In Which We Choose Our Proteges Ever So Wisely

The Perfect Driving Disposition

This is the third and final entry in a series about the letters of Denise Levertov and Williams Carlos Williams. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

The last letters of the poets Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams ("Bill") come at a time of incipient illness for the elder Williams. The aftereffects of several strokes were beginning to show in his memory, and he rarely left his Rutherford, New Jersey home. Yet he and the British-born Levertov shared an incandescent artistic communion, a mind melding that established solid pillars where flaky walls had once held all the confidence in their own art that could be spared. Williams' penultimate letter to Levertov before his death in 1963, included here, displays a shattered mind but an unflappable spirit.

Denise Levertov left her improvised home of Mexico in 1958. Before she moved herself and her husband Mitch to New York, Robert Creeley had visited the Levertov family in Oaxaca. WCW reacts to Levertov's description of Bob in the following letter.

January 23rd, 1957

Dear Denise:

What the hell did you have to get malaria for? Of course you were treated at once and properly with all the latest medical advice you could muster. If you had a severe case as you have indicated that you had it can take it out and may be hard to get rid of. I hope you took it seriously enough to get properly rid of it.

At that you probably had a swell time at the shore or bay or whatever you call it with Creeley. The people who take over your place for you must have been driven to distraction at sight of such a man. Lucky they didn't shoot him. He sent me a couple of poems recently, short lyrics on an enormous page which after all were very good . but so few on such a big page! Maybe that's the way to do it to give full dignity to the art. I hope so. Must be expensive.

I'm anxious to see your own book. Ferlinghetti is also I think printing my own, or reprinting them, Improvisations. Maybe they'll come out together or fail to come out together.

Thanks for your congratulations on the award, I can always use the cash.

I'm sending you under separate cover (if it ever gets there) a poem I translated from the Greek. I don't know any Greek but scouted around among my professor friends until I was satisfied that some of the classic translations I have seen were horrible then made my own transliteration. Hope you like it it may not be Sappho but I guarantee that it is in the spirit which moved her. Keep it, I'll have more copies later.

Take care of yourself.

Bill

Denise reacts to WCW's translation of Sappho and warily asks his opinion of Allen Ginsberg in this 1957 letter.

February 7th, 1957

Dear Bill

How lovely — your poem, the Sappho. Thank you very very much. I tacked it up where it gives lustre to all around it & great joy to me. It came today.

In your last letter you mentioned an award — I didn't know about it for we rarely see an American paper — what was it? Our glad congratulations anyway.

Yes I think I got good treatment for the malaria, & I'm going to get a checkup (blood-count etc.) in a week or so, also.

Glad you liked Creeley's If You  — I did too.

It seems Allen Ginsberg is conducting a regular propaganda campaign. I saw his picture, & Jack Kerouac's, in the Feb. issue of Mademoiselle. He has been rooting for me too, which is very kind — but I don't feel happy about it. He will damage his work surely if he puts so much energy into advertising, however generously. Or don't you think so?

I discovered 2 books by a Southern woman writer, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who wrote with a dense, packed, and evidently true-to-herself style. (The Time of Man and Black is My True Love's Hair) She died 10 years or so ago & I guess is quite well-known (perhaps to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons) but new to me.

Am sending you some poems separately. How I wish I could come see you & Floss.

With love,

from Denise

P.S. Did you know you wrapped the poem in a Law Degree? Was it a mistake or did you want to get rid of it?

Denise would end up reading the following letter at WCW's memorial service.

February 11th, 1957

Dear Denise:

I just mailed you a note about the certificate to be returned to me, thank you. But in the same mail with your letter telling me of my mistake in sending came Cid Corman's Origin with your poems — which you had sent me earlier in manuscript, at least the one called "Tomatlan."

Reading the poems it came over me how almost impossible it is to realize what it is that goes over from a writer into her poem. And how it gets there. Even the alertest reader can miss it. The poet herself might miss it and quit trying. And yet if it is important enough to her she will never quit trying to snare the "thing" among the words. Where does it lie among the words? That is the critic's business to discover and reveal that. You do not make it easy for.

I have never forgot how you came to me out of the formalism of English verse. At first as must have been inevitable, although I welcomed you I was not completely convinced, after all I wasn't completely convinced of my own position, I wanted you to convince ME.

Even recently I fight against accepting you unconditionally. It must always be so with a person we love and admire. It must be in the words themselves and what you find to do with them and what you have the spirit and trust to rely on the reader to find what you have put among them.

Where is it? In detail. Microscopically.

To take that poem apart or before that to view it as a whole, what do I see? But before that where else in this issue of that magazine is there something to challenge it. I'll have to pass that one up because I have not read those poems as carefully as I have yours.

Returning to that particular poem I have spoken of, to read it gives me a sensation of calm, of confidence. A countryside, a tropical jungle appears to me into which with my imagination I enter. It is done with the fewest possible words, with no straining after effect without the poet's apparent consciousness of making any effect at all.

The words used are copied direct from a vision seen, actually seen. The transition between the reader and what is being put down for him is direct, nothing extraneous has been allowed to creep in. This is a great preliminary virtue. It makes the final picture fresh as is anything seen for the first time, by a child, but let's not overemphasize that.

What, granted that, has the poet selected to use in her picture? She looking at the original picture must have selected significant details because after all she cannot see everything and what she seizes in her imagination reveals in the first place her intelligence and emotional range and depth. Her sight is keen, her mood relaxed.

I think the trick is done in the second stanza with the words "its silky fur brushes me". And later on "the palms shake their green breasts,"... Effortlessly, is the impression in the instantaneous exchange that takes place in the metaphor flares as a flash in our minds.

But a poet is not to be trapped so easily (it is all a flight and an escape) an internal battle of wits and the intelligence, a man and woman competing, wrestling for the crown of laurels, and some men and women write for cash. Denise Goodman has the ability to bundle the whole mess into one, balance calmly on her head, not giving herself away.

"New peace shades the mind here, the jungle shadows frayed by the sea winds." The test of how the poet is going to divide her lines is the test of what she or he is.

Bill

The praise included in the following WCW letter to Denise must have been overwhelming for her.

Spring 1957

Dear Denise:

" ...and all / who sit on benches in the morning" It's a beautiful book! and that doesn't begin to say it. It's a wise book and reveals a mind with which I am in love. What is love? a fellow feeling, something We can understand and acknowledge as part of one's own being.

I haven't even finished reading the book and shall not finish reading it soon (maybe) keeping it to enjoy slowly, stretching it out to make it go slow to enjoy as I would a delicious dish of food. It is really a beautiful book. The fine points! I am really amazed and a little in awe of you. I didn't realize you were so good though I had an intimation of it on that day in our front room when you were reading to me and I saw that you were really a poet.

Yours

Bill

This letter from Bill's wife Florence "Floss" Williams explains some of her husband's illness of the time, and precipitates the conversation between Denise and Bill's widow that would continue after his death. Here she does not seem to view Denise as a threat.

May 23rd, 1959

Dear Denise

It was good to see you on Thursday — looking beautiful & cheery as usual — You were a tonic to us. I hope you & Mitch will want to come again.

There is one thing I must tell you about Many Loves. You asked Bill about the opening — he said it was not his idea. I didn't want to contradict him because it upsets him so. It was his idea and is in the published scripts as printed by New Directions Annual 1942. Get hold of it and read it. — It's sad to see a man like Bill fail — slowly — gradually — and know that there is nothing one can do. —

You are a good poet — we enjoyed so much hearing you read. — and thank you for the pleasure.

Affectionately

Floss

WCW was very enthused about Denise's latest book.

December 31st, 1959

Dear Denise:

There is about your most recent book of poems, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads, a frightening quality which marks you as a serious poet and a woman to be contended with in any discussion that has matters of art as its topic. The words, the choice of words you use is disturbing to a man. It is linked to something unknown to the male wonderfully well used. As an independent artist you hold the key to the attack, and it is an attack as long as you shall live.

The first 5 or six poems of this book challenge me so that I am glad I am not younger. It's a strange thing to have the attack come from that quarter: pure poetic excellence, quality which men have almost always reserved for themselves.

You have not always written written so excellently, as always one thinks that there is something unrevealed in such writing by a man or a woman, something deeply buried. When it is a woman that is involved the mystery deepens, it is something cryptic which the world solves by calling her a whore. But the unresolved element of superlative artistic excellence, forces a reevaluation upon us.

I am going to read these first half dozen poems — maybe more — until as an old man I have penetrated to where your secret is hid. It may be a druidic or perhaps an hebraic recrudescence but it's impressive and good for the art of poetry. You have the head for it, an impressive head which I have been long conscious of but that's only an accessory phenomenon, that curious artistic ability that flares in the words themselves is the thing to be treasured. It may at any time be lost, see that it isn't, at any cost!

I'm quitting for now.

With love and respect,

Bill

in 1906 with a donkey

April 9th, 1960

Dear Denise:

Bravo! the last issue of Poetry shows you to be the most accomplished practitioner of the art that we have about us. "Come into the animal presence" is accomplished work but no finer than "Map of the western part etc" You have been going ahead every time you put ink to paper. You know yourself better than anyone else can ever know you. And you have the perfect driving disposition for a poet, and I think the depth of human experience on which to draw from. It's all a mystery where it comes from, as you know yourself, no one can instruct you but gratuitous advisors will for some reason attempt to. To hell with them when they attempt to lead you into one or another camp, because I see it coming.

I just wanted to say hello and to congratulate what you have already accomplished. I know you have recently lost your mother-in-law whom you really loved and respected. What can one say? We have been to Florida but a cold wind dominated most of our stay. Take care of yourself my dear and keep on with your writing. Because we love you. And don't bother to come out to the suburbs where you can do nothing to help us find ourselves in this mystifying dilemma in which we all find ourselves.

The poet is the only one who has not lost his way, and you are a poet. We must look to you. Keep on doing what you are already doing for us.

With love

Bill

WCW had some harsh words for Denise about the language in her poem "The Jacob's Ladder." She responded, explaining where she was coming from.

September 21st, 1960

Dear Bill & Floss,

I have been incredibly sloppy about all letters this summer — please forgive my rudeness in not writing back sooner to thank you for The American Idiom & to answer your remarks on my recent poems.

By way of excuse, the truth is I was having such a good time out of doors in Maine, swimming & swimming and walking & just looking, that I hated to spend any time indoors in my rather stuffy little study there-also, at the last, we were in a state of paralyzing tension over the question of whether we should put every penny we have (& it's the first, fortuitous, & perhaps last time we had the extra money at all) on an old farmhouse. Well, we've done it — at least I think so — negotiations were to have been completed a couple of days ago, Mitch having remained up there for that purpose — but I haven't heard yet.

Now, about The American Idiom. I agree that there are very many young writers (older ones aren't likely to change anyway) who need to have this said to them because they start out writing in a borrowed 'literary' style that doesn't have roots in their own life & doesn't correspond to how they feel and how they talk. Also I agree that there is marvellous poetry in common speech, painful heartbreaking human poetry only to be heard & cherished if the poet hears and frees it — your life's work evidences that.

But-for me personally, I cannot put the idea of "American idiom" first. For you it has always been a focus, almost a mission. But each person must know their own needs. My need and desire is in each poem to find the tone and measure of what I feel, whether the language, word by word or measure by measure, strikes the reader as 'American' or not.

That poem you were distressed by, "The Jacob's Ladder," has to be the way it is because it sounds the way I think and feel about it, just as close as I can make it. My shaking up of its structure into something else would be a betrayal of what I know I must do. You must take into consideration that I grew up not in an American, and not in an English, but a European atmosphere; my father was naturalized in Eng. only around the time I was born — his background was Jewish, Russian, Central European — and my mother, herself proudly Welsh; had lived in Poland, Germany, & Denmark etc all the years between 1910 & 1923. And then, when I came to the U.S., I was already 24 years old — so tho' I was very impressionable, good melting-pot material, the American idiom is an acquired language for me.

Certainly I am an American poet, if anything — I know I am not an English one — nevertheless I feel the great European poets "belong to me" as an inheritance too.

It may perhaps not be a good thing to be without deep local roots, to be at home everywhere & nowhere, but if one's life has made one be such a person, & one is a poet by natural aptitude & constitution, one surely must accept it: for instance, my daily speech is not purely American — I'm adaptable & often modify it to fit with whoever I'm with, but in speaking to Mitch or to myself my vocabulary is a mixture of different elements-more American than anything else but still not standard American so to speak — if such a thing existed, which of course it doesn't.

And I believe fervently that the poet's first obligation is to his own voice — to find it and use it. And one's "voice" does not speak only in the often slipshod imprecise vocabulary with which one buys the groceries but with all the resources of one's life whatever they may be, no matter whether they are 'American' or of other cultures, so long as they are truly one's own & not faked.

Add to this the fact that 'The Jacob's Ladder' was written in a church in Mexico (begun there, at least, looking at a primitive painting). Also, it is most certainly not in iambics. When I come to see you (soon, I hope) I'll read it to you & if you are still interested we'll battle it out.

Glad you liked some of the other poems and hope you don't feel I am defecting from all you hold dear — your own work remains as rich and necessary to me as it has since I first began to read it 13 years ago but I cannot simply go along with all you say about the American Language, even though I think it is healthy for those who grow up entirely in that language to realize it & use it.

And I think you have to grant that I'm a special case anyway — I'm a later naturalized, second-class citizen, not an all-American girl, & I'm darned if I'm going to pretend to be anything else or throw out what other cultural influences I have in my system, whatever anyone says.

Much love always Denise

P.S. Gee, just realized as I dated this letter that your birthday was on Saturday. Please accept my wishes for a year of good health and of many poems and joys.

Please save me some copies of The American Idiom because I have some college reading dates & can give them away to students.

The Jacob's Ladder

by DENISE LEVERTOV

The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and
need not touch the stone.

It is of stone.
A rosy stone that takes
a glowing tone of softness
only because behind it the sky is a doubtful,
a doubting night gray.

A stairway of sharp
angles, solidly built.
One sees that the angels must spring
down from one step to the next, giving a little
lift of the wings:

and a man climbing
must scrape his knees, and bring
the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone
consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.
The poem ascends.

Denise Levertov

September 22nd, 1960

Dear Denise:

Thanks for your explicit letter about your family history and your life after coming to America as it applies to your language. It is very enlightening. So our language has been made up, there is one thing that draw us together: the spoken language.

Congratulations on your purchasing for yourselves a home. May you have much happiness from living in it. Come see when you have the time.

Love,

Bill

October 8th, 1960

Dear Bill & Floss,

I'm writing this in the bus on the way back from reading at Bard. Stayed with Ted Weiss & had a good time — tho' I know I read too fast, darn it, & didn't space the poems out enough.

We're in the process of moving. Left the apartment yesterday with every drawer hanging open, boxes all over the place, packed and half-packed — trunks with clothes lolloping out of their open mouths, etc. It is fatiguing but also exhilarating.

I found Mary Ellen Solt's approach (in her letter) a little Germanic & pedestrian, in other words academic-the prose about poetry of a non-practitioner. The point gets lost among so many words.

Here is a poem you may like — I hope.

I want to see you both. This household removal — I have to get that over first.

Bus is close to Rutherford now — wish I cd jump off & come over — but back to the boxes —

With love —

Denise

WCW seems to apologize for his first appraisal of "The Jacob's Ladder" in this dispatch.

November 6th, 1960

Dear Denise:

Our talk yesterday afternoon was very important and rewarding to me, it put me straight on a subject on which I was too lazy to have made up my mind, a subject of utmost importance to me.

It had directly to do with that second poem which I had slighted but which I now see is one of the best you have ever written, employing the very understanding I am most eager to see in a poet — his relationship with the art itself rather than any topical matter which curses even our most promising artist.

The measured way in which you handled your material of the Jacob Ladder incident until the very scraping of the angels' wings upon the stone makes me cringe with embarrassment that I should have missed it in the first place.

The clean handling of the language is brilliantly deployed — you are an artist who it does my heart good to have seen in action. That's not half of it. Your criticism of my own short comings is noted. I'll pay attention to what you say.

Love

Bill

On June 2nd, WCW suffered his final cerebral hemorrhage. His last letter to Denise records such pain.

June 21st, 1961

Dear Denise:

I have gone far back since we last corresponded. It is not possible for me to describe what exactly has happened to me. It has happened very fast. Bon voyage. 

Love,

Bill

The letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams were edited by Christopher MacGowan, and you can purchase them here. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

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In Which A Baby Is More Important Than Any Of Us

No Proper Setting

The letters of the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson are so voluminous that their editor, George F. Butterick, did not live to edit all ten volumes of their exchanges. The letters themselves cover only the years of the 1950s, when Creeley was beginning to write the first poetry that would make him a worldwide name with his collection For Love, and Charles Olson began to teach a generation of artists at Black Mountain. Both were possessed by an idiosyncratic letter-writing style that prefigures modern poetics and speech. They did not meet in person until they had exchanged letters for many years, and although both were married throughout, their intimacy goes beyond the artistic and the emotional to reflect the pairing of two like minds searching for each other in the wilderness.

olson walking with robert duncan

Black Mountain, N.C.

tuesday may whatever it is

May 9th, 1950

my dear robert creeley:

this is going to be a note, only to tell you i have been on the road for ten days, and will write you the moment i am back at my desk

but i want you to know how very glad i am that you saw Morning News, and that goes for y & x, and the new two, too it is fine

it did startle me, you speak of education, & plan to speak up: nothing could be truer, when poets are the only pedagogues

i don’t think you could know that you would catch me, with yr letter, when I was at Alabama College does a speech on verse and showing Cagli drawings And now i am here at this little hotbox of education, to do the same

i shall try to put down something on education for you: USE, it is the use they make of us

above all things resist, to be sick at heart: we are forward and it is such gratification, that you are ready to go with me

love,

olson

talking to fanny howe

Olson must have been stunned to receive Creeley's response, for what other individual in the world could be tuned into exactly that wavelength?

Littleton, N.H.

May 18th, 1950

Dear Olson,

Good to have your letter, and very good of you to have sent the copies down to the people. Hope to be able to make this up to you, somehow, sometime. For the moment, my thanks.

These letters from you: good to have the fact of your concerns, which, as it happens, mine. The distortion that can come in with an over-emphasis of mistaking EP‘s thought, or the Dr’s for that matter: cripples many that wd be of use. This not to protest that I have the word from God, etc: but that I’m capable of recognizing its misuse in the hands of others: which they might take as ‘friend.’ Usual. But sad, as in the case of Eliot and EP.

Particulars: letters have driven me a hell of a ways from that in the past months, but also: back again. The job of making sense for a particular dozen: worse than I might take it, for the magazine, where there wont be the emphasis on ‘individual’ explanations, etc. I.e. some duds cant see their nose, etc. I cd name names, etc. But pointless. The point: that I find you interested and willing to help before you’ve seen 10 yrs of ‘successful’ biz.

I wd make this an offer, subject to what time you have to work with, and subject to what you may think of the 1st issue, wht you can get from these letters, etc: you to judge: that if you want to take an active hand in these matters, beyond what you mean as a contributor, and as such, will count on you for staples, etc.: to take up, often, those matters pertaining to the center, by way of reviews, etc., the dirty work. Leed & I cant do it all. Some doubt now as to whether or not we can put reviews in this 1st attempt, since they are all written by the same violent hand, mine, and the rapid succession of CLIMAX, wd tell on a man. As Leed put it: this isn’t criticism, it’s the expression of a taste! Which, as it happens, was what I meant it to be, not taking the paraphrase, etc. the digesting of a book in public, to be the best thing you can do for it. What I wd take as better: pointing to ONE GOOD REASON why any damn fool might become less of one, by reading it, etc. Anyhow, you will see the difficulty. Reviews, for example, cd be put to good use in this way: beyond getting to books not given general attention: that others don’t treat, etc — they can be used to cover related ground which we cant get to directly in the criticism. Just there, in other words, that anything from good housekeeping to astronomics can be made to bear: granted a head. Anyhow, that’s one thing. A lot besides. Getting material: always a bug. But think it over, and we can get to the particulars when you will. You sd have a better idea than you do have before you go one way or the other, so hang on for the moment.

Robert Creeley

As the two became better acquainted, the one-eyed Creeley looked to Olson as a mentor who could not only read and give feedback on his prose work (the main focus of his efforts at the time) but who could recommend other directions for his prolific appetite for reading. The following letter, which was never sent to Olson and found among RC's papers, examines his struggle with the form.

Littleton, N.H.

August 30th, 1950

Dear O/

Unfair. My wife says of the enclosed: it doesn't make any sense, not that it is wrong (like Ez had sd, also bitterly of you, that) in matters superficial, but that it is wrong at bottom. Against the light. I can thin of damn little that is not against the light, & yet am committed to the belief that at the bottom, the very, there, only: light. It gets beyond, exact, matters of the simple run of coherence as I might, here, tell you a story, a story, in a matter of some 25 words which could satisfy that, completely, wholely, altogether. The end of it. But nothing is the end, in prose, is that, exact. I am after, trying, to pick up that thread, as the only way occurs to me is: myself and the variations possible upon my experience. My wife thinks that everything I write is 'true' or that it tries to force its way thru to that 'quality.'

I am not in any sense a moralist, more than I can be, a transmitter, thru which work: forces, moral or otherwise. I ask only that exactness, that the words keep with the head/as that carries thru, to consciousness, what charge the emotions are capable of. The complex. To that, to only that, should any art commit itself. It is to have no hesitance between what the head is thinking & the hand is putting down. To force that coupling. To NOT avoid. Well, I throw this at you, only as it is something just done, and about which, since it is, I know or think very damn little. I don't care for any one instance more than any other: one instance.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. No: as my wife laments: point. Pride, & a good deal else, makes any such effort a pain / obnoxious and lamentable, to those who try to stomach it, alongside & not in. The process. As love, as any instance, is enough — does it matter one damn whether or not it 'happened' & yet there it is, what she hates there — my logick for having fallen in love with this one, as she is there in the story, and why? she asks. And I ask the same. I don't expect or even want an answer. I am, if she would want an answer, which I don't think she does, or needs, in love with her. In love with, other, possibles. As any living is. But what I wd pin down: wd be the only 'way' of a thing, since I think all else wd be false in the frame given. The act of writing belies the conclusion which it might get to - because it is when I've finished, that it all occurs to me, what might have been done. But I have already done something, whether right or wrong, and what these mean...it's done. As it came, it had its logic, because it came. Not sophistry, but NO: actual, it grew. It was the 'way.' A failure. Up to what framed it — that I tend out, from others, into a language, & a speech, reasons, that I have no right to expect them to know. My own failure. That I haven't a language, or a depth of caring to make me concerned with communication.

I am, like all, perhaps, if sentimentality is a quantity, and not a mood, waiting to come to life. I know, & try, to put only, what seems now & again, to come there, as out of me: living. Which is often a joke. But the attempt. That is my own attempt.

Perhaps this has a logic that I having written it, and she having her own place here, can't get. That would be the main question — what does it come to, beyond what I must think.

Yr lad/

Creeley

The following letter emanating from the south of France prefigures, if only in some small way, Creeley's masterpiece "Anger."

Fontrousse, Aix-en-Provence

January 9, 1952

Dear Charles,

Beating my head on the stories this morning, trying to get something finished of that Musicians, i.e. I had held on to the first page. But nothing doing. It scares me, but I can't see what else. It seems very dry & dead.

Otherwise, I get out a little more, but that is not much pleasure. I'd forgotten how damn dreary the bix of people can get, or how dull, say, the usual conversations. The policies are as much here as they are anywhere. Either one is most light & gay, or most serious, and I can't make either tone with any damn grace. (I wish you might see me, trying to.)

The whole damn frame, call it, is way the hell off. Not that I haven't some damn security in simply thinking of what might happen, any damn time, and anywhere. But to move it, — that I damn well can't make now. The story, above — it should be something to go on. I have just the two people; more than that, I have them in ways that are in my own feel, etc. That is, there they are, just in the room, and sitting, the whole space of it falls in, and what to do, they are thinking, and what more precisely, to say. In any case, there is hardly a music to hear; that side of it, the echo, is very far off — even in actual miles. They hear, if anything, just that echo of it, and both feeling that i would be so great have that way of it, to make those sounds, say, they are, envying, each very separately, the supposed feelings of these others who can play, as my mother used to have it, an instrument.

But more than any of it, — they are simply sitting there, just in the room. The walls are somewhat steep even, there's not much more light than just one high window, which must be only a foot above the actual street level. It is a cave of sorts. The woman is married, but all there is, is things, etc. Table, chairs, a couch in the corner, and beyond, in the next room, he can see the refrigerator, etc. They take it that it wouldn't honestly be any problem. But what are they in love with, because it is, very clearly, not each other. She loves, say, her husband, one supposes, even less, but she is not at all in love with the man who is, most literally, there. Himself, he doesn't quite know; looking at her, I expect he wonders if it isn't a good time, as one had thought of back such a long time, - conquests & all such dreams, etc. But god knows there is some music. She is playing records, and the sounds, familiar, etc., interpose something else, so that she has begun to dance, of herself, etc, and he is put off by the apparent staginess.

The conversation might well begin just there. There is hardly a damn thing to lose, and he might even turn the damn thing off, etc, though I know he won't. He watches, anyhow; he has that way of doing anything, and can sit it out, and feel something is done even by that. But they will be forced to say something: somehow they are there, the logic of it only their knowing one another, and something not at all right in either one. I don't see how they can not talk, but what they might be saying, or will — what I haven't yet been able to find my way into.

So, I sit. The sun just begins to come through here, — about 10:30, I think it must be now, etc. Last night I got some shelves up, and have, at least, things where I can get to them. Yr picture, likewise, now up. no frame, sadly, no proper damn setting - phew. But can see it now simply, and I like it.

I got a check from ND yesterday: $26.68. Five damn stories. It say,s in the letter with it - $800 is what they have for total sum coming to contributors on this first issue of 2000 copies. And who the hell can think they'll issue more, etc. It bugs me, not that, say, the loot that is needed, but how christly little it all is, etc. I see, too, he pays 8%. I wonder why he damn well bothers.

Have you seen the damn book? Will he damn well give you something for that intro? Let me hear. Will get you a copy myself, if they damn well don't. Nothing in here yet; I don't figure it will be any damn pleasure, at that. Damn.

Well, fuck it. Let me put this by for ab it, and see whether there's one from you in the noon mail. Will try to get this off this afternoon. Can't damn well sit here, thinking of the damn story & how, how damn precisely, I can't do a damn thing with it. Ok.

All our dearest love to you all,

Bob

In this abridged letter, Olson describes a college scene where a promising young student almost drowns. The incident appears to have affected him deeply.

Black Mountain, N.C.

January 29th, 1952

robt:

just to sit here, & put you on — am worn, & chiefly from a business last night at 1 am which threw me:

i came into it as I had just opened the water cock of the radiator of the car, the night promised to be that cold, & snow had been falling for a couple of hours. to get my hand down to the cock, to see it, i had just borrowed a flashlight from the care of one Rauschenberg, by way of his friend Cy Twombly (the two of them are constantly together, and I had found Cy in the dining hall playing a little organ while Nick played a guitar, Oppenheimer the drum, & Solomon the piano. Cy's getting was, too bad you weren't here sooner, we were really beating it out, now, it's leveling off. And he told me where the flash was.

class picture at Black Mountain

two minutes more & i'd have put the flash back, and gone into the house (Con was up, feeding Kate, and I was anxious to be in, & talking with her, the whole day had been consumed with visitors, then two faculty meetings, & a four hour go of the class in the evening) but as i was turning away, there was a cry from the direction of the dining hall, and off toward the end of it where the path to the lake goes between the dining hall and the music cubicle, "Olson, the flash, hurry"

i started off slow, not catching the voice, but some stir there quickened, and i raced about the time i went under the pine tree in front of the stone house, and it was on me in that way that all such things happen — even before i passed the flash to Nick, an saw the beam pick up a head out in the lake, i had the picture: Twombly was twenty feet out, up to his hips, and saying, with as much tension as his southern voice can, that he couldn't go any further, that he couldn't catch his breath. And it was Rauschenberg farther out, out towards the middle, making these moans, & catchings of the voice — and obviously, at least mixed up, & probably stuck, in a trance, not the mud so much, though the mud came into my mind, and I already dreaded the thought of going in to that damned cold water, and the mud, and seemed afterward to have resolved to dive in, wrapping my topcoat around me, and going fast, to get the boy, damned reluctantly.

black mountain college, summer sessionThis excerpt from a longer letter predates an Olson essay. Olson's paranoia was inspired by a visit from the FBI doing a background check on him for a fellowship.

Black Mountain, N.C.

February 1, 1952

I have not lived in a fascist State. I was not born to be a citizen. I have taken the principles of these States as usable facts. I therefore shall behave so, admitting this existing & power, admitting — what I cannot fail to admit is the DIALECTICAL (that which ultimately is the cause of the FBI coming to this point, that my life (my fate) is herewith interfered with — even if nothing happens, it has been interfered with: I have had to feel that shadow. What a shadow, and I, as an American UNPREPARED. That is, as citizen, NOT as MYSELF.

(Yet these absent wings must be felt, to experience, citizenry: no tax-collector, or draft board, has this force; not even the police, — tho they are closer: this must be the old European thing anew, the SECRET police)

It has been a tremendous thing, this visit, that, I was called (on) (for) I WAS CALLED.

I have felt too long that component, that evil. CAUSATION, to duck out now, to take any of the postures: a man cannot escape the MORAL as the only excusable use of the INSTANT — no personal pose can manage the present, no theoretical one, no "movement": back to the farm, or whatever

This hugely argues, for me, the import of CONJECTURE. (You will have noted, how, again, in that Twombly piece, it came out.)

I still take it back to those two decades, 1830-1850. It was in those years that the MALE principle did itself in. From the studies of those two decades came those two LIES:

I that nature is a fate: EVOLUTION (what fooled em was, that, because it did not seem "fixed" fated was not a fate concept: witness the result, existentialism, the false management of despair, the inability to cross over, to get to the other side of, despair: the filthy attempt to fix despair on us, instead of, action, from the other wise

II that the state is a fate equal to nature: MARX is only the image of all that has come since, capitalism, communism, fascism and all the naive and saintly oppositions to all three — the thin boys, the palefaces, the untragic ones

Still it goes: MELVILLE (shaped in those same years, DIFFERENTLY)

RIMBAUD (the first man confronted with the results, and cutting through, but not knowing (it was that early any other action than running guns for Menelik: I had to pass thru this stage myself, and did, ten years ago,  those years, exactly, it had to be still known, done, then. Now (since the Spanish War, 1938) not necessary.

LAWRENCE, THE MAN WHO SAW: what he saw (and he's the only one who saw, up to the men who were born after 1910) was, that the MIND is a TEMPTATION which has to be defeated

and my own sense is that CONJECTURE is the defeat of DIALECTIC, is the ploughing back of that thing, the male mind, to the INSTANT (let me quickly toss in this premise, that there is a difference of the female mind ((these are not at all necessarily accompanied by corresponding sexual parts!)) (((by god, just checked Hegel's dates, and find he dies just where i date the birth of the 20th century: 1831 (from 1770. For it was he who put the name on the mal-usage which made them modern world, that thing raised on those TWO LIES: he gave these dialectical triumphs their language

(I have this horror, — oh to hell with it, only, THIS:

HEGEL TO LAWRENCE

and CONJECTURE takes all that energy (i dub it the MALE energy, and the proper one to the MALE act — without it men are dangerous - without the understanding that they are metaphysically creative, and thus organic, as the female is physically

(((don't scream, Ann:

this is exactly the opposite of an exclusion, simply, that it also restores that respect

takes all that energy and redisposes it ANTI-HISTORY, says, the INSTANT, (which a woman can know without need of any other component) is METAPHYSICAL:

a dogma: that a MALE can act MORALLY only as he enters INSTANT, and that his only gate to the experience is the metaphysical gate

what troubles me, is, that I find it necessary to be myself dialectical in order to expose the condition of same!

OK. Anyhow, as I say, I had to be without fear, those two hours, when exactly the two wings making the shadow were not at all the present but were, each wing, one the past (whom i knew 10 years ago) and the future (where I'd go, say next year — not to worry at all about: for the rest of my life, eh?).

and that is the WRONG — that anything should take away (a) my fate and (b) my engagement in life as a fate separate from myself but only useful to me the degree that its workings are left open by men:

it is this sort of OPENNESS that i say that men can only restore as they deny dialectic as a means adequate to keep nature & society so open — or open to the degree that they can never be, both of them being by their difference different from ourselves

what racks modern man is, that, due to those decades, both nature & society are fatal propositions, under whose spell he is downtrodden

and the only act worth a man's life today is to confront that, to give his fellow men freedom from these rigidities:

all present fear & trembling is NOT momentous, is not MORAL, simply, that it is neither (a) any one's in his or her self — his or her fate; or (b) is "life's," that is, the thing you, RC, have so carefully extricated from (a), without in any way disturbing the FIRST FACT, that they are inextricable

What has shocked me is, to have the MONSTER, to have the combination of these two lies, COME TO MY DOOR!

It had to come. And it did.

The thing is, that to have it happen, was, a sort of joy!

I have no fear left, of that sort: I am able now to see how otherwise I am defeated! Love to you both,

Charles

PS: the error of Kafka (which I always felt) I can now prove: he was "feminine" in his disposing of himself (his father took the balls out of him) — it is this side gives the poetic to his universe; and he was intellectually dialectical (the monster took the conjecture out of his mind, the male of his intellect). And so, there shld be no surprise, that i has been existentialists, socialists, homosexual and jews who had found him of use — His inaccuracy was a subtle one.

What also occurs to me, from this get go, is, how logical that we should live in a world in which — ultimately — it is a BABY who is the important human figure: for when both nature and the State have been allowed to loom as of such importance that man seems only important (nature-wise) because he is an instrument of the species, and he is only important state-wise as he is for or against it in war, then surely, it is logical that a baby is more important than any of us.

The following missive from Creeley's young son David was enclosed with a June 1952 letter. The boy begins by signing his name.

david creeley

olson pggy (this is verbatim...) mama is piggy david creeley. we live outdoors and just in the street and dada wrote that letter on the chimney. we have electricity and a sink and a tree for me to climb on. we live in a little village, so little-so little house this big. we got the garden too except it's all the time full of grass except the things that are growing in it aren't ours —. Mr. Marti who own the things in the garden. Corn and beans are ours. We don't have almost anything - piles of trees. WE went to a fete and it was a nice fete with lots of people dancing, piles of people watching the fete and & nice pretty girls dancing with pretty clothes. We don't have any windows or anything except we live on one porch. There's a tree all dead, doesn't have any leaves on it. We have a basin. We go swimming in it.

Four (i.e. he's four, etc) Thomas one.

f uhttttedd

dda

DAVID

You can read the autobiography of Robert Creeley here. You can read Charles Olson's "First Fact" here.

"Dead Moon (live)" - Madeline (mp3)

"In the Direction of the Moon" - Wolf Parade (mp3)

"No Moon" - Iron & Wine (mp3)

Jerry Heiserman, Dan McCloud, Allen Ginsberg, Bobbie Louise Hawkins Creeley, Warren Tallman, Robert Creeley above Charles Olson.

In Which We Hate Talking On The Phone

This is the second part of a series about the letters of Denise Levertov and Williams Carlos Williams. You can read the first part here.

Agonies of Indecision

The letters of the poets Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams quickly grew familiar. In Levertov, the aging Williams found a like mind eager to take up his artistic sensibilities. Because Denise disliked long phone conversations, she put it all into the letters to her mentor, impressing both with the poems that inevitably accompanied the correspondence as well as descriptions of her life in Mexico married to the woefully mediocre Mitch Goodman. The letters below chronicle her departure from Mexico in the late fifties after Bill first wrote her following an introduction by Robert Creeley.

My dear Denise Goodman,

A man should be able to react "big" to his admirers, it's due them, they do not throw their praise around carelessly. And so I always feel mean when I look into the back of my own head and see what a small figure I make to myself. I am not what they think. I am not the man I should be for THEIR sakes, they deserve something more. It is in fact the duty of the artist to assume greatness. I cannot. What a fool.

I can't believe even what I know be the truth of my own worth. When an individual says he or she "lives" by what I exhibit I get a sudden fright. But at the same time if I myself live by certain deeds why should not others do the same? But we are so weak, what we do seems the worst futility. I am willing to go down to nothing but I don't want to feel I'm dragging anyone down with me.

Here I sit in my little hole like a toad. Thank you for your letter.

Faithfully yours,

W.C. Williams

November 13th, 1951

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

Dear Bill

First, thanks very much for subscription to "Naked Ear." That's very kind of you. He has an extraordinary mixture of good & bad in there, hasn't he — mostly bad — but yet it's so open & simple (like, I've heard, the man himself) that one always feels better things may show up. And in fact they do, e.g. Bob's poems. Bob Creeley spent the 3 days after Xmas with us & he was describing Judson Crews whom he likes very much.

Coming to Guadalajara & finding us gone to the coast & the house empty, Creeley broke a window, entered, & did all the Goldilocks things including a little laundry. When the maid's husband came to make his daily inspection & water the lawn, there sat Bob at table with some food & a book propped up; with his one eye and his beard you can imagine the sensation he must have caused.

He was lucky not to have been shot for there've been robberies in the neighbourhood and Mexicans are gun-happy. Bob's inability to prove to Soledad & her husband that he really was a close personal friend of ours, & their agonies of indecision as to whether to treat him as a guest or a bandit (they arrived at a compromise) make a comic piece in the genre of Pirandello's The Jar.

At the beach we ate fresh coconuts & lobsters, saw a most beautiful insouciant armandillo, swam every day, walked in the palm jungle, caught some inedible fish (tho' the water teemed with edible ones) from an unbalanced & unresponsive canoe (on the lagoon) and in addition I distinguished myself by getting a bad attack of malaria, complete with nephritis, hepatitis, & gastritis. The day before we left the bay filled up with enormous sharks, something I wouldn't have missed seeing for the world, tho' I didn't care to swim any more after that. Once or twice we swam at night — once while Bob was with us.

We were obliged to go to bed early as the candles flickered in the sea wind & hurt our eyes, so we got up in the time to see the sun rise, most days.

The most delightful twinkle-footed little pigs of all colors & their lean long-snouted medieval-looking parents, were constantly wandering through the sandy village of palm-huts & snuffing abut the beach.

I have some poems to send you but Mitch has the typewriter and won't be back for another week so I'll wait till then.

The book from Ferlinghetti was to have been out by Xmas but there was some trouble about the typeface & cover so it will be a while longer.

John & Ruth Herrmann & Juanito have gone to Houston Texas where they intend to remain 6 months & then return to Mexico. John is going into the V.A. hospital there for another hernia operation, & hopes as a result to have his pension augmented. He spent a little time at the beach with Mitch before leaving. We hope, & so do they, that the complete change of scene (after 8 yrs in Mexico) will help Ruth who has just been killing herself with drink. I went into a spin over it for a while, until I realized that no one person, least of all an emotional one like me, can do anything to help a person in that condition.

An image that lingers with me: — her blurred voice & tousled gray hair, her ravaged face from which glowed one beautiful eye (the other half-closed from a terrific shiner) as she recalled you coming up to her years ago at some meeting & saying, "Ah, Ruth, your lovely face — your lovely face makes it worth while having come..." And the strange dignity she retained in her degradation, in the dirty chilly kitchen among the flies & the giggling servant-girls. Somehow she pulled up when John came back from the beach & left for the States in pretty good shape. John himself aside from his poor health is O.K.

I feel ashamed to be so remote, to have given so little thought and feeling, to the Hungarian rising — but it's from the feeling of distrust one has of all the reports — not of the fact of what happened, essentially, but to the way it is used by the worst people. For example I picked up eagerly a sort of supplement to Life consisting of pictures & history of the whole affair — and dropped it without looking because however many true photographs could have been taken there's always the sickening feeling that, in the Time-Life context, they're fixed. So that natural impulse to sympathy, indignation, etc, gets turned back on itself. All the passion and illusion of the thirties that fizzled out with the war is denied to one in the 50s because one's damned if one's going to be tricked and bamboozled. (Of course I was a child in the 30s, but I lived some of it through my sister, 9 years older than I — walked in May Day parades, held the soap box steady in Hyde Park etc) And then one feels ungenerous & introverted. Well, Schuhmacher, bleib bei dein Last, I guess.

Hope Xmas & New Years were happy for you and Floss, to whom please give my love as always.

Love-

from Denise

January 17th, 1957

Dear Denise:

I just mailed you a note about the certificate to be returned to me, thank you. But in the same mail with your letter telling me of my mistake in sending came Cid Corman's Origin with your poems — which you had sent me earlier in manuscript, at least the one called "Tomatlan."

Reading the poems it came over me how almost impossible it is to realize what it is that goes over from a writer into her poem. And how it gets there. Even the alertest reader can miss it. The poet herself might miss it and quit trying. And yet if it is important enough to her she will never quit trying to snare the "thing" among the words. Where does it lie among the words? That is the critic's business to discover and reveal that. You do not make it easy for.

I have never forgot how you came to me out of the formalism of English verse. At first as must have been inevitable, although I welcomed you I was not completely convinced, after all I wasn't completely convinced of my own position, I wanted you to convince ME.

Even recently I fight against accepting you unconditionally. It must always be so with a person we love and admire. It must be in the words themselves and what you find to do with them and what you have the spirit and trust to rely on the reader to find what you have put among them.

Where is it? In detail. Microscopically.

To take that poem apart or before that to view it as a whole, what do I see? But before that where else in this issue of that magazine is there something to challenge it. I'll have to pass that one up because I have not read those poems as carefully as I have yours.

Returning to that particular poem I have spoken of, to read it gives me a sensation of calm, of confidence. A countryside, a tropical jungle appears to me into which with my imagination I enter. It is done with the fewest possible words, with no straining after effect without the poet's apparent consciousness of making any effect at all.

The words used are copied direct from a vision seen, actually seen. The transition between the reader and what is being put down for him is direct, nothing extraneous has been allowed to creep in. This is a great preliminary virtue. It makes the final picture fresh as is anything seen for the first time, by a child, but let's not overemphasize that.

What, granted that, has the poet selected to use in her picture? She looking at the original picture must have selected significant details because after all she cannot see everything and what she seizes in her imagination reveals in the first place her intelligence and emotional range and depth. Her sight is keen, her mood relaxed.

I think the trick is done in the second stanza with the words "its silky fur brushes me". And later on "the palms shake their green breasts,"... Effortlessly, is the impression in the instantaneous exchange that takes place in the metaphor flares as a flash in our minds.

But a poet is not to be trapped so easily (it is all a flight and an escape) an internal battle of wits and the intelligence, a man and woman competing, wrestling for the crown of laurels, and some men and women write for cash. Denise Goodman has the ability to bundle the whole mess into one, balance calmly on her head, not giving herself away.

"New peace shades the mind here, the jungle shadows frayed by the sea winds." The test of how the poet is going to divide her lines is the test of what she or he is.

Bill

February 11th, 1957

Dear Bill & Floss

It's a long time since I last wrote — you'll have just about written me off as having disappeared into the Sierra Madre.

We had a long meandering bus trip down here stopping at different places & seeing a beautiful variety of landscape — the best being that between Mexico City & Puebla, which has not only its own riches, but the two snowy volcanoes Popocatepetl & the Sleeping Woman at its horizons. I had just received $80 for 2 poems from Mademoiselle, so in Mexico City we had a little leeway with money & bought a whole lot of books (since Oaxaca has no American library) which was fun. I don't mean eighty dollars' worth of course!

Finally we got down here to find that the house wasn't ready for us owing to a typical Mexico mishmash — that was the first week in July — now we've moved into 2 rooms & the kitchen & they're rebuilding the rest around us — it will be nice when it's finished but meanwhile the sounds (beginning at 6:30 am — continuing till sundown) of plastering, sawing, plumbing, whistling, singing & cement mixing (by hand) are driving us nuts, especially Mitch, and especially since the patio is almost completely obstructed by rotten beams (removed from the original structure) metal rods) to be used in the present structure) huge mudpuddles (it is the rainy season) and our landlord's family washlines (the landlord & family are charming friends and have adopted my mother for life, which makes it almost impossible to complain, especially since all this is not the fault of anyone in particular).

Anyway — Mitch is restless & wants to get back to New York; so he's probably going to drive up with some friends in a week & stay a couple of months. I guess we will all 3 be back next spring. The prospect of going back to N.Y. gave me the shakes as recently as a week ago, but I've now realized that it is inevitable because Mitch needs it, it is his native ground & he comes to a standstill when he's away too long. For me it is rather bad than good but I'm very adjustable once I can see there's no way out. So now I'm beginning to think of the good things about a return — the chance of seeing you for one. And seeing paintings, hearing music. Nell Blaine has been painting down here & I've gotten a kick out of her work (& finding what a good person she is too, after years of mere acquaintance) — & it makes me realize how much I miss that.

Insurgentes Avenue

Here, even in Mexico City, there's nothing. The Mexican painters don't interest me, except some of the engravers. Oaxaca itself & the great archeological sites nearby I love, but somehow none of it has the impact on me that the bare dry prairie & distant mountains around Guadalajara had a year & 1/2 ago — bitter & almost ugly, they seemed the right place to come at a bitter time. However once this damn house is fixed I mean to suck whatever savor is to be had from the remaining months here, if I can.

Today I discovered something odd — H.L. Davis whose poems (published by Harriet Monroe in the twenties) I'd found in an anthology & liked very much, also a book of his called Winds of Morning, & to whom I'd been meaning to write to ask if he still wrote poetry, is living right here just outside Oaxaca. I haven't met him yet but am going out there in a day or 2. It was rather like finding John Herrmann, to find him living here — tho I don't expect him to be such a nice person as poor John (from whom we haven't heard recently — & in his case that's not a good sign).

The electricity just gave out (see "The Plumed Serpent," very little has changed) and there's about 1/4 inch of oil left in the lamp. We were very glad to read about that Award they gave you. I hope you've both been well — has it been a good summer for you? — not that it's ended but there's a feeling here of summer visitors departing & fall beginning. I've been dyeing curtains all sorts of unexpected colors. We have a 16-year old maid called Lydia, she has terribly bandy legs but such a nice face. The workmen's wives and families come twice a day & they all have long civilized picnics among the rubble.

With love, always,

from Denise

August 25th, 1957

In a diary entry from November, Levertov wrote, "went to San Felipe to visit H.L. Davis. Liked him — gave him my book."

The letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams are edited by Christopher MacGowan. You can read the first part of this series here.