[* * *] in 4 or 5 days I climb on the train to New Orleans so if you do not hear from me I am not necessarily dead, although maybe so. Not having mail forwarded. Going to read it all when I come back and see who wants my sweet balls in the frying pan, or better yet—enshrined in crusted gold. Brought in 5 horses first yesterday and still only made $7, 5 or 6 drinks, and then I loaded on the high-weight even-money favorite in the handicap (#131), one of the worst bets in the the business. There went my profits. well, that’s past; let’s only hope I have learned something. at 45, they are beginning to walk around and shut out the lights. get going, Buk, the grave diggers are licking their palms in the sunset!

Purdy makes it with the typer and with grants and talking at the universities and by, he tells me, the grace of his wife. so being caught up in these various segments and his homemade wine, you’ve got to forgive him, he’s a little lost out there. Layton I don’t know much about, except he must teach somewhere and probably is getting a little comfortable and have heard in Lit. Times fashion, that he believes anything written by Layton is automatically good. This is bad. men change. everything changes. you don’t have to be much to realize that. we all write very badly at times and sometimes we write good, which doesn’t matter too much either, like a good drunk or a day off when the old woman isn’t acting haywire like some Bette Davis throwing a pissfit or the kid wailing wailing the blues, scratching your inner guts with barbwire, and you wonder what ever happened to that small room when you were alone and glad to be alone forever. yet, we go on: having lost the left jab, the hook, we backtrack, stalling, clowning, smirking…trying to save one round, sneak in the sleeper punch. sure. sure. could I be an evangelist? sure, for myself [* * * ]

[To Douglas Blazek]

[February-March 1965]

[* * *] Sheri’s pissed at me because I stay down in the mud and also because I put her in a poem now and then. But take the Cantos. I understand they are good writing because Pound wrote them. I know there’s a lot of Chinese in there, Cantonese, whatever. Sheri tells me they put him in a wooden cage once and did all sorts of crude things to him. All right. he went to the losing side. Many men are tortured every day. they put tarpaper on church roofs. they dig up beets. they pick lettuce. steal cars. slaughter beef. turn the same screw. wait on old ladies. on and on. they cut us all to pieces. well, anyhow, I took the Cantos home. Every time I went to the library I took out a copy of the Cantos It was always there. 15 times I took the Cantos home. 15 times I took the Cantos back, unread. I don’t say it is not a good book; I say it is not a good book for me, Ezra Pound and Sheri Martinelli be damned, and all the Sitwells too, and H.D. and all that gang.