if the world digs me it is only to bury me.

I resent anybody being published because he has a name and only because he has a name, and this is being done much, and I don’t understand it, and it’s more fag and fart and drag and death, and Poetry Chicago is good at it; almost everybody’s good at it—publishing name crap when meanwhile some young artist is on fire all flame flame flame FLAME and they let him burn away to knife or razor across the string of wrist or throat while Mr. X-somebody dulls the screams with flat verse on flat-printed expensive paper. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

Early February 1965

Any drawings or fanciness are not going to be worth a Negro’s shitola here to you, but what drew me to your mimeo outfit (Ole) was that I thot you were a hard-muscled brain of a drunk laboring lost son-of-a-bitch without a chance like I am.

I can’t do you a foreword because if I did you a foreword (on these grounds) there would also be other people I should do a foreword for also.

Look, you are not that great and neither am I—and I don’t know where next month’s rent or tomorrow’s poem is coming from.

I’ve been drunk for several days (am drunk now) trying to figure how to answer you.

Sorry on the heart-attack thing. But most of us who write don’t live too long because we eat ourselves up one way or the other. [* * *]

There are 3 poems here, in this order:

(1)—(great and beautiful)—“Up a Different Creek”

(2) A sweet last line damning us—“Plastic Dimestore Life” and

(3) “Testimony Concerning…”

But wait before you inter me with the bones of hard-head disbelievers—

(a) I still believe that more untalented fake poets are being published than ever before.

(b)—I believe that most poetry stinks like the rot of a garbage can, a game of professors & fakers. And

(c)—that writing a foreword to your poetry would do more to destroy you than any heart attack, than any gift of a new cadillac that wd allow you to drive through the latest town of culture and give a wave.

Certainly, I’m drunk and certainly I’m mad, but, also, most certainly, my word won’t make your poetry good or your wife and children love you, and, hell, you know this, you’ve known it a long time. And I don’t have to get drunk to tell you and you shouldn’t force me to get drunk to tell you—no matter what you think of your poetry or any poetry or anybody else’s poetry.

I hate to speak like a knowing prick from a pulpit, yet you’ve put me up in the pulpit, and shit! I’ve fallen down drunk from there, and I can’t help you, I can’t help myself. [* * *]

The adverse review by A. Frederick Franklyn that upset Cuscaden, publisher of Run With the Hunted, appeared in Grande Ronde Review, Fall 1964.