I like your photo and will send you one of mine if I can steal a WANTED ad from the local post office. you look like a rough baby, kid, and I’d hate to meet you coming down any dark (or light) alley. but actually, in the 50’s and 60’s a different type of poet has evolved through the dense brutality of our age. we’ve had to be tough enough to live and at the same time to save the soul. the university boys are merely soft and tricky and clever but they don’t know even what a wall looks like or a cat or a fish or a landlord or a policeman or a blade of grass, unless they attempt to imagine these things and they do attempt, and, of course, the mockery of our age is that these safe and clever and dead men are published everywhere. this is why the audience for poetry is so small—the masses know that most of it is fake—has nothing to do with lives, their or anyone’s, has nothing to do with Life. [* * *]

[To Steven Richmond]

February 2, 1966

[* * *] LSD, yeah, the big parade—everybody’s doin’ it now. take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. what a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me. All the death does not lie lay ly with the academics or the poetry workshops or the pawnbrokers…[* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

February 3, 1966

[* * *] our boy MacNamara has quit his job and now I seem to get a letter a day from him. that’s nice. nice and frightening. I don’t know quite what to say, finally. I mean, the thing can get kind of religious. but whatdy you do when ya lose yore bible?