[To E. V. Griffith]

Mid September, [1960]

Got your note on chapbook progress the other day. It appears to me that you are doing too much at once, getting out too many chapbooks at once, and although mine was started long ago others seem to be coming out ahead of me. I don’t know what the hell to make of it all and often wonder how another writer would have taken it. From my experiences as an editor I found they wail and bitch pretty much, and can be quite damned nasty. This thing is even beginning to get me. Now the pages have come out wrong sequenced…what kind of a printer is that?

Well, I hope this thing does get done…sometime…somehow. The strain is getting unbearable.

[To E. V. Griffith]

October 7, 1960

My dear E. V. Griffith:

Since you have failed to contact me since about last August—“and I should have something in your hands by the end of the month”—and then the note about wrong sequenced pages—“and I should have something in your hands in just a few more days,” I haven’t heard and we are now sailing well into October.

It seem to me that all mistakes could have been rectified by now! My famed patience, has at last, after a 2 years wait, had it.

And in case you have forgotten, I finally sent you some money—between 30 and 40 bucks—to help you get this thing rolling.

You have put me out on the limb by again asking me to make announcements to the magazines that Hearse is to issue Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. This is getting to be the joke of the literary world, but I am no longer laughing.

I am going to wait a short period longer and if no results are achieved I am going to write Trace, the San Francisco newspapers and the editors of other literary magazines of the whole history of this notorious and impossible chapbook nightmare. I can not see it that sloppy and amateur editorialism, a downright horror of coldness and cruelty and ineptness go unchallenged.

If you feel that I am being unfair, hasty or unreasonable, I would be most glad to get any statements from you. However, further silence or delay, would be construed to mean that you intend to continue your slipshod policies and the writer be damned.

We of the literary world, we like to feel that we are not here to wrangle or to claw, but to create. Protest is more a political and worldly thing, but even as a poet, I feel I have a right and a duty, in this case, to make public protest.

[To E. V. Griffith]

October 14, 1960