This poetry-thing is the worst sort of crutch. It weakens a man. And if a man is weak before he writes poetry he becomes, finally, through the strumming of shadows and wailing, he becomes finally what he is—just another fine pink juicy boy doing his god damned job in the frailest and most vomiting way.

You’ve got to understand that there are other ways of facing the horn except through the typewriter. Those who are known to us may just be a bad choice of chance. Never take the Arts as a holy mirror. Very little is just, and that includes all the centuries. The most honorable countries do not survive through courage nor do the ages survive us the best artists. Everything is chance and shit and the strumming of the winds. Please forgive the center word. If I hate anything it is a vile word said vilely or a dirty joke or the making of sex and life and woman and man into the thing they seem to want it to be.

I am probably fairly insane and you should know this (a more somber note with golden screeching undertones) and I do not mean to knock your verse plays…some have been done well…Racine, etc., only it is too much and ever so easy to mock and cajole when you do not give or try, and I say go ahead: verse, or phone calls or cards or death or love or vast areas of bathing in arenas of sound and stroke and midnight moments, I thank you for going on and I, too, go on a little while more.

p.s.—don’t hate me for feeling more than is (perhaps) necessary. It may be best that the lost frogs and space-burnt nylon and neon air…it may be best that we are creatures of gesture instead of reality and marriage is reality with life and very few of us can stand either marriage or reality or life. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 7, 1963

[* * *] Gypsy, when I phoned last I remember saying “Goodbye, Baby,” and it bothered me for hours afterwards. It is simply terminology, crass yes, hell yes, but you should know all the people I know who toss this term, and it can mean everything—to you it meant simply the best of everything: luck, love of the kind I know, rising spirits, grace, 7, the nose in front, holy Mary, you name it. That’s what it meant. and you know it. and you stay out of this, Jon.

[To John William Corrington]

[?Mid-]May, 1963

[***]…on the blood yes, it is not too good, and I know the cancer-bit. I remember my mother. She couldn’t straighten her legs. womb. gut. she kept telling me all along, “Your father is a great man.” I knew what my father was. She didn’t. I took her a rosary on Christmas eve or Christmas day, I can’t remember. She was dead. Fry was with me. Fry was dead too.