I came back from the store and there was the package against the door “don’t open ’til Xmas,” but to hell with that, I have been waiting, and I tore the paper off, saw the miracle: jacket, cover, skeleton in sand, the works the works…peeling back the pages I ate the whole insides, read the poems I have forgotten, the good Corrington, back page wherein you describe paper, type etc., the humor-agony bug-rat breakdown struggle which goes so well along with the author. And to say you’ve come through is nothing; that you’ve come through in this way…page by page, inch by inch, breakdown by breakdown, cut fingers, landladies, the street corner, the hours, my god, if the poems have been wasted the BOOK has not been wasted, little calm and precious beauties and loves of doing like a garden of good, like mountains, like everything that counts…by god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and I’m proud and struck and awed that you have—the both of you—caught me up in it.

This is the kind of book that grows on you in days not minutes; this is the kind of book that you remember like you remember war or birth or love or fire, this singing in my darkest dark—the photo of Buk with cigarette, everything, everything, there is no beginning, I don’t know where to touch the book next—first I think the jacket is impossibly impossibly true, then I go elsewhere, it’s like walking through a forest with wine at high noon and everything gone except the soaring. my god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it! Never such a book! Where? Where?? in all the libraries, in all the cities I have never seen such a book put together in such a way, inventive creativeness and love. Where have the publishers been for centuries? You’ve done it.

you’ve done it.

The books will sit and grow on me, they will enter me, it is a part, a beholden and miraculous part. It does little to say more: the whole thing wells and turns in me almost impossibly. My thanks my thanks for all the love and honor and pain and beauty; the pain yours, the others you’ve passed to me. Going now, going.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 26, 1963