This is an apt house not a business establishment. You have had your television on loud until midnight and later. It sounds as if you have all kinds of machinery up there.

You would not be allowed all that noise and racket in any apt house where people live for peace and quiet.

I have been in this house 26 years, and have inquired from many people, and you are out of line.

apt. 203]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 5, 1964

Thanks for sending the review. On the review: I don’t think I am “tough” but if the poetry appears that way it is only because they are used to a different content and style. I am more tired than anything and if I refuse to get heated-up over a Sunrise or the blooming of a peony, they think this is tough. Rest of review pretty much on stick, though, and does your printing achievement some justice, and should move some copies. Whoever wrote the article seemed to enjoy the book, and that’s all we want, that, and to get down off the cross.

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