There are 10 or 12 other magazines that have accepted my stuff but as you know there is an immense lag in some cases between acceptance and publication. Much of this type of thing makes one feel as if he were writing into a void. But that’s the literary life, and we’re stuck with it.

I am looking forward, of course, to the eventual chapbook, and I hope it moves better for you than the Larsen thing. Of course, I don’t consider Carl Larsen a very good writer and am always surprised when anyone does. But to hell with Larsen, now where was I? Oh yes, I have never received a copy of Gallows and since you say I have a couple in it, I would like a copy. Could you send one down?

Well, there really isn’t much more to say…the horses are running poorly, the women are f/ruffing me up, the rent’s due, but as I said, I’m still alive and drinking beer. Glad to get your card. Don’t forget to send me to the Gallows. Thanx.

[To E. V. Griffith]

October 3, 1959

Dashing this off before going to the track with a couple of grifters. I hate these Saturdays—all the amateurs are out there with the greed glittering in their eyes, half-drunk on beer, pinching the women, stealing seats, screaming over nothing. [* * *]

Thanks for card and news of Hearse fame in Nation and Poetry (Ch.). Can’t seem to find the correct issue of Nation for this but am still trying. Success is wonderful if we can achieve it without whoring our concepts. Keep publishing the good live poets as in the past.

[To E. V. Griffith]

early December, 59

Are you still alive?

Everything that’s happening to me is banal or venal, and perhaps later a more flowery and poesy versification—right now drab and bare as the old-lady-in-the-shoe’s panties.

I don’t know, there’s one hell of a lot of frustration and fakery in this poetry business, the forming of groups, soul-handshaking, I’ll print you if you print me, and wouldn’t you care to read before a small select group of homosexuals?

I pick up a poetry magazine, flip the pages, count the stars, moon, and frustrations, yawn, piss out my beer and pick up the want-ads.

I am sitting in a cheap Hollywood apartment pretending to be a poet but sick and dull and the clouds are coming over the fake paper mountains and I peck away at these stupid keys, it’s 12 degrees in Moscow and it’s snowing; a boil is forming between my eyes and somewhere between Pedro and Palo Alto I lost the will to fight: the liquor store man knows me like a cousin: he cracks the paper bag and looks like a photograph of Francis Thompson.

• 1960 •