Sorry on your finances on #4. You put so much time and $$ into book that you smashed yourself, and yet that you got carried on this wave, you must know, is not all loss. What happens to people when they see it, the incredulous wonder and awakening…I am not speaking of the poetry but of the book, the makeup…Frances’ daughter wrote to her and she said when she got book she just held it in her hand for an hour, looking through it, at it, not even reading the poems. It is this awakening of the people with beauty in a world where beauty hardly exists anymore, where we are all too “tough,” this kind of thing, just looking and wondering, it’s still in people, somewhere, but it takes an act like yours to bring it back.

“Purples” were special colophon sheets for a more expensive issue of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands. The letter to Tibbs mentioned here is reproduced as an illustration in this volume.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 7, 1964

[* * * ] I stole 2 excerpts from letter to Ben Tibbs tonight for purples. I hope he does not think me a zero for this. Wrote letter first without thought of anything—then got “purples” on mind. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

February 18, 1964

Mind all clogged with useless things—can’t get straight—but glad book did something for you—but as you know—it’s only the next poem that counts, and, then, it hardly counts.

Depressed and jammed-up against small things forever, that’s the way if works. 4 day cold. other scratches.

The book itself is a kind of small miracle to rest against—temporarily.

Looks like you’ve got a good typewriter. Don’t get robbed again.

Mothers are particularly painful because the world has rubbed most of them down to small utterings of inanity. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 1, 1964

[* * *] I am getting a little drunk, a good wall to hide behind, the coward’s flag. I remember once in some city in some cheap room, I believe it was St. Louis, yes, a hotel on the corner and the gas fumes of traffic going to work used to come up and choke my sick lazy lungs, and I’d send her out for beer or wine and she was trying to get me straight, trying to mother me or hang me or figure me, as all women will try to do, and she gave me this old bit: “Drinking is only escapism.” Sure, I told her, and thank old red-balled God it is, and when I fuck you, that is escapism too, you may not think it is, to you it might be living, now, let’s have a drink.

I wonder where she is now? A big fat black maid with the fattest biggest most loveliest legs in the universe and ideas about “escapism.” I wonder if she’s thinking of me now, sitting here 20 years later growling about stolen microphones and that the human race is garbage?