Beerspit Night and Cursing (26 page)

Deah Sharhieeee:

Tank you for the H.D.; seems rather proper and formal to me, but I realize ingrained and worked through, a classical
vendetta against the walls, and so this is needed, of course,

Ez has the same hard control, and of course hysteria is for

but I remember so many times when I went into libraries

looking for hysteria hoping to find madness and

but everything was plish and polished Art and carefulness

and I walked out blacker than any nigger

either the world of Art was invalid since its conception

or I belonged someplace else. I have since worked out a compromise: if the world of Art will ignore me, I will not only ignore the world of Art but the other world also.

And since then I have had my beer in peace—I mean, comparatively, along with wars, landlords, half-wives, lightning, cool Jory’s and the what.

7 Poets Press is going ahead with my second book and Larsen
is picking some wildflowers—I am listening to
Pagliaccia
, or how you spell?—

one jew or jap or wop or german or what human being

can contain immense suffering; I do not say this in the old

in the prima donna sense

like chipping away at marble and making a to-do about it, saying I’m done in I’ve had it all I’m good for is chipping in the marble of the arts

chipping in the halls and drawing pretty prick pictures; but what I mean is what I say: one human being can pack in and

more pain than the ocean bottom; and sometimes it’s good to

If it has been bad enough, you are the one who knows; any need to tell the world about it is not only irregular

but assuming a luxuriant posture. If you can say it irregulary

or in the manner of wolves running through the forest

I think it excusable. Now I don’t mean the hard core or form.

Hysteria is plausible except that you may ask in a drunken

but never beg. These are not rules, but decencies of spirit.

And I realize that I can tell you nothing.

I have never received a letter from you, no matter the cuss words or indignities…that was not shaped out of electric clay thousands of years old. But so much for that.

Heard from Safford Chamberlain of KPFK who wants to have me read some of my own poetry to be taped for future broadcast material. I must tell him no. It is interesting that people know that I am alive, but I don’t think of myself as a poet

essentially but when I do think of myself as a poet I cannot see the poet’s place as being on the stage,

being on the stage is something else and those are other people. Hell, I realize they are all doing it:
Winters, Lowell, Ransom, Tate
; and Corso and Ginsburg and people like that, but I have always followed my own insides’ saying, and my insides say
NO NO NO
!!!!!!

no.

these people always claim they are trying to awaken the public to poetry like shaking the ragdoll alive, but I rather wonder if it isn’t the old ego calling, and all the pose and bullshit

and the hard-core practiced lines out of the mould

were nothing at all,

and that finally they would rather be just as famous as Bob Hope.

poets, indeed.
SWINE BLATHERERS
.

Shed, when I die nobody will know it for 3 or 4 or 5 days—I have no friends, just one old woman who drinks wine—until the body starts to stink and there will be no one to bury me. But I have thought it all over. And I feel that although I am not building a monument, I am not building rot. I cannot say as much for my neighbor who has 5 kids and a large Sunday gathering of noise and who is keeping the world alive while I let it die.

But it is odd that after saying something, making a statement, it no longer matters, as this no longer matters. And that is well, so we can get on to something else.

I expect to live to be close to one hundred years old and by the time I am 60 I am going to begin to carve; but
this
is the time of proper and gentle building and watching. Strength and knowledge come through sweat and new skins and new love, not love of woman but love of stem and the color of a coffee tin, flower and coffee gone, woman gone, old screens with holes letting in sunlight and small wild dirty flies.

Immortality is knowing that you are finally beaten…

Sheri, Gib is gentle and does not want trouble. If you want a fighter go to the zoo. An ape never doubts his own strength nor does he ever doubt that he is wrong. The trouble with a thinking man is that by the time he has gotten through trying to think out both sides

he has either been talked out of it

or clubbed to the floor

A good motto for thinkers is: in times of doubt or danger never think, strike. The victor makes the rules of right or wrong; the thinker can only muse on the damage done and the preciousness of defeat.

Or as Ezra might say

KICK ’EM IN THE BALLS FIRST
AND READ ’EM PETRARCH LATER
.

Something in the H.D. book you sent me. Think not for me. Am enclosing along with coins that were attached to it. (See within)

I burnt your rocks. Boy oh boy you witch you beautiful spirit-witch keep me in your camp and I’ll keep you in mine, and may we never meet

because we’ll see that we are of ordinary clay and design wear shoes blink stink desire go to the bathroom and are dull flabs of what the sky sends us down.

Webb has not written. I told him I felt as if I were a stone in his road and to get on with the other writers. I have wanted to make him a little angry and now I have succeeded. Now we are even for him sending his son down on me in the middle of the night. I viewed his son that night and I did not see a great
writer; I did see an agreeable, calm and intelligent person. I am sorry if my nerves showed a bit, but any minor status in the poetic world had nothing to do with it. I would not have been as angry if I had been faddled with by R. Jeffers, but almost.

And now Webb is asking for photos and the old gal and I got out in the hot sun, but the blinker thing was on for flash photos, it’s an old 4 dollar camera that is supposed to do both, and I hate my face, a lot of scars and now-appearing (it seems) a happy flabbiness, and I took some of her not for Webb and they all came out blank but we didn’t know and got drunk and felt good that it was over,

but it isn’t over and I don’t know what to do.

tomorrow I might well try it over

but why must a man have photos? unless he is running a photo mag.

I think the only way out for me is to indulge in trigamy…

Jory, yes. I cannot quite discard Jory. He is better in letter and poem than in person. When I see him actually

he is so much like the young eager salesman

ready to tell the flip joke or pinch the gal next to him in the ass when she bends over to retrieve whatever they retrieve to show their ass.

and then fill a poem full of stars and the crippled gazelle of living. I’d like to sit him in a room with Jeffers for 8 or 10 hours; they’d probably both come out babbling.

meanwhile,

Buk
Buk

Los Angeles, Calif.
April 17th., 1961

Deah Shed:

Worried about your mind-state.

You coming through, gal? Or are you going to die among the flowers or Chinese chipsewie? Maybe Pound kicked you out of nest, does not mean to die with your elbows dangling.

u still got Buk. all right, so meebee nobody knows me but I know me and I am subjective-objective enough to know I am not a bowl of soup or Popeye the Sailor Man. I know it’s the favorite sport

of a lot of yours to play genius;

I play mye eye self and I got to firuelious or something

figure a lot of tags have been wrong.

not that I give a damn. Each man (or woman) must live out of the
INSIDE OF HIS GUTS AND FOUR WALLS
.

Heard from kaja—she seems a little mixed.

but what the hell? do you mean to tell me that through the sanity insanity of these ariel words that iiii can change anything?

Pound may not like this attitude but Pound got his ass caught in the meat-grinder and Pound never heard of Buk, and now Pound has to cuff off his political favors as being on the right but losing side or whatever the chippy said when she spilled her drink and wanted another one before going up to my room.

Pound can go to hell.

all right. so u do not like it. nor do I like grey idols. it’s time to move on.

…space, it seems, can almost transcend death. Another toy to make us important enough to live

without the

overwrought falsity of poetry.

Ernie
cannot
write! I told you that. Ernie wants to seem or sound like a writer. Ernie is not insane. Ernie has never seen 17 baby pigs running running through something a hole in the fence and laughing laughing the dog and I the pigs the pigs and then going back to the factory not the dog but I, and Ernie prob takes his books with his brains and lets them
KNOW
nobody knows me

they think I am just a tough blank-faced old man

and they think

correctly goddess

the masses are not always wrong, but it is good sometimes to be tough and hard, it allows me to go on thinking and breathing, and maybe wot wot wot who knows what we try. ????

…drunker than the searchlight

feeble feeler

when the rays are subtractions.

all things that hold us together

will finally fall apart,

but neither of us will [
handwritten:
] (etherial abstraction of

be right or wrong

Winter comes but once a year but you can get drunk on any old good night.

drunkeness is a form of suicide that allows thou to expell all the shit in the belly or thy mind and come back like a Lazarus full of piss and pennies.

I am the soldier in the mirror. I can see Carthage and Nap and Hit. I smoke and smile and drink.—I have lived in East St. Louis and I have lived in Hell.

the hellyjelly law pounded my cookoodoor the other night old woman’s laughter broken bottlewebs

I wouldn’t let them in to sin.

things must rot. that is part of the
PLAN. GOD DAMN THE PLAN
. i do
NOT ACCEPPT ACCEPT ACCEPT ACEPPT

nature or whatever it is

when something down near my navel says this is evil;

I am not a cur or a crusador and I’m glad they never found the grail, they wd have only pissed in it, but I piss in myself and know I am nothing, and this is the most important beginning of all—all your genius-playing, fame-urgency tribe committed.

my youth has taken a walk but my mind has not. Or, so it says. to me. we must never be sure. even when we are…

which was pound’s mistake, of course; being sure and then sure again and then
MORE SURER
than ever. Admirable courage of course and
DEDICATION
but men are born bottled shitted born millions at a time all over the world many of them never to write never to know what a typewriter is or a lit. mag some men bending over rice or what awful slipsloopshit
much better poets leaders gutfullredbeasts
than Pound only out of it
ON A GOD DAMNED SHIT CHANCE OF MATH
.

But your Ez is fat ehohellhow to figure he is the only one. And for this, he is fortunate in his narrowmindedness.

Did Ez ever explain why he kicked you out of nest? was it me? or didn’t he explain? I am not knocking P. entirely. He has so far the greatest
GRAMMATICAL FORCE OF THE WORD

a man trained to whip the lion

but a man who could neither laugh nor forgive

or admit being second to anyone

even a 49 day old cat on the fire escape wet steps

after fucking a whore, and everything tired in the arms

and antiotes of nations forgotten whores forgotten

as the sun comes down. Pound was human and I must not

ride him too hard. I am getting almost like E., and I

do not want to do that.

Pound? He stands smoking and I would slug him against the bricks except things must rot that is part of the plan.

there is some enduring world here that should not be; we are toys—recollection and the will to live, and certainly Shake said it.

and against the girl I loved but one night,—

the armies of
Alaric
, the deer across the fender.

your yellow paged letters blue ones filled with

wat conjure up 35 thousand gods.

as for and far as I am concerned:
THE MOCKING BIRD DOES

how many dead do we want or need

how many wars how many New Jersey loves

how many 126976 hands?

how many feet?

most men are nothing; they only pretend to god awful be.

dullness, overlasting dullness and pretense; retch us out of yes

try to decide what my brain is trying to tell me.

musing leads to madness.

I am wise enough to come back and circle myself and bite out a chunk like a wild dog.

into and beyond terror seriousness will not do. Seriousness and the rag-dillpickle bopeek books are gypsy gone

we must carve from fresh marble

they taught us this and that, but then

wine good wine came down through the staring and unbelieving eye.

the indistinct smoke of verse is gone, if I have to kill it myself. If you or I were Greco or even a watersnake. well, rub your hands and prove that you are alive. walk the floor. this is the gift. certainly the charm of dying lies in the fact that nothing is lost.