as review of Olson for YUGEN which will be good, and note also on Burroughs, again good. I wrote Poetry to see if I can review your book when it is out—I’ll let you know what they say. Nims is present editor there, and is so far good natured. They haven’t as yet used that other, but I think he might agree. Otherwise will review it somewhere at least—i.e., I am very goddamn happy it is coming now, and would like to say why. Ok.

I don’t see much goddamn else—as this ‘deep image’. Wow. Dennie wrote first letter in months enclosing notes re her own putting down of same. It really seems a vague and softly sloppy red herring to me. Again your note cuts way past that sort of hopefulness to my mind. Thank you for that OUTBURST connection—I sent them a poem. I liked the look of their flyer. I still don’t see any magazine of much goddamn coherence, but here and there makes it in the meantime I guess. LeRoi wrote he hopes to make ‘critical’ base now for YUGEN, if he can get money to continue. Have you been hearing anything from Olson? I haven’t in some time now—well before Xmas. It must be a damn bitter season there now, weather-wise. Have you seen anything re his Maximus?

So, we’ll get there. We are really counting the days at this point. It’s not at least at all impossible. But sans friends as yourselves, the world (yet) is pretty goddamn flat after all. Write please anytime you can, send poems as you can too. I don’t see anything I like here, i.e., very little in mags now I can see. Etc. Wow. Pues. WRITE!

All our love to you all,

Bob

P.S. Have you seen Larry Eigner’s book—On My Eyes—strange nervous business, with (finally) to my sense great clarity.

[Bobbie Creeley’s note in left margin] I’m reading Spock re 6 & 7 year olds—Leslie fed one of the mice to the cat across the street—well not quite—but carried them both over (wasn’t supposed to go without permission—etc) then, in the room with the cat put them on the windowsill having decided to return home by climbing through the window (!) Cried because the cat chose hers (fattest). One incident from a week of them—oh well, hell. I hope you are all well—Love Bobbie

•••

LETTER TO TOM RAWORTH

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 23, 1961

Dear Tom,

That’s very happy news about your new daughter, and I much liked the whole ‘description’ like they say. I never have got to travel in such fashion and much envy you. In any case, we have four (daughters), so are well acquainted with all the delights thereof. And conversely. Ok.

To begin with—I’ve enclosed some poems, and a note on Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH. Grove Press plans to publish the novel in the States this spring, and had asked me for a comment on its value etc. I’d just done it yesterday, and it may not be worth the time—but if so, you are welcome to it—perhaps adding a note that it was a comment written for Grove in response to their question etc. Ok. (I don’t know that “Black Mountain Review” needs identification there, but would suppose so. Briefly, it was the publication of the ‘avant garde’ Black Mountain College, wherein appeared many of the Beat Generation writers as well as the so-called ‘Black Mountain’ group. Cf. Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, Grove Press—and the comments he makes about the logic for his divisions in the preface.) I don’t have any story to send you unhappily. I will hope to by at least summer, but just now I have copies of nothing here—and anything new I have is at present tied up. But I will. Meantime, I will write Fielding Dawson (whose prose may well interest you) along with this, and ask him to send you something as soon as possible.

As to other people—here are names and addresses of some I myself think outstanding, and also sympathetic to such a magazine as you propose:

Charles Olson	Robert Duncan	Denise (Levertov) Goodman
28 Fort Square	P.O. Box 14	277 Greenwich
Gloucester, Mass.	Stinson Beach, Calif.	New York 7, N.Y.

I.e., those most interest me, and also, very much: Louis Zukofsky, 135 Willow Street, Brooklyn 1, N.Y. You have Ed Dorn’s address of course—who is another. Thinking of prose:

Michael Rumaker	William Eastlake	Douglas Woolf
52 Main Street	Eastlake Ranch	Box 4231
Nanuet, N.Y.	Cuba, New Mexico	Spokane 31, Washington

Edward Dahlberg.→

88 Horation Street

Apt 5B

New York 14, N.Y.

He is presently writing a very interesting autobiography—cf. sections in recent BIG TABLEs, and is an older man, very good I think. Anyhow I’d try him if I were you.

Ed Dorn also writes interesting prose, both ‘fiction’ and otherwise.

Then there are people like Hugh Kenner, 4680 La Espada Drive, Santa Barbara, California—who might be got if you asked them very nicely (or were interested to) for a short comment on American poetry as they now take it, etc. You ought to be in contact with Dr Gael Turnbull, 1199 Church St., Ventura, Calif. (who was old publisher of MIGRANT, and a very decent man generally I think). Also Irving Layton, the one Canadian poet I think exceptional—could reach him c/o Jack Hirschman, 14 North Park, Hanover, N.H.—and Hirschman, a young teacher now at Dartmouth College, is also an interesting translator and poet in his own right. Larry Eigner: 23 Bates Road, Swampscott, Mass. Paul Blackburn: 110 Thompson, New York 9, N.Y. LeRoi Jones: 324 East 14th St, New York 3, N.Y.—who is very sympathetic and helpful man, the editor also of YUGEN. Gary Snyder: Konoecho, Yase, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan. Mike McClure: 2324 Fillmore, San Francisco—through whom also could be reached Philip Whalen, a good writer.

It gets a little endless, so let me stop here, i.e., if you try any of these, I’m very sure A will quickly lead to B. You’ll find most American writers very interested to be published there, and grateful for the opportunity—if a little shy of ‘English manner’ they suspect as a criticism of their own etc. But if you write them simply as you have me—god knows warmly and kindly—I’m sure you’ll have no trouble. Do you happen to know where Martin Seymour-Smith is these days? I knew him when living in Mallorca, an old and very close friend then—and am anxious to locate him again. He as well might be a help to you.

As to outlets in this country: generally that gets to be a nightmare, if you attempt either wide coverage, or general coverage. What I’d suggest is this: ask specifically LeRoi Jones if he would mind acting as American agent for you, in New York area—with specific reference to 8th Street Bookshop and any like places he knows. I.e., put it to him, you’d like the magazine to circulate there, you know the problems of getting currency back and forth, so if shops would pay you in credit for books, say, only, that would be fine (I hope!). He will be able to tell you much more accurately than I what numbers he will be able to handle there for example: probably 30–50 of the first issue, simply circulating it as he can. I’d ask Paul Carroll, BIG TABLE, 1316 North Dearborn, Chicago 10, Ill., the same question for that area—though he may be more harassed, but then put it, can you simply tell me what bookstores etc. Then, last, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco 11, Calif. would no doubt stock copies, if you write them, literally him etc. You are welcome to use my name in reference to any of the people here noted. Ok.

So, let me get this back quickly—and write again. Do write yourself, as you can. I like very much what you are trying to do, and again, would like to help in any way possible.

My best to you,

Bob

[note at top left of page]

Please don’t

be swamped by } Re: ‘NAMES’

this—I’m simply

giving you all I

can think of—to do with as

you see fit.

[note in left margin] If the magazine is available in NY, SF, and Chicago, it’s enough—i.e., those, particularly the first two, are the centers for any such magazine and its effective circulation. It will go on from there perhaps, but no matter.

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

San Geronimo Miramar

Patulul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

January 29, 1961

Dear Charles,

Winding up for a wail, como se dice. I hesitate like they say to write, thinking you have troubles enough—and don’t want to make it, ‘you know how difficult things are for us here, but with the help of god and good cheer, we continue in our little fashion, etc.’ But we see the end of it now, more to the point—three months and/or 90 days I could do I think even in jail. There is, more hopeless, a constant vacuity to things, much in myself at present in any case, so that the landscape is like an ever smiling idiot—so bland and good etc. The recent political businesses underline only my (and as it happens, Indios equally) complete non-sense, or better, out-of-it pattern, of such things. I see it as local, and local, it stinks—e.g. the jets we now hear, one or two in a week—which obey a law as certain as daylight, for the powers involved.

I cannot write anything at present, sitting down again and again to get started, see it fall into patterns like finger exercises, and can feel no goddamn lift sufficient to break it out. That is very familiar god knows, and in one way, not even despairing—being so. But it is why I have not written. I cannot at the moment shake it—think of nothing else, if I ‘think’ etc. Bobbie is working, painting—this year has been for her much what last was for me, free time and space, despite she dislikes our situation here even more than I do. I am drinking a sort of perfumed local vodka, at $1.90 the bottle, also rum about the same—last year we didn’t for some reason. Beer is 25¢ a bottle, more or less, as in the States. I get scared of an exposure, to you—so close to my own sense of myself at least as ‘usable’—I don’t write in that way either, fearing complete dissolve etc. And yet I seem to be in one piece, albeit complete subjectivism yet. Fuck the waste, anyhow. Destroying time is a vicious business. I am working now six days a week to finish by last of April—no job as yet for the coming year. With a little luck perhaps I can parlay the prose into an income for us, enough to make a free year of sorts. I would like to have it, very damn much. I have been in this fix, in divers guises now, for five years—i.e., since last seeing you, it has been a sort of self-discipline to keep ‘attentive’ etc.

The so-called novel is what I have on my mind finally—that seems the next place. I am very cheered that this time they like it, i.e., thinking of that earlier try with Wm Morrow that was so nowhere. I seem not to do it here, I wrote all I have of it in one week before I started working. But I think of it, like they say. BIG TABLE is printing a section, I’ll ask him to send copy—I’m scared to death of it one way, yet has again ‘conjecture’ I’ve not remembered in years—the world that can be thought of like they say. Aie! Do damn well write. I miss you, very much, very selfishly. With a little luck will see you this summer, early—about June (first couple of weeks thereof), contriving ways at present—so. I hope it is making it there. Please take care of yourself. Write. I will—this is poor business, but it’s what, always, five minutes conversation (we never have here) would completely take away. Ok.

All my love to you all,

Bob

Here’s one poem if I hadn’t sent it:

FIRE

Clear smoke,

a fire in the far off

haze of summer,

burning somewhere.

What is

a lonely heart for

if not

for itself alone.

Do the questions

answer themselves,

all wonder

brought to a reckoning?

When you are done,

I am done,

then it seems that

one by one

we can leave it all,

to go on.

[CP I, 254]

Hey! I’m still

a hick!

(I hope.)

P.S. LeRoi has asked me to review Maximus

for Yugen, which same I shortly will do.

[Bobbie Creeley’s note along lower right margin next to a small drawing of a house and two flowers:]

Dear Betty and Charles,

for the good things — we have poinsettias, bougainvillea, a hummingbird has a nest in an orange tree even with the window we sit by to eat, health, etc. also 2 rabbits and a closed yard below the same window so we see them down there white on green grass, the children are all getting great — leaving one set of horrible mannerisms behind doubtless enroute to bigger and better — But the people are bad. Believe the Ugly American’s a great book and art of any sort is ‘beautiful’ or not at all and enforce their attitudes by making 100,000 a year — But we will leave all that in 3 months by the G of G and then never to return — It will be great to see you both and son also

love Bobbie

•••

LETTER TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

After April 28th:
Our address in New Mexico	San Geronimo Miramar
is: c/o Hall, PO Box 34,	Patulul, Such.
Alameda, N.M.	Guatemala, C.A.
	March 17, 1961

Dear Louis,

Your good letter, with the clippings from Paul’s concert, were a great cheer, i.e., despite my silence in past months, god knows I’ve been anxious to know how you all are—and really, you sound happy and active, like they say, and now I damn well fear to interrupt you with my own dullness. But that as well will soon be done with, once we leave here, which is not long now. With a little luck, i.e., no sickness for the children etc, I think we’ll be on our way back to New Mexico at the end of April, and shortly after that we will be coming east (Bobbie and I), and should be able finally to see you all again toward the end of May. By god . . . Ok!

I’m pleased the use of yourself in that ‘Quick Graph’ did not prove a goddam presumption. It really did seem that ‘quick’ to me, I am more and more convinced your work has a very great use for those capable—and I think more and more become so, if only in restlessness and reaction to the deadness otherwise. Anyhow I should myself much like to see all the present excitement harnessed to a few useful attentions. In that sense, you can hardly be avoided. Ah well! I had a letter from Mary Ellen Solt, who mentioned seeing you (and who also seems good-natured? I am curious to know how she strikes you, in point of her critical work now.) She says perhaps Laughlin will do something, which would be about time.

Too, I’m trying to get that review of “A” and Barely and widely written, I seem to go into a revery (yet) each time I go to these books, i.e., I become so involved with my own interest in them I don’t want to ‘talk’ like they say. But more to the point, I’ll have that finally done (short unhappily as it must be, for their limits) this weekend, and will send you a copy as I do have it. That too I’ve felt badly about taking so long with.

I’m very interested to see your Catullus translations, e.g. the one in Anew always impressed me, as those also in Poetry not too long ago. I have by the way the December issue with the section of Bottom—it’s a fabulous insight of juxtapositions and measures I think, i.e., ‘1 picture is worth 1000 words’ and this way you prove, of so placing insight and apprehension—as also in that section earlier in Folio, i.e., the list of comparable evidences—is to myself very opening and useful.

Thinking of what you say of Whitman—I looked up that poem (or the one toward the beginning of that last section, then at the end the other)—I certainly would like to have written the first without question. No I don’t think ‘one’ improves etc. So! Apropos EP, I have a tape of a recent series of interviews he has recorded for someone at the BBC (I’ll bring them), in which he talks on and on in a completely interesting manner, and also does cite Whitman as the best critic of the writing of his period—and generally seems to approve of him in a way somewhat new. I suppose they were at that time scared to death of that apparently rolling, loose line—but the ‘weights’ in it, and the language, and the tenor of the thought, the risks of such curious tenderness and continuance, in the line be it said,—god knows that to me seems singularly ‘great’. So.

The following is about all I’ve written in weeks now, it is not an open time for us, and that shows I’m afraid. Too, having the book taken by Scribner’s has put a curious stop to things for the moment—but it is more the situation here, in its barrenness, that blocks things. Anyhow you will see your way in it, so to speak, which I am intent to understand. Too, I want to enclose the poem for you, published in Trobar (which I don’t want to send entire, i.e., it depresses me, a luxury I guess . . . ). So. Shortly I’ll hope to write a decent letter, and to send the review. Ok. Again, it is very happy to know all goes well and please congratulate Paul for what must have been a very complete evening, to think of what he played. Well, he knew it like they say, before and after.

All our love to you all,

Bob

WATER

The sun’s

sky in

form of

blue sky

that

water will

never make

even

in reflection.

Sing, song

mind’s form

feeling

mistaken,

shaken,

broken water’s

forms, love’s

error

in water.

[CP I, 268]

I suppose I was most interested to get that ‘falling’ sense of words, without ‘rest’ through the lines (as earlier in your ‘Hear her clear mirror / in her etc’), to make the ‘waver’ of water partly, though not consciously. I am not finally interested in such parallels except that they at times parallel the thought that ‘thinks to think them’.

(I suppose also this is an echo of Catullus’ “in wind and quickly moving water”—here supposed as relief to error, rather than as problem of inconstancy etc.)

Aie . . .

[Enclosure: “The House” for Louis Zukofsky (CP I, 237) , from Trobar (1961)]

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

San Geronimo Miramar

Patalul, Such.

Guatemala, C.A.

March 26, 1961

Dear Ed,

Your last letter got through safely—I think it’s all now come ok, i.e., Bobbie’s visit to the PO and questions seem to have done the so-called trick. But what a goddamn irritation to think of all that didn’t get here, due to their malign finagling. Ah well.

You cheer me up, very much. I.e., I’ve been having shakes like that, who am I, what’ll I do, will it ever end, etc., when it is hardly either that difficult (it is not) or that uncertain (which same Scribner’s removes largely no matter now). And so on. I have a bitter goddamn fear of not ‘earning’ my way or rather support of us all, bred partly of the earlier situation with Ann—and continued in having fallen into the two jobs I’ve had as either stop-gaps or else apparent conveniences (as here) that proved otherwise. I.e., what I am afraid of apparently, is getting out on the goddamn limb, with all of us, and then having to lean on somebody (as Bobbie’s parents—wow . . . ) to survive. I can’t develop the arrogance (which in such a case I think justified) that maintains a reasonable claim on help of others, since the work it does, i.e., the man does, cannot per se support him, and yet its eventual use, or use in wide terms, is nonetheless unquestioned. Ah well again. Well for christ’s sake, it is clearer than that—to wit, I’m scared to death of taking a chance with all of us, who in turn define my responsibility, and I fear being caught out in a way that will only harass us more viciously than we now are. I have no stomach for the uncertainties of living that ten years ago would have been an excitement to me—you as I know, if not better, how viciously such worry makes impossible anything but thinking about it, over and over and over etc. Now the Eastlakes tell us that place will be available only till mid-July, though I think of course something equivalent can be found around there, at least for a low rent if not for none etc. So that isn’t the problem. After the barrenness here I’d like more ease than we have had, perhaps that’s gravy only—well, it is. But in one embarrassing sense I’ve nothing immediately to die for, except the novel which I hope to finish in one push this summer, it is that kind so to speak—and then I’d like to go to Paris like they say. Ah well . . . Or let’s make it the moon etc. Simply some romantic nada land, beaches and all that shit etc. No—hardly, but what the hell will I write, Ed—something like that. I fear saying I’m risking whatever to do something I only do as I do it, and do no matter—so what’s the excuse, I suppose. But to hell with it here. I think the whole so-called question which is impossible to speak of finally, will get settled as things are or are not open to me, job-wise like they say—so far none, so so far so good, really. This is one choice I’d feel better being backed into, like a horse etc. So.

I enclose sheet from Nat’l Review, partly the prettiness thereof, and ‘new poems’ from last winter now, and that ‘name’ one is finally ok to me—the other re figures, is of Barela’s sculptures Bobbie lifted etc—and qua sign, to see if I can’t mitigate the weird evil of that magazine. It underlines so clearly so many people, or enough to make this context, make $25000 a year and up etc. What do they care about who’s feeling ‘liberal’, i.e., you fuck up the carpet out you go etc. That’s what that money’s for. So they come on like gentleman, not so gentle at all, amateurs who if they can’t say it right can at least pay their way through it no matter. It’s pretty ugly, and I am uneasy about being so a part of it, via Kenner—who himself has been helpful now to Olson and Zukofsky, say, and to me certainly, and wants to print what he can—and yet how clear can any of it be in this context. Greasily, I’d want to argue well the fucking poems have to ‘speak for themselves’, and if you can get into the enemy camp in such a way, so much the better. But if your terms argue a premise, vaguely put qua ‘poems’, etc, can’t the people such as these very neatly vitiate your ‘identification’ and what use it might be, rightly situated among people you believe in—but then how would Dennie for example ‘believe’ in Mademoiselle, or me in the Nation (thinking of that little shit who edits poetry for them, MLR, or present Merwin, who is hardly liberal in any sense I understand at least, howbeit to me personally much more acceptable than MLR, who attacked me there almost sans reason, or none but to hear himself talk apparently—so that’s a world, too) . . . The mess is I want to ‘rationalize’ everything, and feeling breaks in areas heretofore closed get shaky in how I should react to them. E.g. Donald Hall’s recent approval in NY Times Bk Review makes me wonder if I’m turning into some kind of castrate fascist, or if we really have won our point. So—that we can talk about thank god. Ok.

I will get those dexedrine for you, that’s simple. I want some myself. Do damn well watch out for them, i.e., Martin’s wife Jan had a very unhappy habit with them—and they breed, used too continuously, a very problematic nervousness and ‘withdrawal’ which I don’t feel pot to, for example. The latter, when you stop after some time, seems only to make a feeling of ‘let down’ for a week or so, not ever hard, and makes sleeping at first hard—but the dexedrine apparently gets a physiological scene going. Well, to hell with it . . . Confines of the civilization can be defined in terms of addiction, e.g. to food and friends. Ok . . .

We will be leaving here, as now planned, the 28th of April. This Tuesday we are going out to Mexico just for the day, to get our visas straight, i.e., by leaving the country we get an automatic thirty days more, etc. So that will do it. The school goes ok, and that I’m now sure can be finished in time, simply enough. So.

Again your book made it for me, altogether. I want to say more, god knows much more, than that quick note did. I haven’t as yet located a place to, but I think I can. Anyhow, you’ve done your part like they say. Your letters make me feel you much happier now I think, and that comes over to me—to make myself feel self-indulgent and ashamed of needless worries, but much more to the point, equally hopeful. I.e., you make it. Ok. We’ll see you all very soon so that’s it.

All our love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

c/o Eastlake

Eastlake Ranch

Cuba, New Mexico

June 26, 1961

Dear Louis,

I’m very very pleased the review was all right, i.e., such a thing has a primary use for me at least in such reference like they say—and its shortness had seemed a problem; yet I did want to make clear my own respect and use of your work. So. That’s very happy.

Donald Hutter is the editor at Scribner’s—a younger man, about 30 or nearly that, and good-natured and enthusiastic in manner. He was I think interested. The one hitch seemed the ‘mechanics’ of the new series, and I suppose he wanted that more arranged before he committed himself to other material. I do know he took your name and address and the titles of Barely and widely, Some Time, et al; and I can keep at him in the meantime. He must know that the pseudo-academic people they have been printing prove nothing but an echo, and the very fact they’ve taken me on seems to show they’re at least desperate. In that way I am hopeful. (Remember that John Hall Wheelock is the literal poetry editor there, you can see what a jump they must have made with respect to myself to take such a collection at all, at all.)

I’ve had tests now and an x-ray, and nothing seems very complicated, at least I’ve heard nothing, and the tb test seemed ‘doubtful’ or really negative (so the doctor thought). Too, the cold is finally gone and I suspect I was simply exhausted and took it hard in that way. Ah well. It got me to rest for a time in any case, and that was very welcome. I still sit here looking out at the space. It’s fantastic. Anyhow we still simply unwind, which seems very necessary after the tensions of Guatemala, and the quick trip east with that confusion etc. If I pile necessities on my back, I’ll write nothing of any pleasure, so I make that excuse, temporarily. There are thousands more but I will be working shortly, i.e., I can feel it coming in a way, and grow restless.

You both made very clear to us that we seemed ‘reasonably’ together like they say. God what a relief such a life is—I would never have known it by myself, or as that prior clutch of willful hopefulness—which I am reminded of, since it comes as a ‘subject’ in this novel, partly. Anyhow, feeling together as we do, it is possible then to go out from that, for my own part, sans the fear of separation or criticism etc. So you were ‘expressive’—don’t worry! I always feel ‘at home’ with you both, you make it so simple to be so; and knew in that way you felt as you do.

That’s very good news that Bottom goes well, though Celia’s part now must be god knows difficult and tedious. Well, it will be much a world of you all, ‘in the best of all possible’—so that’s good, qua definition.

I wanted to tell you how much Paul impressed us. I love his wit and intelligence, and I think he makes a fine man—or will shortly, i.e., not to rush him. That’s good news about his own vacation. I hope this fall we can both come again, and too, that there will be more time to be with you all. I had wanted to ask him in particular about his sense of rhythmic ‘weights’ and what not in poems, as these relate to his apprehensions in music etc. Clearly, he knows what he is doing. Most to the point, I wish there had been more time to ask him about ‘rhythm’ and ‘time’ in either music or poetry, because we began to speak of that very briefly at the table; and I was quickly aware my own ‘definition’ was pretty much a ‘working’ one. There may not prove another, yet it would be interesting to have his sense of it, from his own use. So.

And really on and on, i.e., conversation with you is a great use and relief to me, and I have a hunger, always, for more. Tell me, please, what now seems possible for your Catullus translations, and too, how otherwise things go. I have written Cid to make my request for further issues of ORIGIN. And to compliment him, certainly, on the first one. I am wary at times of his ‘use’ of such things, yet can never forget his literal work and persistence. That’s rare, and very useful to us all. Anyhow I shall be looking for the three other sections of “A”—and keep at these now in hand, both book and “A”-13. Which is a lot. Ok. I’ll send a copy of that magazine with review once they have it done—it is, I’m afraid, a dreary one, full of Poetry Society people, but then, god willing, it will ‘say’ all the more in such context. I simply wish it could travel farther than such an instance, but that’s time enough, or there will be.

Thanks again. Please do write as you can. It is very good that you have some relief from that shoulder. I hope more comes in all senses. I will write again soon. We are settling each day more, and I think it all comes together again.

All our love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED AND HELENE DORN

1835 Dartmouth NE

Albuquerque, N.M.

October 9, 1961

Dear Helene and Ed,

I am very damn sorry not to have written. The poem is very good and I will like they say use it.

Anyhow I have to tell you of an impossibly tragic thing which happened. There was an accident involving Leslie, who had been out playing with Kirsten and some other children a week ago last Sunday on that mesa out toward Menaul. Apparently they were trying to build caves in that Embudo Arroyo bed, and the bank gave way and caught Leslie. We were able to get her out quickly but it was too late to revive her. I can’t think it possible to say so quickly but there is no other way. Kirsten was trying to dig her out when I got there, and after that the firemen arrived with a respirator and all that but it was no use. I think it was mercifully quick, and it matters that it was, I can feel that all that possibly could be done was done.

I think we are holding together. Simply the continuity of work and some literal obligation to keep together makes a great difference to us all. Kirsten seems to show no permanent effects. I was very damn worried that she should but she went back to school two days later, and as a child will, went on with her own immediate life thank god.

Anyhow I do not want you worrying about us. We are really all right and by the time you have this, I can say very truthfully, even now, that the worst of it all will have been accepted. It is just that so much possibility did exist in her, and such a wild and honest mind. So that says it, please.

I am very happy that things there are working out. Finally they will here too, I think. The job is good and simple, and I have been given a so-called honors class as well, which means sharp kids and some extra money too. A week from Thursday I’ll be going up to Toronto happily, and then to New York. That will be good. I’m hopeful of seeing Olson if a possible reading at Harvard works out, I don’t as yet know. Bobbie’s show is a great delight, it’s on for this month, and all in one place like that makes a wild sight. So.

Do damn well take good care of yourselves and write as you can. We think of you very damned often.

Our love to you all,

Bob

P.S. I’m pretty sure that the Hayworths are now in Taos

[Enclosed is the news article reporting on Leslie Creeley’s accident and death.]

•••

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

1835 Dartmouth NE

Albuquerque, NM

January 19, 1962

Dear Jack,

It was very very good to hear from you, i.e., I’d asked after you in New York both last summer and then this fall, but the time was always so short and people so vague, I could never locate just where you were. Anyhow I would give a great deal to see you—simply to talk, which same there seems increasingly less chance to do now, with the Dorns in Idaho, and another good friend, Ed Abbey left now as well—and so on. I have been teaching parttime at the local university since the fall, fair enough, i.e., I seem to be sufficiently unidentified for them to be polite and likewise to leave me to my own so-called devices. It takes off pressure of $$$, and involves me two days a week only. So that holds us for the time-being. The place, i.e., all this desert and space, I do love, and whenever I can make it beyond my own nose, there it is. So that’s a pleasure.

I wish you could get here. Phil wrote earlier you had thought of going there, and perhaps might be able to stop en route like they say. Anyhow please do, as and when, for whatever time is possible—you are very goddamn welcome. Ok.

We faced a bitter time in the early fall, which I in one way would rather not tell you of, but you are a friend and so I can’t not, in that sense. Our next to oldest daughter died in an impossibly sudden accident, no one could prevent, and yet it was such a damn deep shock and emptiness to get used to. I think we are now, at least the time passing helps no matter how much of an old saw to say it seems—well, it’s true. I suppose such things do in no bitter sense make life as much as any others. How to live without it, always that exposure which used to seem to me almost an ‘excitement’. I know a little better now and yet I cannot not feel that same exposure gives us all the possibility we have,—so. Again we are ok, I think the other children have not been painfully hurt by it—and our life does, I think, make it. That is a damn good thing.

Anyhow things continue. I have a book of poems coming out in April, and will get you a copy. I am trying likewise to get through a novel, old times in Mallorca, long ago enough to be malleable, etc—and when writing, it’s a pleasure—and when not, as lately, it hangs on me like a stone etc. So god willing I’ll have it done by summer. I was making home brew before I got too lazy, and that was wild, i.e., the luxury of having gallons of it around the house—great parties by the way. Ah well . . . I’ll have to do that again like they say.

So don’t be unhappy goddamnit. Ok. Viz get here and pull me out. That will keep you busy, and to see you again would be a real goddamn joy. Write as you can, and take care of yourself. I still vote wet.

All my love to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

1835 Dartmouth NE

Albuquerque, N.M.

April 6, 1962

Dear Charles,

I am very pleased, and very grateful, for that review of the book, i.e. no matter what he thinks to do with it, it’s there, like they say. I find the book itself continues to be somewhat unreal, I don’t finally think of things that way—I am god knows pleased, completely, to have it a chunk like that—pues, como mi vida you dig—but I continue to see it piece by piece, looking ahead so-called. Ah well . . . I think you give me everything I ever wanted, the help with and recognition of the use of self, the instant to instant sense of form. Likewise the energy term—I have never got to anything that made more sense to me than that sense of the real you made clear in THE ESCAPED COCK, the risk as in the note to those MR BLUE stories in the ND Annual, and the means and terms of energy in the PV piece, and all that you then made follow. God, I can remember you saying, look out for the ‘poeticisms’; and “And they shat in paper bags.” Ok. Viz you told me. No one else ever did. So. There could be no measure more than yourself for me. I thank you very damn much for that care, as god knows here, and all the time. Wow!

I got the job by god, they were terrific, i.e., I was as ever vacillating like mad, caught by being here literally somehow. After so much moving the past two years, when they made a counter offer here, having money etc equivalent, I was very tempted to sit, but the Tallmans refused to let me—was that great! So as of July we move out there, and it feels like a real goddamn place to be. T/ himself is a lovely man, really too much, that shy quick careful care of mind—sans the least stir of any biz of assumption. He reads us like a new language, i.e., all the rest seem finally preoccupied with their own information etc etc. So really it feels like a place at last, and as of a summer from now he speaks of their plans to make some sort of ‘writers conference’, seven weeks, but free of the muck usually present, i.e., he much wants yourself, as a center. Those people are really pushing to know something, a very lovely sound. I haven’t really met with such a push in people since the few at Black Mountain, as Mike, Ed, Dan, et al, back then. So that puts something ahead again, which is complete and solid pleasure. Here I’ve been ducking through doors, and hiding in men’s rooms etc. Not the greatest, despite no one has bugged me particularly—but the sluggishness does, and the face of a student who is awake would break your heart—for my part, it becomes immediately a conspiracy. So it will be a relief to be out of it. So by god. Bobbie likewise is very happy. We have no friends here, despite the good house—and that gets wearing.

Anyhow all is ok. I’ve been trying to get on with the novel, no poems in a long time but I can’t worry. It’s taken a long time to let emotions work again, after Leslie’s death, and I can’t as yet take hold of things by means of them—but again the prose makes a way into that, letting it come as a conjecture one thing after another, lets me both into and out of where we’ve had to be in the past months. I think in that sense we are all right. Again, I cannot thank you for such reassurance as the note on the book, viz it is everything. I can’t worry whether they use it or not, and/or I’ve got it. Ok. Write as you can please. If I can help with anything please let me know. We’ll see you for sure in June, so that at least gets closer. Ok. And thanks again!

All our love to you all,

Bob

There’s a little more time before taking this off to mail—I was thinking, perhaps it is the prose for me which makes the means again flexible, i.e., in poems a ‘manner’ many times tends to set, as against now, in the novel, the need to invent a form from what the ‘subject’ proves as written. Because the past year was a ‘hell’ of seen limits, I mean the accident in Guatemala, with the truck, killing the old Indian man by the side of the road, then on return here finding one of the boys I had taught with roughly two weeks to live, conscious of all as I talked to him, the will of that intelligence more persistent than any I have known and more innocent also, then the afternoon as we had to stand in the waste of the sand like a gravel pit in New England, watching Leslie’s body be recovered, first her shoes, then herself, with a ring of people on the bluff of the arroyo above the diggers and ourselves, with a TV camera man and all that hell of that invasion—I found myself in each instance thrown back to pure ‘seeing’, it was such an instant reality—and in perhaps the perversity of my own nature, or literally what the ‘I am’ is in animal term, I watched with such an intensity, even as I myself ‘did things’ I was all that perverse act of recognition, so hungry for the exactness of ‘sight’, so unable to shed any of the consciousness, even seeing in the last reference Bobbie in the same way, again myself frozen in the term of a receptor. I note that only to make reference to the ‘limit’ it has left in me which I refuse as ‘bitterness’—having at least come to have little interest in that—that is, I can only be alive is what I’ve come to know completely, and in others also, my own child or children now, too. I won’t say I know what ‘life’ is, how should I being ‘life’ as much as I will know I suppose, ever. But I am beyond any ‘reason’ for living, any sense of ‘plan’ that is, want only to be with it, people as real as trees and water, and only as ‘permanent’ as these. The pain is the distortion only. What one’s mind can acknowledge is perhaps even ‘horrible’ at times, but I cannot disavow it, and consider ‘acceptance’ almost as an arrogance, i.e., how can that be the point—if one lives at all. There can be no such ‘argument’ in what one is—but I will tell you, how very damn truly those words of yours were for me, just that afternoon, I mean a hand held that far to me, over that at times distracting distance of literal miles between us, of that, ‘I left him naked/ the man said and/ nakedness/ is what one means . . . ’ There is nothing that does not yield its beauty to that sight, not one human term that will not come true there. God knows thank you for all you have taught me to know—so never please think anyone could say more. Ok.

All love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO JACK KEROUAC

1835 Dartmouth NE

Albuquerque, N.M.

May 30, 1962

Dear Jack,

Goddamn huge confusions on us here, como se dice, as we get ready to take off for the east, then back again, then west north to Vancouver, where I’ll be working the next year. It looks like wild country up there despite rain, and we haven’t seen trees and green for some time now. So, it will be good. But the confusions of getting there, via New Hampshire etc,—ah well. Viz, On The Road With Wife and Kids—and why not . . .

I don’t really damn well know finally what Don Allen wants—because I haven’t heard from him now in some damn time, but he is off in Mallorca/Japan etc. So, good for him too. But if he says the anthology shot is off, viz the prose book, then off it no doubt is. He had said earlier he was seeing Barney Rosset in SF/LA and that’s when I haven’t heard from him since, pues. Anyhow who needs anthologies. I really think they muddle more than they help, or do at the moment. But then I was hoping a book such as planned might cut through the clichés of Herb Gold, Salinger, et al—that is the ‘proper’ ‘style’ sense of it, quite apart from what they write etc. Which I can’t myself make (viz I was trying a few days ago to read Mailer’s DEER PARK, and despite I think he does mean it, and does care, it was an awfully dreary thing to pay attention to, really . . . not that I mind tears either, but I hate the clichés etc etc.) Anyhow if I hear from him that anything is happening, I think those prose pieces you note would be very good to have in—so. Onward . . . And Don is a pleasure to drink with etc, so that I suppose is the point no matter.

This is late, but thinking of above, and fact I’ve been up to neck in people all year, viz students, you should know how they do hold on to you, as against Salinger for example, or simply the wise tone. In one thing, and they were sharp people*, they had been reading Huckleberry Finn, and I was trying to get them to say what they thought could stand with it, i.e., qua simply where things were, what, and why, and then how it felt to them—as it obviously did feel to them, for very damn real indeed etc. Anyhow that’s just where you came ^ [in. They could think of no one else who so thought of the world as such a “present” place.] As it happens, happily, Warren Tallman, who did that note on your prose in EVERGREEN, is the one who really got me into university, now, in Vancouver. And I was thinking of what he does say in said piece, of prose as ‘a sum of variations’ etc. That is useful to me god knows, and/or makes clear that people can still read etc.

Thinking of moving now, again, I feel it is a good time to make clear as well what I value in you, that beautiful life you bring up out of things. I really love it very much. And I love the way you love people. So, if a truck hits us etc, I’d want you to know that, like they say. Ok! Selfishly I wish you were going to be around New York. (And if by luck you are, you can get me c/o of John Chamberlain, 74 Strawtown Rd, New City, NY—from a little after mid-June till about the 1st of July etc.)

Lawrence F/ came through briefly, and I liked his shyness, and straightness. He is a simple man finally to please, I mean in the old sense of make comfortable. So we had a good time. Here I’ve felt too often like the only odd ball, and do it, working, so quietly, etc, that is whatever difference etc, it’s hard finally to find anyone to sit down with. So.

Anyhow god bless housewives, why not. Their laments make more sense than most things. They may even look out those kitchen windows etc.

Write as you can please. After mid-June, and trip east, you can reach me c/o Tallman, 2527 West 37th Street, Vancouver, B.C. Take good care of yourself.

All love,

Bob

[note in right margin] *It was actually an “honors” group reading Darwin, C. Wright Mills, “Ben Frank”, etc.

•••

LETTER TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

1835 Dartmouth NE

Albuquerque, New Mexico

June 4, 1962

Dear Bill,

I feel guilty about my silence, but have hesitated to write, god knows why, except my own confusions of the past months have kept me tongue-tied, and likewise divers work, as the teaching. But Denny had written of seeing you, and if thinking of you has managed, then I’ve been there as well.

It’s a miserably hot afternoon here, my wife is packing the house (Indian style!) while I’m ‘grading papers’—wow! It is a little heart-breaking, and endless—but one I just had read brought things back, to wit a girl writing of your DESERT MUSIC, awkward with this place but working her way through in a good, hard headed fashion, reading it, in short—which is the pleasure. For example:

“The laws of the world give a corpse, which may be represented by the form which is on the bridge, dancing with the music of nature, but only the poem can give the music which makes the form come to life . . .”

Or better, this tight shot: “The whole of the world prevents an escape from any part of the world . . .” Apropos your saying ‘I cannot vomit it up . . . ’

Then, a little later: “If he cannot vomit up the ugliness he will compose a poem, which will turn the ugliness into beauty. But, as Williams says, inspiration is nothing; the writing of the poem, or the “made poem,” produces a tangible idea . . .”

And then: “Now that the poem is almost made, the verb which has brought it into being detaches itself, and the poem is in existence; it is articulate. But before he had heard music in loneliness, and now he does not feel lonely when he hears it, for he is part of the music . . .”

Anyhow that’s a freshman, with that happy decent awkwardness, and with that, so to speak, it’s possible to work and/or to teach—or really to give something, if only my own confusions at times, that I can’t feel the imposed critical hierarchy, hence go by a process of ‘feeling’ equal to that of the students. What else.

We are moving, shortly, to Vancouver, B.C., where I’ve got a job for the coming year, and I think it may well be where we settle. I like the distance, and I like, too, the still open freshness of things there, and that possibility of any not as yet ‘settled’ place, etc. I was there briefly in February, reading, and found people very good, i.e., open, wanting to see things, and so on. Teaching, the most tedious and finally degrading aspect is that authorities grow apart from all the literal life of things on which they both feed and depend. It’s a vacuous, well, vicious, debasement of any use that otherwise might be there. Ah well!

Anyhow we do look to a life there, all of us. This past fall we lost our next to oldest daughter in a sudden accident, and that has left a residue of feelings hard at times to deal with—and the place tends to stimulate them, just now at least. Then too, there is a ‘way of things’ here that sometimes displaces me, it’s what I’d first taken as an ‘open’ manner on the part of people—but too often it proves simply a slackness or an assumption not easily accepted. For example, down at a shopping center near here the other day, I was sitting in the car, having bought some envelopes for some letters, anyhow sitting writing addresses on them a man suddenly was looking in the car window, sort of quizzically, and asked if I remembered having insulted him, the day our daughter died, having been caught in a fall of earth in an arroyo near the house—and if I wanted now to apologize. I was dumbfounded—apparently I’d pushed him away, or said something, god knows caught in that moment. And now, eight months later, he thought of all things to remind me of it, having himself apparently kept the ‘injury’ fresh in his mind all that time. So I insulted him again, I couldn’t think of any other fit response to him—I hardly understand what, even, he really wanted of me. So.

We are coming east for a brief visit, and I do want to call. I would love to see you again, but I wonder if that would prove an imposition—but I will call. I have thought of you again and again, the past months—very much so when my book came out, with your plug very generously to the jacket there. I hope you know what that meant to me. I can remember first writing to you, very scared, and then later meeting you for the first time, and your answer to my pretty shaky introduction of myself and comment that I was scared to death—‘what, of me?’ You’ve been very good to me indeed.

I think things strengthen, define themselves, or begin to. I feel they do among my generation and friends, and I hope things continue to work as they have these past few years. Lately I’ve been writing at a novel, trying to break through clichés of habit got in the poems—that is the book of poems even calls for a change, or so I’ve felt, and the prose gives me it just now. And all really does feel good.

I hope things are all right for you and your wife. It’s impossible ever to thank you rightly, but at least I can say it, thanks. You’ve really made a whole world possible for many many people.

All my love to you both,

Bob

P.S. Just going on with “grading”—one kid turns up with a wild phrase: “He was a natural athlete, morally speaking . . .” And a little later: “Stanton went down heroically, trying to save a lady’s maid larger than he . . .” They must really try!

•••

LETTER TO WARREN TALLMAN

The University of New Mexico

Albuquerque

English Language and Literature

June 12, 1962

Dear Warren,

To recapitulate, i.e., I wrote you last night, and now in the debris can’t remember clearly whether or not I got it mailed—I did mail a postcard, which is incomprehensible if you haven’t got the letter. Anyhow, briefly:

I’d be pleased to accept the post described, for the summer session ’63; and will do my best to persuade Olson to come also, when we see him shortly in Gloucester. (Please use that address for me, for any note you want to get to me quickly, about the 20th to 25th of June: Olson, 28 Fort Square, Gloucester, Mass.) I suggest otherwise these people, thinking of your own outline, and granting myself etc.

Myself	Olson	Tomlinson	(for the long period)
Duncan	Levertov/Zukofsky	Layton	(for the week etc).

I suggest Layton because I can think of no Canadian equal to him at present, for the purpose in hand; and too, he will get on with Olson and myself at least, from old associations on BMR etc. I suggest Tomlinson finally because he’s the best poet technically now in England, certainly of the younger—and will be close, hence more likely to come. And Logue, though pleasant, would not be very much for the context. I suggest Zukofsky/Levertov like that, because I favor each of them equally. I would think in fact that Zukofsky would be the more articulate teacher, but Denny has a larger following at present—and represents very clearly an active element of younger writers etc. So, that’s like that.

Or to take a chance: why not drop all English, shift Duncan to Tomlinson’s position, put Zukofsky in Duncan’s—and let it ride comme ca? Como no pues etc. Ah well.

Now apropos horrors of moving. Jesus Christ etc. I just found first registration given me, ‘temporary’ but legal, giving date of car registration as June 22, making it legal to bring our car in there sans duty then July 22nd, so that would be expected (give or take a day) time of arrival. Is that impossible? Please tell Eliott Gose I got and thank him for PRISM—and would be grateful for any help re settling once in. And also tell Frank D/ have his bk, much enjoy it, but too goddamn vague now to make sense—so will continue where left off on arrival. Then, could you call RR freight, in a week, or just before you leave, to say Creeleys will pick up or arrange for freight they have there on arrival as ‘settlers’ July 22nd or thereabts. So they won’t sell it etc. That’s abt it. I am really in fog, may forget all important bizness, but have feeling I’ve said this before, like, if I mailed that letter. I just mailed batch of huge xrays to Med/ Cent/ in Ottawa—like the Hall of Fame? So—crazy. And we’ll be in touch.

All love to all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ROSMARIE WALDROP

2527 West 35th Ave.

Vancouver, B.C.

Canada

August 17, 1962

Dear Mrs. Waldrop,

Thank you for your letter, and for the copies of your translations—which interest me very much, for example, how the rhythms seem held in the first verse of The Warning, or again, in the last of Heroes, etc. That’s quickly put and/or actually read on my own part, because my German is pretty hopeless—but anyhow I’m grateful for the care on your part. Ok!

Apropos your questions: “for love” in The Warning has the sense of, ‘for the sake of love’ and is, in that sense, free even of the qualification of ‘my love’. But certainly the association of ‘for love of you’ is also there, insofar as that is the specific relation etc.

Then, in The Hill, ‘but that form’ has for me the sense of, ‘but that way of being,’ ‘but that structure of a way of feeling and acting,’ etc. It implies a manner of acting and feeling, but one deriving from a whole way of thinking, as, earlier, I describe the ‘head’ as having been made into a ‘cruel instrument’ by this ‘form’ etc. Well, ‘gestalt’ may well translate it, I can’t see why not, but then I am no judge of the associations involved. Its ‘psychological’ implications would be accurate enough. Yet there is no implication of a ‘woman’ finally since that would ‘exteriorize’ this ‘form’ and what I most wish to stress is that it is an interior or inner ‘structure’—not one determined by outward terms, etc. Ah well! ‘Weise’ (still feminine?) might be more accurate, but again I’m only guessing.

I’d like to send something for Burning Deck—I enjoyed the last issue I saw, certainly. I’m embarrassed by not having written anything for some time now, distracted by being at work on a novel—and also the book tended to swamp me in a way. Anyhow I’ll enclose the one I do have, but you’ll find it pretty dense I’m afraid. What really concerns me now is to go back through all ‘manners’ or terms of my own thinking, as here the question of what existence things said have is god knows evident. Playing I guess upon that ‘how is it far if you think it’, to ‘how is it real if you think it’ etc. Sans, hopefully, dull assumptions. Well, it is clearly a way mainly of priming the goddamn pump etc. I hope you will feel very free to object, if it’s of no use to you and your husband. I can’t think, scrambled now as we are from just having moved here, who might usefully be sent or whatever notices of BURNING DECK. Really, I’d stick to those whom you yourselves feel close to—which is the point. Anyhow I’ll try to write again as things settle, and to send other poems as I have them. Thank you again for the translations and for your very kind interest.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

•••

POSTCARD TO JACK KEROUAC

Creeley

2527 West 35^th

Vancouver 13, B.C.

Canada

Jack Kerouac

c/o Blake

PO Box 700

Orlando, Florida

USA

November 25, 62

Dear Jack,

This is quick—but I just read BIG SUR and though I can hardly congratulate you on the pain it brings so close, it is a completely articulate, human, and beautiful thing you make clear. I.e., if it’s truth they want, that’s it. So—you make it. Just now, here, it’s like old New England weather I’ve been long out of, a misty evening, yet—fair enough, i.e., it makes one think, usefully. Things are ok. At times the teaching part gets dull—I do—but we stay centered—and/or here. Take care of yourself please. And thanks again for the risk of such truth. Ok.

All my love,

Bob