Part Four. Pieces, 1963–1973: New Mexico, Buffalo, Bolinas

[Top of page: hand-drawn star, Shine on! ]

Placitas, N.M.

August 30, 1963

Dear Paul,

It’s good as ever to hear from you. Here we are just coming down after the wild business in Vancouver—which I thought, finally, one of the wildest things ever to happen, to me at least: viz, 1) Black Mountain 1955–56; 2) San Francisco 1956; 3) Vancouver 1963—with then the spaces of literal singular friendships, as yourself that first time we met, the two and a half days talking, Laubiès in France, Gerhardt coming back from Germany, times talking with Ed Dorn—und so weiter. But it was a great time—i.e., it opened everything up again for me, and, selfishly, that matters a lot like they say. Otherwise, I think it was a common feeling. You’ll be getting reports there no doubt of varying kind, but I’ve never heard better readings of Charles and Robert, nor Dennie—who was really with it. And Allen was like a lovely damn open human being every moment of the way. Really, it was an extraordinary rapport for all concerned. Voila!

I’ll try to make some sort of short tape, for you, and get it off within a week’s time. Just now the Chamberlains are here with us, preparatory to moving out to Santa Monica at the first of the week, so things are swinging with that etc, and I don’t know what I can manage to do immediately. But I’d like to do it, very much, and will. Ok. And god knows thanks for thinking of me. (Charles must be, by this time, back in Gloucester, so you’d best get in touch with him there. Also Ed is of course in Pocatello—we had a good visit with him on the way back, likewise with Douglas Woolf—who is an exceptional man in all senses.) Does 8th Street have the novel on sale, i.e., Scribners told me the publication date was September 13th, so I was surprised by your note of it etc. But don’t buy it for christ’s sake, i.e., I’d like to send you a copy—the more so, since it’s of that place we both had a part in. Anyhow that at least seems now behind me, and I’m hoping shortly to get to work on another, of the time in Guatemala, just that it breaks any set locus of people, and makes the feeling of a kaleidoscopic ‘reality’ which I’m after this time. Too, I’ve got a contract to do a book now on Olson for that Twayne series [^ US Authors Series]—actually sort of a ‘handbook’ of 160–190 pp/ which is really best for me. I’m no good at the ‘further explication’ at all, at all. Anyhow that’s also to do, and god willing I’ll begin with poems soon likewise. That shot of Vancouver was what I needed very much.

So all’s well, if a little chaotic from all the travelling etc. I go to work here sometime next month it is, god knows likewise when. But they’ll tell me no doubt. I’m glad to hear things are going ahead with the Provencal book, and not disappointed, finally, that Macmillan won’t do it—because I think you can damn well find better. Ok. Take care of yourselves.

All love as ever,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

Placitas, New Mexico

September 13, 1963

Dear Ed,

I’m sitting here pues, in office, trying to kill time against same when I can go home—and the relief of that distance, despite drive to and from, is considerable, i.e., all the grey dusty tedium of having to be anywhere for no good reason is wiped off simply by that space opening up along that drive north, the mountains, viz just to get out. Ok. At least this year I’m given privacy, this room is in fact much like a cell, surrounded by empty bookcases—‘a home away from home’ I expect is the rationale etc—and a phone, which rings for two other people as well, elderly professors, and am tempted to leave it off the hook but lack the guts to, just to stop its ringing at times, and this huge office typewriter, which reminds me of that one we tried to get to you, i.e., big and solid, obviously my one friend here sans doubt. So. So, thinking of business, I have you now down to come sometime this fall, i.e., before Xmas say, and does that make sense for you? The assured payment is $100, and also, depending on what’s possible, it might well be that one or two of the other local u/s would want you to read also, upping same. But the damn point is, I hope not selfishly and impossibly, to see you. When things get more straight, we can work out best time etc.

I am very damn grateful to you for your letter re the novel, just come this morning, just before I had to come down here—so that’s on my mind, very much, and very happily. I have been sitting here also reading the Penguin RIMBAUD, which has a useful selection of letters etc, as the early one re ‘seers’ and that emphasis ‘je suis un autre’ which is part of that ‘I’ placement—or god knows one (I) never so ‘place(s)’ anything, or as R/ says also at that wildly early age: one is thought. The other lead for me, I think, must have been Stendhal, most in his journals, where the objectivity of himself is put as a ‘thing’ almost, and his sense thereof never somehow confused with his actual existence. Hence, cast in that way, ‘I’ finally sees the back of ‘my(s)’ head, etc. (I wonder if Dennie had that unconscious sense of person in that ‘With Eyes at the Back of our Heads’—probably not, but present poem re the ‘face’ of the body, the fact that front of a woman’s body makes: tits/eyes; bellybutton/ nose; cunt with hair/ a bearded mouth—and with that I make myself a cuntface no doubt. Etc. Well, I see said the blind man. Ok.)

Anyhow you let me think of the book as same, more and more—which is very useful right now, because I want to start another, before simply the habits of writing such a thing—for once in no ugly sense—I mean simply the sitting damn well down to—get faded out etc. I want to use that flux of Guatemala, beyond sociology god willing—beyond even committed sympathies of such an order—and/or to cast again, if possible. What I won’t have—and what will be in that way the new thing to learn—will be the presence of an ingrained emotional context; hence invention and feeling, in the actual moment writing, will have to play an even greater part than they do in the present one etc. But as you told me, way back, i.e., that I might trust simply the act of writing to find its own way, it did damn well work for this one, to wit, I found thinking found its way, and I suppose that also is why Joan gets in there, as you say, beyond a ‘criticism’ of her such as I might carry in my own terms of that ‘history’. Viz, in that sense, throughout the book, I never purposively understood what I was saying, and/ or was too pulled by saying anything, ‘just now’, ‘here’, etc, to let the intention of saying that ‘one thing’ ever get a warping hold etc. Ah well—but again, and again, and again: thanks.

I liked Dawn, I was very moved, uselessly, by the predicament she is in. I liked the other girl there less ‘pitiably’ simply that she is so much the nature of a woman, no matter what she ‘thinks’ etc. As you, I like that simple size and form. [^ I mean more than such literal feeling.] Anyhow there is not further point to any of it, thinking of the pillow I can’t now remember clearly ever having slept on (?). Somehow & where no doubt. But that is very damn good of her, again woman-wise, Dawn, to think, so:

Like murmurs

the weeds grow

faster—

Or something. And I really dig weeds, i.e., do, finally, associate my own nature with that term of growing. I was trying to think of the sun in any case.

Pero otra Adan oscuro esta sonando

neutra luna de piedra sin semilla

donde el nino de luz se ira quemando.

But another dark Adam sleeping there

dreams neuter moon of seedless stone far off

where the child of light will be kindling . . .

I.e., Lorca garbled between myself & Gili, again Penguin etc. That note of his on the duende is still there, certainly. But I was thinking of the hope and light sweetness of that name, for a girl, i.e., to give to one, Dawn—‘child of light’ against such ‘neuter moon of seedless stone’ etc. The darker thing, etc.

The goddamn office is killing me. Ah well. Hot. Dull. Sweat. And out the window a whole parking lot of dead cars etc. And some huge tinlike bldg which is making a constant roaring sound. A few cowed trees, and particularly a telephone pole with one of those cylindrical black things hanging from the crossbars, under the wires, like balls (?). Ok.

Last night Ken Irby came up—I do think he has had a breakthrough with that long poem he says you liked also—and I played him the tape of your Vancouver reading I hadn’t myself heard since then, i.e., just now copied from Fred Wah who had had it etc. That moves—viz, that ‘walker’ of yours I damn well respect, and how it makes the back & forth of any being here. So—that’s true.

We have got another house, better in point of inside room, enough outside as always—‘the whole world, boy . . . ’—and still in Placitas, which was my worst fear, i.e., that we’d have to get sunk again back in this city etc. Anyhow all’s well—except for dreary colds I’m just getting over and Bobbie is in the damn middle of. But we’ll be in sd house by another week at the most and can begin to distribute ourselves therewith, etc. So—it makes it. And you equally sound too swing. That picnic is really where I’d want to be, ever & a day pues. Take good care of yourselves, and do write, and don’t mind this rambling. Today is the day the novel comes out officially like they say: Friday the 13th -my sign.

All dearest love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO DENISE LEVERTOV

Placitas, New Mexico

October 19, 1963

Dear Denny,

If I may say, I’d like to depend on your sense of those poems I sent—which much reassures me. I’ve come to a kind of locked sense of things that compels me to tear up almost everything I write, of the last year—except for the novel finally, where my ignorance of the ‘formal’ possibility gave me actually a relief when I saw that things were ‘following,’ so to speak. But with poems—and somehow that summary quality of the damned book, in that sense at least, and all the damn talking about poems my job has pushed me to—I am falling presently over my feet, viz confusions, constantly. That was the ‘bankruptcy’ sense that got so insistent at Vancouver this summer I think. I hate what I know in my own work, I mean what’s there as a ‘skill’ and/or something I’ve accumulated almost as ‘information’. I can’t write a damn poem as an ‘example’ of ability etc etc. Well, you know.

So again—not to make you the goat pues, nor to be coy or whatever—I’ll trust you to know more really than I can, right now. I write the damn things when an hour later feel jesus I hate it, see the trick, feel the goddamn slip of ‘easiness’ etc etc. It’s not that I want it to be ‘hard’ but rather, want not to know so simply where the poem is, in that sense. I think it will get simpler shortly, as I get more relaxed about the whole business. The book again—with my New England nature—made the damn issue of, can you keep moving from what you have done etc. And there, you see, that ugly effort of ‘intention’ gets bitterly located at times. I think of Robert’s ‘be idiot awkward with it . . . ’ and that sense I too often lose to my own (present) self-consciousness etc. But anyhow, just that my life, like they say, does not become itself in a way I hadn’t really known before, is enough to trust to—and those ‘orders’ will come beyond all that my worrying can accumulate as resistance.

I think the two you take—as I remember, ridiculously in that I burned my copies etc—are best. The other was too damn simply a ‘Creeley’ poem. Damnit! Anyhow what you say of them shows me they were there—more than I ‘thought’. Ok.

This is quick—but I want to write so, to say thanks for your very helpful hand with same—and also that happily this Texas offer of a reading will I hope settle the problems you note in your letter. That pleases me very much, and selfishly it will be so good to see you both. (I think it will be a better time of year also, not so cold and all.) So that’s good. I saw a man from close to Presque Isle on television yet—a long way from home!—the other night, and got hopelessly nostalgic. I think we’ll contrive to get east for a year at least, as soon as we can manage it. I think it would be worth it for us all—because this space at times does get hard to fill with any human contact. Well.

Meanwhile all does go well, in that the job is simple—and fair enough people, and leaves much time free. And our house is comfortable, the children a real delight—and I feel clear in it all. So again I think things will come. Write as you can and I will.

All my love to you both,

Bob

Again re poems—I do want to touch things as fully and clearly as you are doing, from the given fact of your being a woman and then with your own nature equally—i.e., there is not other ‘place’ I respect from which to write. I have never intended to play tricks with such things, but whenever a way of saying something tends to habit, I get nervous—I mean, when my poems move in a manner I feel is the result of such habit, then I see no possibility being allowed. I suppose what I am now involved with is—curiously—learning to accept what I’ve come to, i.e., that I do write poems, and have to take that act as something less than amateur etc. But often it’s like trying to find whatever can answer that question, is it enough. Just now I’m caught by all that wants to say no.

P.S. As postscript to that poem for Allen—which I’d sent him before the goddamn reaction came etc—:

“B.C.

I was waiting for Eternals

superimposed on blue sky

and apartment building walls

I was in 15 years before

come back through future doors.

I can’t wait forever,

I didn’t and came back here

by myself feeling sure

lost in this University

with other males and females

looking in Creeley’s like eye,

and we all told similar tales.

Oct 14, 63

Dear Bob:

Battered that out last night, trying to approximate your style, the middle stanza almost makes it no?, but the last line sing-songs bad . . .”

I.e., Allen—who really I love very much, i.e., this side of him is so little recognized, all the way he tries, and studies, and thinks—and all the shyness therein. Anyhow that struck me, reading the above.

I read JUDE THE OBSCURE a few days ago—for a class that’s a good one, just open talking sans ‘program’—so-called ‘Honors’ etc. He is a wild writer—each time I read him, it hits—prose or poems. Just that reach of his emotions is so deep—it rides through all the ‘style’ of that ‘period’. Anyhow that was a recent pleasure.

Otherwise sitting here listening to twist music, e.g. “I got my job through the New York Times . . .”

•••

LETTER TO LEROI JONES (AMIRI BARAKA)

Placitas, New Mexico

October 21, 1963

Dear Roi,

Your book takes on so much it’s hard to speak of it very simply, like they say. I’ve meant to write for weeks now, but the damn confusions of moving again made me wait to see if some sort of time would come, to think of it free of all that distraction. Anyhow—and/or to hell with that—it really carries a lot, and I’m very goddamn impressed that you could keep it all together as you do.

The parts literally dealing with music, e.g. how this or that manner or form comes to develop, seem to me held on to clearly enough. Again, because of what the book covers, your way of doing it has to be quick, but the use of what you quote, or actually the social sense you keep emphasizing—i.e., what the distinctions were in that place, like ‘dirty’ blues as against the parodies etc that come of it—works for me very clearly. I am most interested finally—as I think you are—in that sense of it, and the music makes a sharp context for thinking of that history where it is, as apart from any generalizing sense of ‘understanding’ in a specious and god knows ugly sense. Again, all the details, such as the way your grandfather, moving north to Pennsylvania, met with a wall, keep one’s own feelings in reading ‘local’—and that, to me, is a great pain. Curiously enough, it is, again for me, only in those parts where you are obliged to cover quickly a lot of detail re the music per se, e.g. ‘bebop’, that things lose that particularity—just that the manner does there become of necessity ‘objective’ and reasonably enough ‘cataloging’ as opposed to those sections—as when you talk about the fear of the middle-class negro of that threat of the newcomers, etc, or of all those distinctions of feeling and position (those quotes re the twenties novelists, for example, say more in themselves than ‘talking about’ ever could)—where you are moving on the terms of your own feelings and involvement.

The last way seems akin to what gets such location in the ‘Crow Jane’ poems for example—which impressed me very much. Or in the Dante book, etc.

Anyhow, I think you make it altogether, in what must have been somewhat the confines of the ‘text’, call it. I mean, the set of such a book to begin with. I think in that way the book which they note you are at work on, the whole situation of the present negro intellectual—the ambivalence of where they can be, thinking of that middle class again, which you make so clear—will let you center more closely on your own concern. Which to say is presumption, but I could hear you all the way through this one with that very much in mind. Ok!

I just had word from Charles about you, Ed and Bob Kelly’s scene at Buffalo next summer. That ought to be wild—i.e., that really seems the place to me, viz I don’t mean ‘Buffalo’—I mean you there as such a center. The one limit at Vancouver this summer was that we were working re people of what comes after you, and that skip at times displaced me, for one. What I mean is, without you, Ed, Bob et al as the ‘sequence’ literally there, it’s very hard to ‘place’ anything. So again, it ought to be a great summer in Buffalo.

I am in slough of sorts, not hopelessly—but just that we have been moving about so damn much the past months. But the house here now is ok, and job is simple and fair enough etc. So, all’s well. This is quick but I have already been too long about it, like they say. Write as you can please and let me know what’s happening.

All best as ever,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO CLARK COOLIDGE

October 26, 1963

Dear Clark,

Don’t worry so much! Viz onward! The fact you write is all the reason that is—‘sanity’, ‘cause’, or otherwise. I thought you people were going to start something—not to bug you, but do keep moving—otherwise things begin to clog, and one is left stuck etc. Anyhow you make it, viz poems—so that’s a blessing? How about counting them . . . Wow! But really, let’s do laugh. Take care of yourselves and give my best to friends there.

All best to you both,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ALEXANDER TROCCHI

Placitas, New Mexico

November 1, 1963

Dear Alex,

Your letter just reached us, and what a damn deep pleasure it was, first, to know that all keeps moving and that you are all right, like they say, and then the very damn generous sense you give me of the novel.

Even more as much goddamn lovely was the way your letter and the outline of what you are planning came here, i.e., I’d just finished Whitehead’s Science & Modern World for so-called class business*, Ed Dorn had just read two nights, and had been very centered on whole political fantasy, and all the sense of things got this summer in sudden concordium (as Olson called it) of people at Vancouver—and think of that re ‘place’: Allen G/, Olson, Duncan, Denise L/, myself, and the people who came drifting in from all over Canada and the States for gig on so-called poetry but what was much more: history as one telling the story, proprioception, cells,—or, to save time here, simply what you put as “What is to be seized . . . is ourselves.” [note in left margin: *I’m teaching at UNM, which is simple enough for time-being and keeps us eating.]

It’s no damn coincidence that all who were there were wailing right down that line, even to literally the issue of university as no ‘place’ or ‘institution’ but the literal instance of persons. Well, I hear you, like they say—and will be very pleased to give whatever help I can be.

Let me note people immediately who’d be I think interested, and some you’ll know but may have lost track of for the moment, as Allen:

Allen Ginsberg, c/o City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave, SF 11 (and send him several of the off-prints, so he can pass them on to Ferlinghetti, McClure, etc—who will be equally interested. Also, Don Allen is starting new magazine, and might well be useful: 1815 Jones Ave, SF). [note in left margin, with arrow drawn to “Ginsberg”: He’s going to NYC for Xmas, so write him quickly.]

Charles Olson, Wyoming, New York—I’d think him a very useful root, simply that his thinking is primary in just this center you hope to actualise, and I hear that word in your thinking, as Whitehead, as Olson also insists on it, etc.

Edward Dorn, 10B Pocatello Heights, Pocatello, Idaho—the sharpest younger man on issue of politics, not as ‘subject’ but as defunct process you again note (and I had chance to give him the extra copy of the offset happily).

W.S. Merwin, Lacan de Loubressac, par Bretenoux, Lit, France—he’s been much concerned with political maze lately, i.e., of last KULCHUR or earlier issues of THE NATION—and would usefully widen context simply he is outside the reference we usually make?

Stan Brakhage, c/o Nauman Films, Custer, South Dakota—a wild filmmaker, intelligent straight man, and again useful as further context—and I think he’d hear what you are saying.

John Chamberlain, 123 Oceanway, Santa Monica, Calif—very good man, great goddamn sculptor/painter, and old BMC friend—so he might come in, though he reasonably takes the whole political term as hopeless as we have it here—so might shy away from any apparent concern therewith, but still I think he’d get your point.

Then a group in Mexico City, which in turn could turn on rest of SA/CA groups: Margaret Randall, EL CORNO EMPLUMADO, Apartido Postal Num. 26546, Mexico 13, D.F. They are organizing, for example, “LA CASA DEL HOMBRE” which “plans a self-sufficient center on the outskirts of Mexico City, open to those who wish to come, etc . . . We direct this idea to the artist, feeling he is the social and spiritual conscience of our time, and realizing that the time for centers of nuclear investigation is at an end: the time for a new and living creativity has arrived . . .” Anyhow they get the point. Allen, again, will have much of this activity located from his own travels etc.

Anyhow—that much just to get started, and I’ll pass on word to people as I write etc, and you tell me what, again, I can do. As so-called statement, beyond self-satisfaction etc:

“History is the act of each one of us. I cannot admit longer to forms which are not of that reality. I insist that we become ourselves.” Well, fuck such abstractions no doubt—but anyhow, let’s go!

Thanks for the warning re Calder. I’d heard (from Don A/) he was a pretty weird one, and got nowhere with him when he first wrote me directly etc. But Scribners’ agent there, Curtis Brown, will at least be watching him for terms of contract, i.e., he’s now signed to do three bks, novel, short stories, and poems, over next 2 yrs beginning spring—so when he goofs on that, I can at least get clear, if and as he does etc. He thot he had serial rights for pre-publication but they called him, so that’s why he’s being so bitchy re that no doubt. Ah well. Write as you can—take care of yourself. It’s a damn deep pleasure to be back in touch.

All love to you all,

Bob

[note on envelope] P.S. I very “innocently” sent your note re the novel back to Calder via Marion Lobbenberg—with note you were old, dear friend—and your generous comment might prove excellent for publicity, etc,—At least we can have that pleasure. ¡Onward! Bob

•••

LETTER TO ANDREW CROZIER

Placitas, New Mexico

November 15, 1963

Dear Mr. Crozier,

Thanks for your good letter. While I remember, The New Review I’d mentioned is one to be edited here by Donald Allen (who edited the New American Poetry anthology), 1815 Jones, San Francisco. From a note of its contents sent me by him, I think it will be very useful—particularly for reference to Olson’s present work, etc. Kulchur is, as you say, often ‘local’—and of course here that serves a purpose—and really what I thought should be of use to you is the material by Duncan, Dorn, Zukofsky, and a few others. But if you can see it there, even in bookstores, I think that should serve you well enough. As yet there is no definite publication date for Olson’s new sequence of Maximus. You probably have the earlier book, published by Corinth/Jargon (Jonathan Williams). Do you know his Melville criticism, Call Me Ishmael? That was printed by Grove.

The people there I’ve been more or less in touch with are Tom Raworth—but not for a time now, Ian Finlay, Michael Shayer for a time when Migrant was still printing, and presently Charles Tomlinson, whom I much like and who is to edit an issue of an Oxford magazine on the so-called Black Mountain school, Alex Trocchi whom I’d known in Mallorca and Paris and whose present plans much interest me, and Martin Seymour-Smith, another old friend from Mallorca—and then odds and ends of people from time to time, as Jeremy Prynne, and divers editors there who write now and then. Of course Jonathan Williams spent the last year there and gave me a fairly wide sense of what was happening. I had met Robin Skelton while in British Columbia last year, and Carne-Ross, whom I didn’t like, a while back in Texas etc, but only, happily, for a very fractured evening. And so on. I did have chance this summer to talk at some length with Charles Tomlinson, and got his sense at least of what was happening there. I like and trust him, and think he has certainly been sensitive to American practice far more accurately than others. Thom Gunn I met briefly in San Francisco last fall—there was no real sense of much happening, but then I only paid his class a brief visit, in company with Robert Duncan—and he politely enough let us do the so-called talking, etc. But this may, in any case, give you some sense of my relations there, etc.

Your mention of Burroughs suggests you might have interest in a new anthology of prose edited by LeRoi Jones, called The Moderns—and published by Corinth, which is literally the 8th Street Bookshop. It has work by a variety of people, i.e., Ed Dorn, Douglas Woolf, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rechy, Selby, Mike Rumaker, myself, etc. I think it’s a good cross section of these writers—with some I would not have included, but then also with Fee Dawson, for example, whom I very much like. So it is useful, and the first of its kind, certainly. There’s to be another brought out by Grove, edited by Don Allen, early next year I think, though the publication date hasn’t been set. I helped with quite a bit of the editing, but then had to withdraw, not so much from any argument with him but for reason of not wanting to offend another friend whose work Don couldn’t accept etc. Ah well! Anyhow that might prove interesting to you. I do like Burroughs, by the way,—I suppose I read him primarily as another writer, and find his ear, for one thing, extraordinarily accurate and close, and I like also his pacing, i.e., the collage effect he achieves. As social program perhaps it’s something else again, but, again, I find his preoccupations god knows useful. What he isolates as volatile terms I respect, for example. I think Alex Trocchi has the more developed political sense (as Ed Dorn points out) but Burroughs also very much impresses me, very much as a writer. I don’t want, otherwise, really to say more of William Stafford. I.e., he is a decent man, certainly, and your taste will prove as accurate as mine, and then, I read him as an American—and of course shy from the generalizing ‘we’ of his poems, and the personifications of ‘nature’, wind, mountains, et al, and question the overlay of his rhetoric. It is much more Frost’s that Williams’, by the way. In fact, I see no relation at all between him and Williams, because the sense of form, and especially line, is very different. Again the parallel seems to me Frost, with a heavy overtone of the Ransom-Tate school, certainly very familiar here, etc. Well, no matter, in any case. It’s a pleasure that you are reading as widely as you are—which is the point. Anyhow, if you draw your conclusions from formal aspects, instead of contentual whatever, that really will give you sufficient ammunition to qualify the fellow studying Pound.* I’m surprised he, of all people, can’t make those distinctions, i.e., what does he think Pound was making a point of, etc. So . . . I’m pleased to hear the poem was of use. I hope all goes well for you, and thanks again for your letter.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

*Ask him about Zukofsky and Bunting—to whom Pound dedicated Kulchur, etc. Does he know their work?

[note on envelope] Do you know Paul Bowles’ work as a composer, novelist, e.g. The Sheltering Sky et al? He’s not really so simply a disciple of B/s—much more a friend apparently. [illegible] is younger—and perhaps more as you suggest, but again, that does simplify. C.

•••

LETTER TO DENISE LEVERTOV

Placitas, New Mexico

November 16, 1963

Dear Denny,

I have mixed feelings about trying to review the Cantos (wow . . . ), simply that I don’t feel the background like they say called for. I would like to do it in a way—just to find out if only for myself what there has been in them for me, selfishly enough. But I had a lousy experience with Hatch the last time I tried to review—and I wanted to do as well as I could, i.e., it was Williams’ Pictures from Breughel. But my first attempt he in effect rejected, on the grounds of ‘difficult’ style, and suggested changes of manner etc. So I tried it again, to my own mind much watering down the original by the attempt to make it ‘clear’ for I don’t know whom at all, finally. But let me show you, since I still have both copies. Viz, for example:

1st: There is no simple way to speak of this book. It is so singularly the work of a man, one man, that it moves thereby to involve all men, no matter what they assume to be their own preoccupations . . . (Then I quoted the opening few lines of The Yellow Flower.) The insistence in our lives has become a plethora of plans, of solutions, of, finally, a web of abstract commitments—which leave us only with confusion. Against these Dr. Williams has put the fact of his own life, and all that finds substance in it . . .

2nd: There is no simple way to speak of this book. When a man makes something so much the fact of his own life, then we are all of us involved because each life is first of all that singular . . . (Now reading that, I don’t clearly know what the hell it means! As against at least the snap, and feel, of the first draft—which was my way at least of putting it, etc. Then the quote again noted.) What we have been told too often to care for in our lives are the plans, tomorrow’s solutions, what we can look forward to, and no one speaks of what is to be seen, right now. But that is what there is, to speak of. Against the confusions which come of a blindness to that fact, Dr. Williams puts the things he sees, feels, knows, in the life given him . . .

I think the manner of ‘spelling out’ really did lose much of the whole point of the comment, and I hated it the more since this was my chance to make my own respect of his work completely unequivocal and declared—and as it was, the last chance—and I am bitter in that sense that Hatch had to put his damn finger in. In fact, when he came to print it he changed my title of The Fact—which I felt put it as straightly and flatly as Williams might himself, and I was no doubt even unconsciously punning on the title of a poem of his I’ve always loved, The Act—anyhow he changed the damn title even to The Fact of His Life—which is then pretentious, and somehow condescending to my own feeling, or rather to my sense of what I wanted to say. Ah well! But can you help me with this dilemma to this extent—ask Hatch if he will accept a manuscript you yourself find acceptable, since I am sure we can work out whatever obscurities etc come up without having such a completely different kind of mind and intention so inconsistently present, as Hatch’s etc. That was the damn problem, i.e., he kept saying I had very interesting things to say, etc etc, but that my way of saying them was confusing. I wondered of course how he could find ‘interesting things’ if he then made the point he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. Anyhow I would like to stay clear of him in all senses, supposing that can be possible. I would like in any case to do all I can, and I am flattered, very much, you think I could handle such a book—again wow. And I really would love to have again a sympathetic context in which to write such notes, i.e., to be so used. Well, I’m game, then, if you are—and there must be some way to get around Hatch. And I’ll also try to keep my ‘manner’ as open as I can—pues. But I did want to mention that earlier difficulty with him, because he might now have that opinion of my way of saying something stuck in his head so that whatever I say becomes that occasion for his concern.

I hope I’m not reflecting simply a lousy mood here. I don’t think so—but it has been a bleak week, first our dog getting hit by a car, breaking his hind leg, so he has to drag around with a pin in it, a hellish business—as you’ll certainly know from the problem with your kitten. I hate animals caught in such businesses, especially this lovely damn patient one, with his huge embarrassed size. Well. Then we had got all excited about the possibility of getting finally some land north of here, cheaply, with chance then for putting a house on it etc—but find our credit extends only to the value of our car, and that for 12 months etc etc. Fuck it. But it was bitter to have it so close and then to have so firmly made clear that our sort is not the sort etc. Then, as a sort of endsville, I’ve somehow got entangled in a business with Cid re the novel, which he doesn’t like, and says he feels ‘something is missing’—and that of course is like waving a red flag in front of me, i.e., I scream you son of a bitch WHAT’S MISSING—and so here we are, locked in parallel moralisms no damn doubt. But he so much always tells me, ‘next time . . . ’ Well, you know—and I can never get through to him enough, or he to me, I guess—and I feel ten years old again, having tried but well perhaps the next time will show improvement. And—god! He can frustrate me more simply, and more completely, than any man I’ve ever damn well met—and make me feel guilty to boot! I suppose I should simply acknowledge him as a most personal saint, and have done with it. He also speaks of the tinge he feels in the book’s look, etc, of ‘business’ and ‘commerce’—and again I blanch redly . . . Today we didn’t even have four goddamn dollars and ninety eight fucking cents to buy a fuse switch for the wiring here, and he tells me I’ve sold out—or he doesn’t, just lets it drift in as it were with the breeze. So—all’s well, actually, entirely—and I feel fine! Robert just did write, after the same long silence—and he keeps to that sense you note—so I assume all goes ahead in that way. Shortly I guess we ought to think of literal poems, in the way you note—I think that would be very good, and I agree Robt will be our most useful help with it. I can barely remember my name, most of the time—and my own suggestion to you both would be, read it all, it’s goddamn lovely, I want it ALL. But we’ll make it. Ok! This is quickly written pues, but I’m anxious to get back before Uncle Wiggly etc. All our love,

Bob

[notes in left margin of p. 1:]

P.S. I’ll hand on that letter to Chris M/- she’ll be very pleased to have it. No proof of those two poems as yet, but that’s no problem. I’m a little curious now to see them again—and thanks again for saving them for me. Ok!

One wild thing—Robt and Scribners are apparently pretty settled now on what’s to be the book for them- and they are very happy with it, and I think he equally is. ¡So!

[Bobbie Creeley’s notes in margin of p. 1:]

Dear Dennie and Mitch—I’m enclosing 2 collages the size I’m working now—I hope you like them—love Bobbie-

Robt mentions in letter he heard from you about me sending poems etc—so it does go around. I’m so damn shy at the moment—but things do open. Thanks again.

[note in left margin, p. 2] I’m very interested in these poems of yours now that center in such a close character of person—as body—I think they are moving something very deeply. As in Vancouver: Our Bodies: Hypocritic Women—and the one with the boat image bumping the pier. They are parallel in part to one I’ve always loved: THE FIVE DAY RAIN. I like too the grace of the shorter one—it’s a lovely formal “set” it has I think. Please keep coming, like they say. Shortly I’ll hope to as well. Again this “A Psalm Praising the Hair of Man’s Body” is very lovely.

[Enclosed are the poems “I” (CP I, 279) and “Something” (CP I, 281).]

[notes in margin near the poem “I”:]

These are just two recent, the first from actually a clipping that came in a Belmont paper re the novel, which actually (actually) was the history of my grandfather who lived there plus a brief note on my father also. Viz the review had smaller heading: Grandfather Was Selectman, and refers to the outset as, grandson of onetime Belmont market gardener writes first novel, etc. It was a pleasure!

Among other things trying to “dislocate” “I” in some sense at least. I sent this to Don Allen for that new magazine of his, but I don’t know as yet if he’ll use it.Some of these rhythms, curiously, seem to go back to poems I was writing in the late ’40s.

[notes in margin near the poem “Something”:]

I sent this to Ed Sanders – the nearest I seem to get to his context – ah well!

Later I thought of Williams “Turkey in the Straw”—again a lovely one! He really runs all through my head. But I am clearly the more tentative man—I suppose even intentionally.

•••

LETTER TO TOM RAWORTH

[Placitas, NM]

February 7, 1964

Dear Tom,

Thanks for your good letter, and the copy of that translation, such as it was—that was the poem I’d remembered, particularly the last verse, and that reference in Olson’s The Death of Europe is, I think, to the young man riding, i.e., his “I praise you/ who watched the riding/ on the horse’s back . . .” Anyhow I made one or two small changes, just for the sound as follows:

A VOICE

Softness, and you dumb . . .

Bells from a mountain

want to come here . . .

I sing.

My night is lonely,

my voice sans guts,

water spits on my rights,

tongue twists . . .

The air’s warmth . . .

a syringe.

No metal, no dreams.

The water’s red is a blood red,

and the seraphic beauty

a young man

on the roof tree

riding . . .

The sun’s march

is by dogs escorted—

the march of the earth

by a rosy hurricane.

I remember there was an idiomatic use involved in that ‘water spits on my rights’ and ‘tongue twists’ but I can’t find the original, nor Rainer’s letter in comment on this translation—he had a diagram if I remember with hands cupped or ‘fisted’ over the ‘I’—anyhow, blocked was the point there, and I liked the ‘water’ as a primary ‘natural’ blocking the personal order etc.

I’m glad to hear that your job and all go better. You certainly deserve, like they say, an easier time of it. And you sound god knows as active there as ever: wow! I will look forward particularly to Ed’s and Fielding’s work.

One thing before I forget, Renate Gerhardt is now active as a German editor and small publisher. I think you could reach her easily enough c/o Rowohlt. I don’t know what she might feel about the memory of Rainer now—the last days of their marriage must have been very painful, but I’m sure she’d be interested to know of your issue on him—and might do a short note on their work together then, both translations and publishing. Then—there was a translation of Brief an Creeley und Olson in an issue of Origin, first series—I don’t have the copy, but I’m sure the library here does, and I could get you one if that interests you?

Your new baby must be there now: wow again! It’s our Kate’s birthday today, five years old—I remember all the Dorns arrived that day five years ago now, i.e., time! Actually she was born the 6th, and we slid it to this Saturday (actually it’s the 8th . . . ). Ah well! But it’s wild to watch them grow.

Things seem to be moving a little again here. I’m thinking of an issue of Northwest Review to come, with a great deal of Olson’s work, both reprint and new—most usefully. The same magazine is now printing Ed regularly. Then there are an increasing number of small ‘newsletters’ that keep things open—and Kulchur plans an issue on Zukofsky’s work shortly. So . . . Otherwise I’m still myself moving in crabwise fashion, somewhat obliquely, but at least writing poems again which is a relief. I’ve heard nothing further from Calder about anything—typical, i.e., he comes on, then fades—but contracts at least hold him to the publication of the various books etc. Anyhow if more works out re coming, I’ll certainly see you there, which would be terrific. Do write anyhow as you can and let me know how things are, and if I can ever be of any help, you say.

All our love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO STAN BRAKHAGE

Placitas, New Mexico

March 28, 1964

Dear Stan,

I’m awfully sorry to hear of difficulties there. I enclose a check—like they say!—I hope as some sign at least. I’d just been reading, in the Village Voice, of what had happened, and it looks bleak indeed. It may well be it’s Authority’s way of getting back at the freedom presently in publishing, where it seems this influence is now almost completely embarrassed—e.g., Poetry, which is certainly conservative, will now take work with such reference, making no comment; to wit, from a recent poem I’d sent them and they’ve taken:

. . . At night it

is the complex

as all things

are themselves and

their necessity,

even sexual. So

cunts and cocks

as eyes, noses, mouths,

have their objects:

hermaphrodite, one

sexed, bisected

in that lust . . .

[from “The Dream” (CP I, 300)]

I hope some such sense is equally soon allowed in films—well, it has been surely, well before its equivalent in writing in some instances. Again, were there larger film distributors to take on the issue also, the effects would balk this kind of power, etc. Grove, for example, as Robt points out, embarrassed this move by publishing so quickly so much of this material the moves to stop it could not keep up—and finally the whole ground of what’s the qualification of ‘obscenity’ becomes embarrassed because it cannot qualify its intentions, even. Anyhow you probably know that there was a showing of Flaming Creatures in San Francisco, at a local, neighborhood ‘foreign films’ theater—in fact, two showings, at six and nine, sans any incident. It was there only one night, as part of a ‘festival’ program, but nonetheless, there were apparently no complaints.

I’m sorry not to have written in so long. That lovely abalone shell and ‘magic mountain’ came safely—thanks! We have had a good year, in fact all goes very well. I’ve got a Guggenheim for the coming year, which means that everything opens out ahead. We’ve also found a good house here we think to buy—on interminable ‘time’ but no matter. I’ve asked Betty Kray to send you tickets for that reading, and will certainly see you all there. It’s been too damn long! So, this is quick, but do take care of yourselves and let us know what happens, and I’ll see you in just about three weeks.

All our love to you all,

Bob

•••

TELEGRAM TO CHARLES OLSON

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

AWSX BUE"025 NL PD = ALBUQUERQUE NMEX MAR 30 =

= CHARLES OLSON =

= WYOMING NY =

= WE ARE VERY SORRY. PLEASE KNOW WE ARE WITH YOU. ALL OUR DEAREST LOVE =

BOB.

915A MAR 31

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

Placitas, New Mexico

April 1, 1964

Dear Charles,

I don’t want to intrude with any sense of question, but must say to you how very very shocked and sorry we are at the news of Betty’s death. I really cared for her and I very much hope she knew it.

But I love you so deeply, and necessarily for my sense of my own world, that I’ve got to insist that you not be hurt impossibly. Please tell me anything I can do—which is an impossible thing to ask, but as you will know, I’m here for whatever use or help I can be. That way, there is no need to write or anything else. I’ll hope to see you very soon, but that too—if it isn’t simple for you—is of no matter.

You are so much in the world of all that I know, please take care.

Our dearest love to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ALEXANDER TROCCHI

Placitas, New Mexico

July 16, 1964

Dear Alex,

Forgive the long silence—we moved the past month, and the usual chaos, like, followed. But in the meantime I’ve heard, as you must have, that Ferlinghetti plans to print one of your statements in the next issue of his Journal for the Protection etc, which circulates very well here. And I’d suggest also you get in touch with Lita Hornick, KULCHUR, 888 Park Ave, New York etc, since she would be interested, I think, to print such comments as you now want read—and again her distribution is active.

Otherwise, I’ll be of what use I can. Having just seen, like they say, the Republican convention here, politics of that order seems to me to have become an instance of physics, i.e., screw & lever etc—not that it actually is much else in any case, with all respect. But I question staying within the conceptual frame of such thinking—I feel that CORE and like groups are limited imaginatively, in this sense, no matter how effective they may be in local protest. But such friends as LeRoi Jones, for example, want not the ‘white man’s burden’ but an actively redefined sense of place in no way the complement or stereotype of white definitions, etc. I don’t see that as yet they provide the terms except in negation—but nonetheless I feel them right as such reaction at least. ‘Reform’ is too simply an instance of recoil, before the next shot etc. Or so it does come to seem from this place. (In contrast—I much respect Allen Ginsberg’s contemporary activity in politics—again very local, and making, at base, an active ‘fantasy’ of the content proposed by institutions as presidents etc. Likewise Olson in recent work.)

That book you note sounds very interesting. Will you tell me please when it’s available? I.e., the anthology of writing on drugs. Ok.

I was very flattered and pleased to hear a photograph of one of your sculptures is used for the jacket of The Island. I.e., that’s a pleasure, and useful sense of old times as well. Now I hope to god they manage to get the book itself out, at last—announced for March, and now mid-July etc etc. Onward . . .

I’m coming over in October, and will hope/plan to see you then. It’s been a long time and as ever letters don’t make it enough. But, selfishly, do keep writing as possible, and let me know what I can do. I like the poster idea—I think a form of that kind could be very sharp, even to jog with ‘strangeness’, as close to the generality [^ viz. The People . . . ] as possible—well, why I dig Lenny Bruce etc.

So, take care of yourself and I’ll see you. Voila.

All love as ever,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

Placitas, New Mexico

July 26, 1964

Dear Ed,

I sent off the ms/ to Tom Raworth, and hope it’s of use. Thinking of what he must be up against as fact of day to day life like they say makes me feel depressed and useless—but anyhow I hope something as this makes it.

Just now hearing reports of rioting in New York and Rochester—and also of possibility in Buffalo—what sense do you get? The Goldwater nomination was such a cold duck, the political distances seem absolute. TV at least gives some sense of the police in so-called action, and NBC report makes clear the officer was not in uniform and continued shooting after the boy had been hit, and that the knife was a pen knife—and is clearly hostile to Wagner among others. But that too becomes descriptive somehow, i.e., there seems little effective ‘power’ interested in doing more than try to ‘return it to normal’ etc. But again, I’d be very interested to get your sense of it there, thinking of, as you note, the reaction to Roi’s living in that neighborhood (Buffalo) earlier.

The house we’re in is up that dirt road that branches off from the highway past the church. It’s a good one, i.e., roomy and sufficiently rambling to make enough privacy for us all. We are putting on one more bedroom in a kind of curve by the road, and that damn well done, I think it will be great. We ran out of money so it lacks final plastering, and finishing roof, but I think we’ll make it ok.

There have been people through, Gary, Mike M/, Don Allen, etc—as I think I told you—so have not done much beyond odd jobs and/or I can’t yet get with the novel pues. Then the work going on outside cuts off a sense of privacy I seem to need. But things feel ok and I’m not in that way worried, for once.

I’d love to have heard you all reading. Was a tape made and would there be any chance at all to get a copy? I have never heard John and have missed that a long time. I really dig very much his present work, all that I’ve seen. He really sticks.

Likewise, I liked sections of Gil’s long poem in WILD DOG, the last one, very much—I liked it all in fact, and parts especially, i.e., the way it went, like they say, in the so-called form. He sounds steady again.

Most unhappily, Bobbie’s father died suddenly the 15th, a repetition of the first heart attack while driving to Ruidoso with his brother. He was only 48—but not simply as rationalization, I think he would have hated the limitation of the continued heart trouble and clearly it wasn’t going to stop. It shook the family—it hardly seemed possible, and he was a very decent and innocent sort of man.

Forgive the jumpiness of this letter but selfishly I want to keep in touch. Let us know how you all are and enjoy yourselves despite humidity etc. I really wish we were there, to talk and all—but ironically it’s wiser that we are here.

Our love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

Placitas, New Mexico

December 29, 1964

Dear Louis,

Forgive my long silence—really the effect of all the confusion of moving about in October/November, and then, on return here, the kind of persistent restlessness that followed as the aftermath. I did get the copy of After I’s you were kind enough to send, very gratefully—and love as ever the clarity, and the light (light) way it all makes—especially “The Translation”, thinking too of your reading it to Robert and me that afternoon. Ok. (I’m fascinated by “The”—I should say so. Voila!)

Most happily, while in England I had a pleasant meeting with Basil Bunting, very unexpectedly, since I had no clear sense of where he might be. But I found him and vice versa in Newcastle, and spent that evening at his home in Wylam. Next morning we had a little chance to walk back of the town, and also across the river to the store there etc. I enjoyed him very much—really, that intelligence you are both possessed of shines through a very great dark indeed. In fact, I thought much of you as he told me his first sense of what he might himself do in poetry came from the awareness that sounds might lead the sense in a modulation of its own continuity. And too—speaking of Pound, he said, although he wanted obviously to be Chaucer, he is much more like Spenser in what he gives to the craft and those who then come after. Anyhow, I found all his company a very useful pleasure to me—in that pretty consistent chaos of bouncing about England, from London to Edinburgh and back again.

(Also happily—on return here, I read for two weeks in Michigan, by that point exhausted—but stayed for a couple of days with Donald Hall and his family, whom I did like. Hall is now advisor to Harpers for poetry et al, and is hopeful of getting Bunting’s work collected and back in print. That would do wild things for ‘British verse’ come to think of it.)

I can’t say I’m as yet able to do much more than chafe—it’s a kind of habit of movement got from all that mumbly peg etc. But hopefully, I’ll soon be rid of it, and at work in some sense. I had a good visit with Charles Tomlinson also, and was pleased to hear of his issue of AGENDA, of your work. They are really very interested there to be aware of more than Graves etc. And Charles is an intelligent and excellent friend.

So—all’s well, and again forgive my silence. I came into New York about 8 in the evening, a Sunday, and was gone before noon of the next day—and fall to pieces on telephones, so that’s what happened to that hope, unhappily. But we will or surely ought to have more time in June—a better season in all ways.

Our love to you all,

Bob

P.S. I’m very pleased to hear of your own work—and that “A” continues so well and all. I feel such an impatience just sitting here, that, clearly, something will come soon no doubt. Ah well . . .

•••

LETTER TO ED DORN

Placitas, New Mexico

June 2, 1965

Dear Ed,

I’m sorry to have been so far off—somehow the past months have been pretty sluggish, i.e., distracted like endless Saturday afternoon sans much to do like they say. But that really has been the goddamn sum of it.

Thanks very much for that issue of Peace News, and that very sharp poem of yours. I do think England is going to offer terms for you, in a sharper more local focus, which despite whatever offers and so-called resistances, will be very happy and useful. To that end—I don’t know if you’re in touch with Alex Trocchi, but very clearly that might be of use to you both. Anyhow the enclosed ‘portfolio’ is what he’d recently done for me, and somehow I like it much better than the way it seemed to sit in recent issue of the Yale Literary etc. There is always a form to the way Alex sets something—as the way he makes the initial paragraph work here, etc. So if you could send him something, as notes of your own etc, I’m sure he’d both be grateful and put them to good use. The address is 6 Saint Stephen’s Gardens, London W2.

I suppose what’s really at so-called root of present balking, is like so-called ‘lines’ come walking for the mail—when I can get past the paranoia of being even that public etc. This town echoes so many for me, mainly from the times of living in Spain, and often I’m at a loss for a way to walk through it simply, no matter sitting out back and looking out at that wild space is to be somewhere in all senses. Anyhow said lines come as not so much random, but insistent wanting to strip something clear, get to a ‘proposal’ apart from the egocentric, yet make evident the actual appetites and feelings that seem present. Poems tend to be ‘wrap-ups’ otherwise, i.e., both data and manner too familiar to me. I was impressed, for example, by the way Gael Turnbull gets past that—thinking of the obvious containment of his nature—in that sequence in recent Poetry. I.e., it’s only at a few points recently, and not so damn recently at all, now, I feel I’ve got like possibility actually in hand, and/or The Woman, Anger—and one or two others.

Not just to make her the goat etc, but in contrast I felt Denny’s “Olga Poems” (and the title per se tended to stop me) had become too damn much the manipulation of her intention, and a literary manner all too damn decidedly. That’s what I walk in fucking fear of—that what one knows how to do gets adamant—and at that point of course it’s all over. Anyhow . . .

Otherwise it’s great here, I can’t really damn well deny it. One very happy thing. I got the tail of the Rockefeller scene at least enough to get us briefly to London next February—it’s a goddamn odd business, i.e., I’d asked for a year there, but instead they are paying income equivalent to my salary here for spring semester, and flying Bobbie and me to Lake Como, where they have a villa, like, for month of February. But that is all that’s come of them, i.e., Olson seems to have got nothing, and so on.

I very damn well much hope you get to SF. Otherwise we’ll see you there or here as we can manage it. This is quick, but anyhow I’ll be back. Ok.

All dearest love to you all,

Bob

[Enclosed, “To Bobbie” (CP I, 337)]

•••

LETTER TO ALLEN GINSBERG

Placitas, New Mexico

June 2, 1965

Dear Allen,

We saw a note in NY Times about your being crowned King of the May, like they say, in Prague—which seems a lovely triumph. Bobbie made a collage of spritely cherubims dancing about it, so you are eternal. Ok.

Re the enclosed—you probably know about Alex Trocchi’s Sigma and this was a note of mine he’d kindly printed. I like the form very much, and hopefully it gets around England a little. Anyhow he seems very much of our time and place, and if you had anything you think he might use, either poems re political terms or whatever, I know he’d be very grateful to get them and to distribute them in this fashion. Did you see him while there? I hope so.

Nothing much happening here, but nothing hopeless either. We look forward to seeing you in July—that ought to be happy, just in that way at least.

Too, very very happy you got the Guggenheim. That’s progress for them clearly, and I hope it serves you to some use you’ve wanted. Ok.

Write a card when you can please. Take care of yourself.

Our love to you and Peter,

Bob

Alex’s address there is 6 Saint Stephen’s Garden’s, London W2.

I heard very indirectly here that Neal had been busted along with Ken Kesey in LA, and had jumped bail and gone to Mexico. What’s happening, and could I be of any use. You say, please.

•••

LETTER TO TOM AND VALARIE RAWORTH

Placitas, New Mexico

June 23, 1965

Dear Tom and Valerie,

I’m very sorry not to have written long before this. It’s been a sluggish winter, and/or it was, and time went by sans much disposition of anything. But happily things begin to move, and at least I got through the editing of a Selected Writings of Olson for New Directions, lacking now the introduction only. I feel pleasure in that like they say, and hopefully the book can serve to put back in print some things that have been long unavailable—Mayan Letters, for one thing at least. They plan to publish it early next year, so it’s not too hopelessly far off.

Thinking of that side of things, Penguin is doing I think a very active collection edited by Don Allen, to be called something like The New Writing in America, also to be published early next year. It has things like Olson’s Human Universe essay, Ed’s From Gloucester Out and his story, Beauty—and all of LeRoi’s play Dutchman etc, and much other stuff besides. That note Alex published recently as a Sigma bulletin by me, will be the intro for it—then Don’s done a preface etc. Anyhow that’s action of a kind, clearly.

I still haven’t seen a copy of The Gold Diggers from Calder, so god knows. I really had such a good time while there, and was so grateful to Calder for giving me bed and board etc, that I don’t give much more of a damn at this point. Still, it would be pleasant to see. Scribners is publishing it here in the fall, and may well beat C/ to it at this point.

I just heard that LeRoi is to be there in London for the opening of Dutchman this summer, hence won’t be at the Berkeley conference after all—so I’m given his teaching job, and Ed in turn gets the reading and lecture I’d had—which somehow is much happier, at least from my point of view. I think LeRoi is now so committed to cutting out all whites it could only have been a bitter mess.

So that’s about it at the moment. Great weather—that clears a lot. And one damn day or another, perhaps will get to so-called work.

I do hope things settle for you now. That’s a miserable problem with children, and it must have been a dreary time for you all indeed. Again, I’m sorry to have been out of touch. You were very good to me while there, and I hardly forget it—though then too I wish I hadn’t been being dragged about so much, just that there would have been more time in all senses. One thing: please do thank Anselm [Hollo], very much, for his book. I’ve had too little mind even to write him to say so, but the point is, it was a pleasure. Ok.

All love to you all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

Placitas, New Mexico

October 16, 1965

Dear Charles,

I’m just back from Oregon, 5 readings in 6 so-called days, but I can’t think of simpler ways to make money or whatever it is. Your three letters were here on return and I’m very happy that damn introduction gets enough done to make sense to you. I didn’t want to take on the poems directly—i.e., first it seems to me Projective Verse, and equally the one on Shakespeare, and the letter to Elaine Feinstein etc, must damn well give ‘explanation’ as is pertinent. But what I had wanted to do, writing it, and then got distracted from, was literally a footnote, first noting Robt’s and Ed’s and my own notes otherwise re the verse directly, with some tight ‘unexplained’ statement of the issue of structure in the verse with no tone of spelling it out etc. Anyhow what I now want to do is, following the bibliography material, which will be a listing of primary books, give a brief note of relevant critical material either followed or preceded by a short note re prosody. Like ‘fine print’ really, since I think the people who bother to read such are those also best served by it, i.e., such comment. The rest merely churn it into ‘argument’ etc, which I was very damn anxious to avoid—I wanted just to say things, then let the book follow as the very damned obvious fact of itself. Ah well!

One thing quickly: would you have any interest in coming out here for a reading either late this month or sometime next? I think I can get about $300, which would pay costs of coming at least. This house is a lovely one, and there is a comfortable bedroom and all. I’d welcome the damn chance to talk—the kitchen by the way is great too. It wouldn’t be any demand on you more than that, and the people are decent. So, supposing that interests you, either call me or write quickly to let me know, and I’ll get it set as I can manage it.

I can very much feel that sense of box the scene at Buffalo, or actually all such ‘direction’ of any order, beginning with the Historic Moment of Vancouver etc, i.e., yourself as such Focus etc, must have increasingly seemed. That really was what came so clear at Berkeley in that evening.

In that way, I didn’t want to ‘get to’ the poems after the first Maximus book, first that no text as yet is there—second, that a whole new condition is there experienced, the outcome call it of the first, but so open that I don’t see involving it in ‘description’ prior to its literal experience. And again, the terms are clear—that is, the proposals of all this prior material lead I’d feel to the conditions of the new work—e.g., persons gain an intensive location well beyond ‘exempla’ which they sometimes are in the first. e.g. Ferrini et al. In fact, it’s the intensive, call it, which so declares itself in what I can now get from the tapes and the various texts of this sequence I have. Anyhow, supposing the Selected Writings to locate ‘where’ it’s happening, then what’s coming in the new book is the full condition of the act in so many senses it would take another such collection to document it in any sense—which sense I thought much better to let said text itself literally be. I mean, I hate the damn elbow of talking ‘about’ something at the literal moment of its own event, advent. Well. That poem, four lines, you read that afternoon on the grass, that was earlier in Fuck You etc, seems the statement of the advent, in sd way. I never saw that piece in the Tuftonian by the way. That’s been the damned irritation the past couple of years—the fact that the texts were in this way scattered.

The point is, I can very easily understand you now, when you say, “I went to my own funeral there in Vancouver”—as ‘I gave myself into the hands of others who were interested to sum up the fact of my own condition, albeit with great respect and so forth . . . ’ Onward! I love that fact of JP Jones for example, and really wild that way it De-clares in Whitman, Song of Myself, i.e., just in like that, to the thought—what a lovely fact that is and was and will be, always. So anyhow, again I was leery of coming too far into present conditions, as of yourself and the present work, just that such ‘set ups’ run dangers of distorting, always, the first facts of any such condition, which reasonably enough do come first. I didn’t want in short to be like sd British frigate etc etc. So, you know.

I’m presently in open condition of having thrown one far astern, sort of a great relief if a perverse one, to hear all the hounds of the sea barking off into the distance, with the GD/s etc. But also delight, as review in NY Herald Tribune, Book Week, for first time in such public place gets the point—11 years after. But it leaves me very free to make present terms, feeling that ‘distance’ still holds, or rather, that fact still manages its own connections.

Re the fucking money by the way: I do think that expense should rightly come from plant costs, i.e., of payment to me for the editing business. I really don’t like the way he puts it between us, and I can’t feel such costs can be other than ‘plant’ etc. But you say. Anyhow the damn book at least survives. Write as you can please. Do come if it makes sense—and let me know quickly if it does.

All our love to you,

Bob

P.S. Also, is it ok with you for me to get tapes of the first lecture you gave and also the reading right from Berkeley? They say they will send them if I have your permission, i.e. a note to me or them saying ok. If it is, just put a separate note, so I can forward to them sans further bizness etc.

•••

LETTER TO STEPHEN RODEFER

Placitas, N.M.

January 11, 1966

Dear Mr. Rodefer,

The chairman here, Dudley Wynn, just showed me your note to him about the possibility of a position, and I was most flattered to see the subject of your dissertation. Re practicalities: Sylvia Bowman, of Indiana University, is general editor of Twayne’s U.S. Authors Series—and had given a contract to Fred Weiss (of Pennsylvania Polytechnic at Troy, etc.- or how you spell it . . . ) to do a book on my work, but he has, I understand from him, dropped it. You might well get in touch with her about the possibility supposing you’d be interested to publish it in this fashion—they pay no advances, but the distributor seems fair enough, etc., and you get a fair income in that scene.

I am of several minds about the situation here, but would certainly welcome a sympathetic face like they say. If I can be of any specific help, please tell me. I’ll support your application in any case sans question—no doubt from vanity, but equally with respect. Ok—and best to friends there.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

Placitas, N.M.

Jan. 26, 1966

Dear Charles,

Al Cook wrote two days ago to make tentative offer of a job there, god knows a good one in comparison to what’s become of the scene here etc. It’s a so-called full professorship with two course load at $17,500—and for $9000 more per year than I’m making. Which isn’t all that simply the point except things here have so deteriorated in the past semester that even the house and place can’t make the difference. I don’t want ever to face such useless frustrations again—like, Baker was nothing in comparison. And to make it duller, these people are “nice” and “like” me. I get to feel like the original horror.

Again I’d like very very much to see you there if you aren’t simply so involved it’s a poor time. I’d thought to take a train to Boston the 15th, and then to come out by bus from there. I could stay at The Tavern—like—in fact have always wanted to. What I really, selfishly want is a good bowl of clam chowder. hot. And equivalent conversation, so please do damn well indulge me.

It really is time to get back there somehow. I’ve run out the use of the past ten years here, and I’m not a “westerner” as some very properly are. I thought of the crazy wetness, dripping, in the woods, as spring, black water in the holes of the ice, sound of cracking, in the freeze—The quiet of the denseness of night, etc. Buffalo is hardly that, but it does seem one part of the way. Hopefully, we could get some place out enough to have sense of country. Anyhow that’s on my mind—with much relief. Do write as you can, and I will shortly. All our love to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

April 8, 1966

Dear Robert,

I very much thank you for your letter. It focused, finally, all my own distrusts and confusions. I had, in effect, accepted. I was curious, flattered, interested to see the actual circumstance of such procedures—hopeful that I might talk to people in my own person, and equally hopeful to give some sense of a writing here we share respect for. But you are very right that the one inescapable fact is, the State Dept is the sponsor, and accepting the situation, I can hardly hope to absent my own position from that fact—in a country where I can’t even speak the language, and in a situation where I’ll be completely dependent upon their agency. Anyhow—the enclosed letter goes off with this one. I feel much relieved. I’m going to read—in Chicago April 16th—Bly again, and this time I accepted, or had, out of my own uneasiness with the Pakistan business. Anyhow—it feels a better context.—I leave here Sunday for Kansas. All’s well. Bobbie then meets me in Chicago the 23rd and the next morning we’re in London. It will be a happy time. The more so in Italy. Where hopefully I can unwind at last. I’ll write once the smoke settles—and thanks again.

All love to you both, Bob

[The following letter to Bela Zempleny was enclosed. Duncan sent it on to Denise Levertov; it was found in her papers at Stanford.]

•••

LETTER TO BELA ZEMPLENY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Mr. Bela Zempleny, Program Officer

Division for Americans Abroad

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs

Department of State

Washington, D.C.

April 8, 1966

Dear Mr. Zempleny:

I am very sorry to have this sudden shift in plans, the more so after having given an initial acceptance—but I now find that I’ll be unable to go to Pakistan this summer. Briefly, I am very disturbed by the growing dilemma in Viet-Nam, so that to go to a country as Pakistan at a time when an implicit political crisis is so evident, and to go as the guest of the State Department in apparent support of a President whom I deeply question, would seem a deep and inadmissible confusion of my own purposes and commitments.

I am very blessed to share a community with other men in the act of writing, and it is their respect and belief that I am also much aware of. I cannot outrage the community of my own identity. I have also a deep loyalty to the fact of this country and the persons in it, and in that sense also I cannot commit myself finally to any program which is involved with executive acts and attitudes so hostile to the nature of this country which, within the possibility of my own acts, I have tried to honor and make known to others.

I am very grateful to you for all your help and sympathy. I confess that my first acceptance was really a response to your conversations, but now—even if so inexcusably tardy—I must consider that my going will have a much larger content, both for myself and for those other writers whom I care for, than I had allowed myself to be aware of. I hope you will understand that, and that you will depend upon my interest in being of whatever service I can at any time when the executive branch of our government does not permit or create such invasion of national sovereignties as it now does.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

c/o Rockefeller Foundation

Villa Serbelloni

Bellagio (Como)

Italy

May 3, 1966

Dear Charles,

I’m sorry for the silence but things got heavy and useless while in Kansas, and I slogged through simply as a job—not that hopeless but very damn nearly. Then I met Bobbie in Chicago and we made it from there to London, where we saw Ed and Helene very happily, but without much time for actual conversation. He thinks now definitely to stay another year and it makes sense, i.e., he seems to have good company and they both look active and settled.

So after a few days there with much business, a reading etc, and many damn people including Jonathan who looks now a proper Englishman (he took us to a concert at the new Royal Concert Hall, thence to Rule’s etc etc), we went to Paris for so-called lecture on Poe (!) which I almost didn’t make it in time for, i.e., luggage got stuck in trunk of the cab taking us to London airport, hence missed plane, and had hopeless time trying to get on another—had been up all night, at one point met Ornette Coleman etc—but did finally in time to walk in on wild scene somehow of proper old fashioned lecture room with students in tiers all about plus Sorbonne professors. I could barely speak much less make sense. Ah well. Then the next day we walked around Paris with René Laubiès, who is a solid friend—Montparnasse, Notre Dame etc. Then here the next day where we are now settling in. It’s an odd scene, e.g. also in residence a guy named Katz, international law from Harvard, Theodore White journalist who wrote The Making of a President, then lovely man Herbert Butterfield and his wife Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, historian—and a couple of others I haven’t as yet focused on clearly. But it’s still somehow a boyscout camp, with meals On Time—though can get lunch and breakfast privately at least, and the surroundings are a gas—viz ‘where Leonardo stood looking across the lake: × makes/marks the spot’ and ‘Flaubert liked this path . . . ,’ ‘Stendhal uses this in the Charterhouse . . . ’ Und so weiter. So, like, it’s still me.

I feel some shake, at some damn depth—Bobbie equally withdrawn in to herself, that time of life I guess one thinks deep. Yet I trust it. I look forward to the fall, to conversation sans the need to be rushing off, at least not in the same manner. I realize, like they say, how bitterly long it’s been since I’ve had a chance to let myself go open to anyone somehow—all a kind of hand on the gun, too often—and days go by with a sort of float and emptiness. But hopefully I can get something done here, it makes a ‘view’—back to Mallorca, forward to god knows what. So.

Before leaving Kansas I checked proofs of Selected Writings—and asked Jerry to refer to you the few questions I had. I hope that got done ok. Do write—a sign from you would help a lot just now. We’ll be here till 1st of June, then I’ll go back to London till the 10th, then home. I’ll write again soon. Ok.

All love to you,

Bob

•••

POSTCARD TO ROBERT DUNCAN

BELLAGIO

Lago di Como—Villa Serbelloni

Lake of Como—Villa Serbelloni

Lac de Côme—Villa Serbelloni

Comersee—Villa Serbelloni

May 6, 1966

Dear Robert,

We’re settled in at this point and it’s really a very happy rest and time together. The villa is the large building well up the hill—and I have a place further up in those woods for working. All goes well indeed. May 15th we go to Venice to see Pound and Olga Rudge—she wrote he’d welcome the visit and that his health was fair enough. So—will write decent letter shortly.

Our love to you both,

Bob

•••

POSTCARD TO ALLEN GINSBERG

[Buffalo, NY]

Sept 10, 1966

Dear Bozo,

Just to report position viz beachhead established sans bloodshed, and am now in bizness. I went up to Gloucester last Sunday and had word of you all from Charles and John. Will see you October if not before. I think it’s going to work out here ok. Good people in so-called classes at least. The house is good. Kirsten decided to go to local highschool here which makes much sense. So—take good care of yourselves and keep in touch if possible.

All love to you both,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

256 Woodbridge Ave.

Buffalo, NY 14214

Sept. 24, 1966

Dear Charles,

P.S. to that card, i.e., that so-called graduate seminar fell to pieces yesterday, after three turgid meetings. I’d begun with Eliot, just that I wanted the occasion of some literal cliché to see what terms might be got to, therewith to make evident what the work was to their own assumption of it, etc., etc. So anyhow at one point one of them says, the word’s out you’re “white-collaring” your classes, and you were hired to be “Robert Creeley” and that’s why we’re in the class, etc. It was a hopeless moment, and I felt the appetite of that “imagination” so viciously and crudely present. Shee-it. I.e., a class is supposed to be a spectacle, and I thought I was going to get some active use of things. Thinking of the year ahead—I feel like I was back to cleaning hen houses. Hopefully I can make simply a stiffness of occasion by asking for literal information—but how dull to lose a human circumstance just because they have their fucking “ideas” as to who I’m supposed to be. I felt a very damn real offense in it—not just to protect myself as my so-called privacy—but that anyone could be so dumbly evident in such a fucking limit of fucking attention. So that’s what it now means “to know.”

Afterwards went to Onetta’s with John and some of them, viz Mike Glover, Fred Wah, Steve Rodefer—you can see the “picture”—and a couple of others, and drank beer, and finally back here with John and Glover, who left after a time, smoking pot—then Kirsten home from visit with her English teacher and woman’s husband, terrifyingly young. The “other way” viz Columbia— Cornell—now here for Ph.D., a “critic”—scared and didactic. I don’t know. Finally watching Italian horror vampire movie on late show, relieved to be looking at something. I’ll have to figure another way. I will!

All our love to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

256 Woodbridge Ave

Buffalo, NY 14214

March 6, 1967

Dear Robert,

I’m ashamed of the long silence—but happily it’s that so much has been happening it seems each day is time to catch breath and start again, which perversely I very much like. Anyhow, I had a lovely two weeks in company with John Cage and Merce, and others I very much liked as Billy Kluver. Then last week Norman Brown was here, and he’s a pleasure, then last night John lectured—a lovely statement of god knows real condition. Then Jim Dine and his wife were here—and on and on! Bobbie and I feel a very damn useful whirl, in it all, which recalls us to possibilities in ourselves somehow the quiet of NM sometimes lost us. So.

Congratulations on the new house and yourselves in it! Wow! I’m very very happy all has come to pass with such pleasure. It must be LIFE like they say, at that.

So apropos a reading here—I’ll get hold of Irving Feldman, who is not the loveliest thing to have hold of—but I think I can get him to arrange a specific date, having your time-table in hand. I’ll be back about that as soon as some definite business is clear.

You are so very kind—well, that’s no damn word—but I mean that you are there, in what you say of WORDS. I am very happy to have it out, i.e., out of the house/head, or whatever it is, was, etc. That too opens things up.

I regret Don Hutter’s leaving Scribners, just that he could be talked to, and heard. I don’t know what our situation there now will be—I suppose ok, for the most part, but it somehow dulls the occasion for me I’d come very much to look to. But by this point there’s only one so-called ‘direction’ no matter.

I get notes from Charles, and things sound ok—i.e., his energy is very evident, and I think he makes a company of people coming through, as now the Browns, and others there as Ed. God knows he is in a very comfortable house with enough money to open things. That should make some sense. I think he sees a doctor and keeps hold of that end.

Back to Hutter’s letter: those sections of PASSAGES you’d know very much I respect—eg. I read UPRISING at the recent Angry Arts bizness in NYC, and I don’t think any evidence of that fact and the feeling it confronts, could have been more evident. Despite the fact you were not literally there to read it, it had immediate and very evident response and respect of those present like they say. Well, that’s where editing ends—especially if it never really began—so I don’t see how there can be accommodation for such reaction from them. Which is the limit of Scribners etc etc.

I wish we were here together talking, but we will be shortly—and now we are returning to New Mexico this summer—we’ll use that as home base—so perhaps there’ll be chance to get out there too. Again, I’ll write as soon as I have something straight about the reading here.

Our love to you both,

Bob

P.S. Again—what you say of the poems is so much a world I love the possibilities of. And thanks forever for making it. Just that, at moments, I tend to an almost “agreeable” doubt, it’s so familiar to me. – And company in only a few! So thanks for being there.

Love again,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO GEORGE OPPEN

256 Woodbridge

Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

March 19, 1967

Dear George,

I regret missing your reading, but at least I can get hold of the tape—but anyhow I very much value the brief time we did have. You certainly make sense to me. As it happened, I saw Ed Sanders not long after—I think that whole business gets as vague for him as it must seem to any of us, and I think (and hope finally) he’ll not stay put in it. In any case, much does seem to be happening with and to this present generation like they say. If it can keep its eyes open, who knows.

This is quick, but I wanted to say hello, and thanks again for coming. I’ll look for you at Basil B/s reading, and will hope to see you again before too long in any case.

Our love to you,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

9596 Knoll Road

Eden, N.Y. 14057

Oct. 26, 1967

Dear Robert,

Time has gone so quickly, I’ve been poised to write you like they say for months on end without managing to. Now in this house, much is relieved indeed. God—what an opening relief it is. I think my tenseness and irritability of the spring was that damn bleak house of Cook’s, and all it stood for—otherwise urine tests etc don’t show any diabetic problem, though it was very decent of you to be concerned in that way.

Enclosed the first poem of any movement in a long time—which is also such relief. This summer I took LSD on two occasions: once here before joining Bobbie and the girls in Gloucester (I was teaching a short summer session) and then once there, in her company. Although I’ve not now much impulse to “do it again,” it was extraordinary, and very true to intuitive senses of the world I’ve long had. Most of all, it made absolutely vivid and explicit the center I have in her. So—that’s that, like they say—and I don’t know how many times one has to be shown it, which is why to “repeat” would be much as Lawrence’s, “The repetition of a known sensation is sensationalism . . .” Voila!!

We saw a little of Charles this summer, at which point he was pretty down—but he’s just been at Cortland, NY—and the people from here who went over (I had to be away—in Iowa!) said he’s in fine spirits now and notes from him seem to indicate the same.

I wanted to tell you of a limited edition of “fugitive” poems Walter Hamady is doing for me—it really came out very handsome—which I’ve dedicated to you “by your leave . . .” While I’m at it, I’ll put in here the text of the Berlin lecture that was reprinted in Harper’s Bazaar, in case you hadn’t seen it. Then, thanks to you, that possibility of The Black Sparrow Press doing something of Bobbie’s and mine together goes well—in fact, the poem to be used will be this one enclosed. So really much seems “forward” in a usefully happy sense.

Your Epilogus is a real gift—and thank you so much for what you say of us—as with the handsome printing of the sequences from PASSAGES also. How you feel the occasion of love is always so close to my own way—well, you’ll know.

I’ll be out there in late March for a couple of weeks (for the KQED experimental businesses)—will you be around? Unhappily for the Arts Festival here, it contracted to being able to invite Charles, Lowell, and Allen—just that your having been here last spring made that choice seem best. But supposing Lowell doesn’t make it, there would be then that chance. Write as you can. Our love to you both as ever,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

30 November 1967

To whom it may concern :

I cannot longer avoid commitment to the circumstance of those who, in respect of conscience, seek to avoid being drafted into service in the present war in Vietnam. I feel strongly that this war is an unjust one and that the United States involvement is deeply to be regretted.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

Professor of English

RC:gb

•••

LETTER TO PAUL BLACKBURN

9596 Knoll Road

Eden, New York 14057

January 15, 1968

Dear Paul,

A belated Happy New Year to you, old friend, and thank you very much for the copy of THE CITIES, sent us by Grove—and such a deep pleasure to have. And delight too to think of you now citting (sitting) in one of them citties—ok! I really think the whole book shows a crazy weave of your articulation, and the size of it makes a very useful room therefor.

We had heard of Sara and you having separated—which was not happy news, i.e., I think as you must, she was an extraordinary woman—but the difficulties you were facing can hardly be accepted. I.e., one goes where one loves, and is loved—and when that stops, there’s damn little point in staying on.

Your remembering that wild evening in Banalbufar—wow. That really was ‘women’s work,’ i.e., Ann was paranoid with sense Freddie was out to get her, no doubt partly right just from F/s habits of address—and I was being prodded to ‘do something’ and when whatever it was was said, I simply flipped—and remember at one point realizing that there I was fighting with a friend as yourself, for reasons god knows a little vague to me. Though happily not often involving close friends, that kind of situation did occur several times with Ann, e.g., one time on a boat back to Mallorca I flipped at a waiter with much the same sense of frustrated impotence, i.e., inability to ‘deal’ with whatever it was seemed to be the ‘problem’. Ah well . . . I felt such a continual diminishment, really an inability to reassure her own sense of things and/or to provide for them—so that when someone as Freddie (this may have been our paranoia as well) started chipping, my response was very hysterical momently.

Well, there must be an easier way—which happily there does seem to be. I’m so pleased that Olson’s book reads well for you. I sweated it out for months, trying to think of an ‘appropriate’ selection etc, then one morning simply went in and wrote down titles etc as fast as I could—and that was that. I saw Laughlin last Friday, briefly here to check Wms letters against the possibility of a book of his and Pound’s correspondence which would be very interesting (and never, I think, very clearly given)—and he said the book is now in its 2nd printing, and he is now enthusiastic etc. At first I think he was doubtful about it all, though he’s fond of Chas—so. His address by the way is 28 Fort Square, Gloucester—he’s back again and we saw him briefly in December, at which time he seemed in excellent health and very good spirits as well.

We have decided to return to New Mexico come summer. I can get the job back with better terms, and anyhow will try it for a year as a visitor, while keeping this scene still possible. But Buffalo is a hard city to get with in all senses. Money alone just doesn’t make a reason to stay etc. Too, I really feel New Mexico as home in a way no other place now is. Going back to various places in New England this summer, as expected they were hardly the same—though I was curious to see where parts of my so-called life had happened, and to experience the way people talk, act, etc, as I’d known it as a kid etc. I saw the monolithic river of my childhood, Teel’s Brook, which is just that, and in midsummer, under the little bridge I’d cross over on my way home from school, was simply a bed of marsh grass—but nonetheless still somehow the same. The house was largely shifted, and most bitterly, the lovely barn is now just about to collapse. Woods the same for the most part—but suburbia is coming close, and all the sense of wildness that stretched out in back is pretty well obliterated. Scale was funny—what I thought was a walk of miles must be hardly one all told, and you can practically jump across the intervale I thought was like the plains of Siberia, coming home. But what it did all do, being back there, was rid me of that goddamn sense of having somehow not made it to that measure—which is so often such a tight-mouthed mealy pinch purse small minded crock of shit. Viz, to be even that briefly a Big Spender thereabouts rid me of that frustration forever—and to see the lovely Concord river again, and the sea off York Beach etc—that was what I’d hold on to.

I’ve got memories of Valencia too, my own dark night of the soul—and people there were somehow so decent and supporting, just the ones I’d meet sitting in the park. It’s a lovely decent human habitation. So—give it my love.

All the same to you and take

care & send some postcards, and we’ll see you.

Bob

•••

LETTER TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

Box 567

Placitas, N.M. 87043

September 7, 1968

Dear Louis,

I’m very sorry about the long silence, the more so after the very happy time with you both in Buffalo. Things then went on, it seems, very quickly—and then we had the move back here, and then summer like they say—so, here we are. It’s good, finally, to be back. This country is very relieving and puts us back in ourselves in a happy, useful manner. Terms of people I find a little bland and self-protecting, after the east, but the point I guess is we have our own concerns and occupations, and it’s a fine place to be thus at work. I’ll be teaching at the university here, which I don’t particularly look forward to at this point, but again, the house is great, one can stay absorbed by the place for a long time indeed, and I don’t think either Bobbie or I were aware how exhausted we were by all the rushing about we’d been involved with.

That was a lovely issue of poetry (Poetry!), and I was fascinated by Rudens (and for an innocent, ignorant question: is that Plautus? It has the feel of it, or god knows that was what I was trying to experience, like they say, in so-called Latin B, like, at Harvard . . . ) That Voice, and the tags of song, weaving in and out are lovely. Anyhow—wow! It was a lovely and altogether honorific threesome to be a part of, though I wish my own ‘part’ might have sounded more in voice, somehow.

Apropos: I’ve finished or come to the ‘to be continued’ place of, a sort of sequence I’ve called Pieces, and it’s been a very useful opening for me. I’d got awfully boxed in by senses of poems as ‘A Poem’—which all too quickly argues ‘The Poem’—and also had begun to dislike the enclosure of two or three lines on a pristine page solely, etc. So anyhow—these simply ‘run on’ with minimal typographical break, in a form that really lets them come and go, meld and/or join, as occasion proves. There are some longer ones included, though I’ve let them fall as they do in the continuity of the writing, e.g., “The Finger” and another slightly longer one called “Numbers”—und so weiter. The point is, I’m happy—and so would like to dedicate the book to you if that’s not a presumption, and to say no more than, “For Louis Zukofsky,” i.e., no flourishes this time, nor prefatory notes, but simply to begin as the first one does:

As real as thinking

wonders created

by the possibility—

forms. A period

at the end of a sentence

which

began it was

into a present,

a presence

saying

something

as it goes.

[CP I, 379]

Which ain’t the greatest, like, but is so much the fact of so much you’ve made clear to me, no matter I may well have learned the lesson badly. Ok. But please don’t hesitate to say no, if for any reason it would be an awkward occasion for you. Happily, Scribners will publish it, just when I’m not as yet clear—but again, I’ve wanted to say thank you in a non-leaning manner for a very long time, and hopefully, possibly, this can be one way.

I had a note from Stuart Montgomery yesterday, mentioning among little else indeed, that a second operation on Basil Bunting’s eyes had been successful—so his sight will be much improved I take it. Also, that he has another year’s employment at Newcastle, which also is good news for him.

Write please as there is time. I’m quite sure I’ll be in the east at some point during the coming months, and will get there to see you. For once I’ll insist it not be so hectic I end up vaguely in Times Square. Ok. Meantime I hope all’s well indeed.

Our love to you both,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO THE ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

Placitas, N.M. 87043

September 16, 1968

“The People’s Corner”

Albuquerque Journal

Seventh Street and Silver Ave. S.W.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Dear Sir:

I first came to Albuquerque in 1956 and was impressed by the friendliness of the people here and the generally pleasant way of life one met with, a New Mexico tradition as I was to learn. Another attraction was the number of artists, writers, and musicians who claimed New Mexico as their home, no doubt due in large part to the air of friendliness I have mentioned. Many of these men wear beards—as I do also, and have for twenty years. Up until two years ago, this fact constituted no problem in my personal life, nor did it during the last years which I’ve spent teaching in Buffalo, New York.

We returned to our home in New Mexico in late July, and in the past month I have been stopped while driving three times, once by state police and twice by Albuquerque police, to be “checked out.” No violation was involved—no charge was made. On asking why I was stopped the third time, one of the three policemen questioning me answered, “Because the car has a New York license plate.” When I asked if all cars with out of state license plates were being stopped, he replied that I was stopped because I “certainly don’t look like a tourist.” I agree that this certainly makes me a suspicious person and that the police are right to stop me everytime I attempt to drive in Albuquerque. Of course tourists should look like tourists, if only to make things simpler for the police. Too, the policemen were right, I am not a tourist—I live here. I must drive weekly back and forth to the University of New Mexico where I am a visiting professor for the coming year.

What must I do, short of altering my personal appearance, to be allowed free access to Albuquerque streets? I am not a criminal, I am forty-two years old, the father of three daughters—one of whom is an entering freshman at U.N.M., the author of many books, published in many countries, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation grantee, and a tenured full (!) professor at the State University of New York. I am also listed in Who’s Who In America! Where did I go wrong?

Yours sincerely,

(Prof.) Robert Creeley

•••

LETTER TO ROBERT DUNCAN

Box 567

Placitas, N.M. 87043

February 12, 1969

Dear Robert,

I’ve been sorry to be out of touch—but god knows you’re familiar with the so-called problem. One thing I’ve been trying to get done, is to get sent to you both a ‘portfolio’ bound edition of NUMBERS, i.e., it’s the same as the portfolio, but the sheets are bound—and it’s very handsome. But it ain’t the easiest thing in the world to wrap, like—so hence the delay as I ponder. It will get there never fear. (Too, did you get a copy of PIECES from John Martin? I was disappointed and so have tended to forget the book, but for friends and relatives passing through.)

All’s well enough—but it’s been a sluggish time here, possibly ourselves, but I really think it’s the basic inertia of people here in contrast to that jazzed-up eastern manner. So, as of June 1st, we’ll head back there, and spend the summer in that house outside Gloucester, happily available, then Eden in September etc. Don’t tell the young, please—who make me feel older and older—just that I’d dearly love some time with the birds and the bushes. And the beach.

I spent two weeks at a very pleasant small college outside Lake Forest—money, money, money, but somehow still agreeable, I suppose it really isn’t hard to be, in that situation—but the people were active and decent, a very pleasant combination. It really is a better arrangement than leaping from the skies for an hour or so, then sh-zam etc. I think I was dazzled for awhile by just how far one could get in five minutes, but I’m beginning to get tired of it. I’ve taken on a lot for the spring, just to get out of here as possible—but I think another year I’ll not be so egocentrically pleased to be asked etc.

One very happy thing: Tom came out over the Xmas holidays, i.e., just after Xmas, and we had a very happy six days with him. He’s got a lovely sharp eye, and being in the middle, is usefully wary and singular—and not persuaded by quite the ambitions David seems to have got from Ann. So that was great and pleasant relief, and I’m now in touch pretty solidly with both him and Charlotte. March 10th/11th I’ll be at Williams (in Mass) and that’s where David is, so hopefully I can have chance to see and talk to him a little.

Kirsten also came home at Xmas, and I must say she sure looked good—like they say, and seemed very much about her own life. I confess to parental fears and whatever, but it is obviously hard to keep out of it when for some 16 years that’s been almost the reflex response of ‘how’ she is, i.e., that unconsidered care for kids one learns unintentionally as a parent. Anyhow she seems to be making her way—and I daresay she doesn’t really want us watching, at all. Otherwise the actual rapport between us does stay, i.e., the literal response. And—the world now is obviously what she hopes to enter.

Various other things go well enough, e.g., I’ve seen proofs now for the Scribners edition PIECES—and it looks ok, and much as I’d hoped it might (for once). They plan to publish it in the fall, but once I have copies, I’ll send one on to you. It feels right, so am curious to see what you think. It is, in a way, really a response to a sense you’d put in my head long ago, i.e., ‘take care by the throat and throttle it’—as that’s said in that poem, and this book is the first letting go of some over-riding care about ‘rightness’ and so at moments anyhow a much more useful revelation, of a day’s content, and days’ continuity, than what I’ve got to before. I’m not getting anywhere thank god in any case—but this ‘dabbling’ has really been a pleasure.

So that’s good. Then Don says proofs of the collected notes and so-called essays book are about ready, and that should be out before too long—and also his edition of THE CHARM, reset finally, with a few added poems as well. So one feels in movement of some order.

Finally, and most interesting at the moment, is A DAY BOOK, for Ron Kitaj, i.e. that business as you’ll know that he has with Marlborough. Thirty pages, and am about on the home stretch. It makes a very curious texture—again a breaking up of some habits, so that the process is much like taking a design by ‘rubbing’—the texture is curious, likewise the range of statement—and what I’m very curious to see is if an implicit ‘continuity’ occurs from the agency, i.e., myself writing it.

—Is there any chance you might be able to pay us a visit at some point, going to and fro, i.e., I see you’re to be at Kansas in the spring. I don’t now know if we will get to SF before leaving here. We’d like to but it may be we’re short of money (getting the house straight to go) and also caught in that miserable business of getting stuff together, to be moved. Anyhow let us know what might be possible. I’d dearly love your company, while life remains. Ok.

Our love to you both,

Bob

If in debris I had not said how lovely NAMES OF PEOPLE is, in every sense possible, forgive me—i.e., it brings you both so much into this home, and has lovely ‘echoes,’ facts, of god knows very dear things indeed. So—thanks to you both, deeply, otra vez.

Ron called from LA a few days ago to tell us John Altoon had died, very unexpectedly, from a ‘massive coronary.’ I regret it deeply god knows, his life had come to such actual peace, I think, the past few years, and he was obviously now working in a new condition of that experience—yet, perhaps paradoxically, but I think I’d feel it with any friend, I was almost relieved that the death, which had to come and has to, was for him instant, not in any sense a preoccupation to be dealt with. You know what kind of measure he was for me—how much in fact I looked to him at times in my life for a reassurance and fact of manhood. No man possibly closer to me than him in senses of women. I really loved what he was.

•••

POSTCARD TO GREGORY CORSO

[Buffalo, NY]

Oct. 21, 1969

Dear Gregory –

•••

LETTER TO CHARLES OLSON

9596 KNOLL ROAD, EDEN, N.Y. 14057

(716—992—3913)Jan. 1 196 70

Dear Charles,

I was sorry to see you in the hospital—but such a deep and abiding pleasure to be with you, always. My head, like they say, comes away with a very useful stuffèd-ness. Ok! But more, you are so fully the center of so much the world makes clear.

That’s all poorly said—like they say. I’ll be back, hopefully about Jan. 10th—and will be in touch in the meantime. Any use I can be whatsoever, have Harvey let me know.

Meantime my dearest love,

Bob

P.S. I spent an hour or more reading CALL ME ISHMAEL at the airport—it made those jets seem like horse & buggies—AH WELL . . .

•••

TELEGRAM TO HON. BYRON MCMILLAN

State University of New York at Buffalo

2/23/70

Faculty of Arts and Letters

Department of English

Hon. Byron McMillan

c/o Geo. Chula, Atty.

522 S. Broadway

Santa Anna, Calif.

(856–5760)

Deeply question holding of Dr. Leary without bail. It is of great dismay to one’s whole sense of legal act and responsibility.

Yours,

Robert Creeley

Prof of Eng.

SUNY AB

•••

LETTER TO ALLEN GINSBERG

Gloucester

6/20/70

ECHO	Dear Allen,
I’m almost	That was a very happy and
done, the hour	useful time with you. It’s now
echoes, what	very quiet here—crazy splatter
are these words	of light out kitchen window
I heard, was	midafternoon. Really thinking
it flower, stream,	and thinking of that “abstract”
Nashe’s, as Allen’s	activity I seem fact of. Any-
saying it, “Brightness	how—onward. I’ve read a
falls from the air?”	little over 100 pp. now of the
Was I never here?	Indian Journals: beautiful exact
The hour, the day	company to have, dense, various, thoughtful,
I lived some	extensive—and very human. So—thanks.
sense of it?	Likewise listening to your Blake. You’re
All wrong? What	a deeply gifted man, old friend. A quatrain
was it then	like they say:
got done? This	If you get sillier
life a stepping	as you get older.
up or down	as you get younger,
some progress?	That’s really abstract.
Here, here,	Dig, That’s me.With love,
the only form	Bob
I’ve known.
[CP I, 504]

[The note to Ginsberg is handwritten. The poem “Echo” is typed.]

•••

LETTER TO BOBBIE CREELEY (BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS)

Knokke, Belgium

September 3, 1970

9:45 PM

Most adorable divinity—viz. you, I’m here praise god, all but out of it with lack of sleep (I’m trying to stay awake till 10 so as to make time change—ah well . . . ) in sort of creaky pension near promenade with sea then beyond that—in company with many elder persons all watching tv in sitting room below at the moment. I checked in with poetry scene—pretty awful—but had a pleasant day in Brussels with the stewards who met plane and much eased arrival. Also got a new “impenetrable” (raincoat) like a black box coat, short, after leaving old one in bus to get on plane, etc. I like it! I love you! I really feel entirely opened by actual intent to cut back teaching. Bless us all! Will see you in moments so that’s the point. You are the works!

LOVE,

Bob

•••

POSTCARD TO SARAH CREELEY

[September 4, 1970]

[RC’s brackets around “over the Atlantic Ocean”]

•••

LETTER TO BOBBIE CREELEY (BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS)

[ca. 1970]

Monday afternoon (on the plane) / sunlight comes in window from left

Dear love,

I feel almost woefully abstracted in this place, nowhere in curious fact. My thoughts have been filled—now at least two hours—with the prospect of seeing you, i.e., since I got on this plane, and into the static fact it obviously is, you, and me, like they say, have gone though my head endlessly. A very dear and wise confrere, Lars Gustafson, whom I left at the airport, was saying on our ride by train to Brussels this morning: marriage is a social invention, a construct in that sense, no less than a car. It’s not, per se, a human experience as would be hunger, or happiness, or whatever is of that fact. The faintness and the distance, and the frustration these and their concomitants make, is of course intolerable. Somehow my life—marriage is, as you would most of all people known to me insist, two people, not a one of melded condition ^ [has turned a corner very abruptly and insisted it’s really me who’s here]. I don’t feel we’ve “worn out” the relation between us, and I feel, as you, that my life, as your life, has become a bleakness in a way I don’t know specifically how to define. I question that I’m not “open” to you, as you to me: openness is a quality and I feel you are, almost despite feelings, of that literal nature of fact. I’d feared losing you—I hadn’t thought of it—but your presence is so much a place of my life. The habit of that perhaps overrode its actual occasion. So—what to say. I’ve talked so much, so long. I feel very quiet. I can’t “work” at anything, and again, love as an implicit intention or measured event isn’t for me possible to accomplish. When we make love, or how, are rooted in our feelings, not in our minds. We’ll change, hopefully, so that we regain ourselves with each other—but no “purpose” will serve. Whether you can find a life with me further or not—and don’t assume, please, it can be something you “want” to do, therefore will—at this moment I love you entirely. Always you are measure of generous human life. My dearest love,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO GENEVIEVE CREELEY

Box 344

Bolinas, Cal. 94924

August 29, 1971

Dear Mother,

I’ve finally got time and mind to tell you how very pleasant it was to have that time with you there. All went well on return as well, and again, it really was a very happy time indeed.

We continue to be occupied with settling in here. The place is really so beautiful at least when one stops with whatever chore and can look around, it’s an extraordinary pleasure. As of yesterday, it seems that fall has suddenly come, i.e., the air is very clear and I think it must be the beginning of that lovely sunny fall weather. So all is good.

This shed I’m now sitting in, in fact, got all straight while I was away—new roof, also joists on the backside, and the whole building reinforced, etc. It makes an ideal place to work in and hopefully I’ll be able to do just that. The house itself is sound but needs a new roof which will be put on within the next two weeks. We got a little of the tree work done, the so-called safety work, and will now let that wait for awhile till we have a clearer sense of where the sun could use more room. The garage-barn was finally too derelict to permit us to convert it into a studio, but that too has been shored up, so it can be used for storage at least for a few more years. We want to build a two room studio at the top of the hill we’re on the side of, for a studio quondam guest house, and hopefully that will get done in October. In the meantime Bobbie’s been at work painting in the kitchen and much else, and I’ve been doing divers small jobs like making tables for this place, etc.

Our biggest news is a horse no less. I was finally so badgered by Sarah to get one, we went to see about a bay gelding over in Novato, and thanks to the very generous and bright young lady who owned him, we ended finding an ideal palomino mare about 14, who is perfect for them. She has pep enough and rides easily and surely, and at the same time won’t run them into trees or off cliffs etc, which was really my sneaking fear all along. She’s up in a pasture on the mesa and really occupies the girls most happily. It’s an ideal place to have a horse and I’m pleased it’s finally possible to have one for them. So they’re much occupied with all the lore of horses, and that should keep them busy for quite awhile. Her name is Bonny by the way and I hope both you and Sarah can see her before too long.

Apropos, I do hope you can come any time it will be simple for you say toward the end of September and/or early October. If for any reason that time proves a poor one, just change it to whatever is more convenient. The point is we’d really love having you come. Ok!

Carlie came over about a week ago and seemed in good spirits. She was with a charming young man, so that seemed happy. She told me Lucy’s present young man is one she’s known previous to Lincoln, and that all seemed happy. I hope we’ll see more of both them now that they have cars.

So, just to keep in touch—and I’ll really write more frequently as things become more settled. Again, this house is all either of us ever really wanted—wow.

My dearest love,

Bob

[Bobbie Creeley’s handwritten note follows signature.]

Dear Genevieve –

Bob had a good visit there—He’s told me all about it—and now we’re looking forward to your visiting us here –

Everything here takes longer than we had thought but there’s nothing unfunctional it’s just that it will be a relief when the basic things are finished—Each thing done is a real achievement—

Give my love to everyone there & come as it is simple for you –

love Bobbie

•••

POSTCARD TO ARMAND SCHWERNER

CREELEY, BOX 344, BOLINAS, CA. 94924

10/10/71

Dear Armand,

Paul’s relation to me is really too complex to be able to say anything more than how bleak and sad he is gone. It all goes flat trying to say more. He was a dear useful man.—I’d be pleased to write note re Guggenheim, so that’s fine.

Meantime love to all,

Bob

•••

LETTER TO BOBBIE CREELEY (BOBBY LOUISE HAWKINS)

[Bolinas]

November 9, 1972

Dear Bobbie,

Before this plane gets there, and all the confusion and nostalgia of just being there comes in—what you’re doing does make sense to me. However literally the fact—it feels as if we’ve been resenting one another’s “reality” for some time. My drunkenness and ugly violence is one obvious fact in any case. For me there is a constant fear of being cut out or dropped—and that’s inexorably difficult to live with. So time apart makes sense indeed, to know why we want to be together at all—granted a very literal love is also true. But as you said when I was leaving, you’d like to like me too—or have that left as a possibility if we can’t make it further.

The phone calls really wipe me out—like instant changes of reality, as resonating as my drunken freaking out is obviously for you in much larger degree. Anyhow if a letter is possible, that would be great. I hate to think of you sans provision so any money you need let me know—it’s yours as much as I’d feel it mine at this point. I’ve got specific reality to get used to and this seems as good a time as any. I love you. Do what you have to and want to, and that’s it.

Your old friend believe it or not,

Bob