To give talks on Poetry it is best to have a captive audience. Get them where they can’t walk out—say a hospital, a jail, an insane asylum…school auditoriums are not safe—those with guts will leave. you can’t blame the masses for disregarding poetry—it is pretty dull stuff & obtuse & unreal in direct regard toward what is actually happening to them. In the Atomic Age they don’t have Time to waste or to be wrong.

This letter was printed in Congdon’s Magazine, no. 3.

[To Kirby Congdon]

[ca. mid-March, 1966]

if this letter is detached and punchy, understand, at least. I’m out of the hospital, and these couple of dark hollering rooms are mine to divide, to throw myself on the springs and wonder about how I keep getting it in the ass. (don’t misinterpret…or do, who cares?) (which reminds me of a guy in a place I just worked, I mean used to work. he had this reducing machine which he put his girlfriend on and fucked her. “we turn it on every night about 3 a.m. and it sounds like a washing machine. people wonder what I am doing washing my clothes at 3 a.m. but it’s a great machine; you just lay there and it does all the work. you and I ought to try it?” “you and I?” I asked. “yeah,” he said. “but who’s gonna get on top?” “what the hell difference does it make?” he answered.)

I have been vaguely unhappy, bored, disgusted with poetry for years, for centuries…I sometimes try to tell people why—not in the involute & secretive and vocabulary-deadened style of a Creeley or an Olson, but really, what the HELL ISN’T going on and what the HOAX is. Of course, the best way to point out is to create, but sometimes I can’t resist a few beerhall speeches. It is not so much in telling people how to DO things but in letting them know how the trusted kingpins have managed to slice an inch or two off the peckers of their souls and make them smile and say thanks. I’m 45 now; have only been in the game ten years but the way the body is falling apart I thought it would be best if I left some word. I hope I do not talk too much like a con-man. I’m sick of that; I’ve seen enough of that. anyhow, nothing.