[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 18, 1963

[* * *] Whenever I need a lift I look at that table of contents you sent and I think of all the pages and all the poems. You really let the book run away with you and I’m glad. If I remember right you were once thinking of 60 pages. If I never write another poem, I will always have this book, a kind of holy thing to me. [* * *] And we’ve got the right title too. After these months it has become solid as a wall. I’ll never forget the night I came across it, early a.m., and I said, they’ve got to take it, they’ve just got to. And then sweating Cerf. I’ve been lucky on the titles of my books because the editors have always gone right along, and each title has explained my mental-spiritual shape of the moment—or if this is too fancy: the way I felt. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 19, 1963

[* * *] Some outfit in Frisco wants me to give a reading in Feb., offer of 2/3rds of house but I can’t see myself on the boards in front of the yak hyenas, lonely hearts and homos. Not yet. If I were starving, maybe so. But I am not yet starving. People keep explaining to me that I am really lonely, and this makes my ass bleed too. What they are talking about really is themselves and they figure my machinery has to be set the same way. There is nothing sweeter to me than closing the door on the world, having the walls again. Generally, I am too TIRED to be lonely: a hangover or bucking the horses or the job or some woman and when the time is finally given to me I like to duck under the table and hide rather than go get myself the wet nurse of the crowd. You remember the poem I wrote of the man who dug a hole in the ground and crawled down into it? And he didn’t tell the people why when they asked why, he only smiled because he knew that they wouldn’t understand, he knew that he was odd-fish out—Outsider of the year, Outsider of the world. I too have learned not to explain anymore. Let them win the word-games of the air; if I have anything to say I hope to put it into a rock with a fork. Maybe it will last through a few rains or maybe they’ll throw it into a cesspool, endurability is not so much the matter anyhow as is waste and nonsense and yak yak yak. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 27, 1963