217 Randolph Place NE
Washington 2, D.C.
February 24, 1948

My dear Bill Williams:

It is heart-rending to have you down. And just when you have roused us all with the magnificent trip-up of Eliot. You sure took his pants down and showed the royal ass tattooed OM. (O Milton, o my degrees, on my ass)

This is the fondest hope you get well quick. I don't have much to say but everything you say I listen to with an ear as big as a mitt. Haven't been in touch with you for so long. And now I feel rotten like hell about it. But you should know: les amis de WCW are all to hell all over the place. We want you well.

It was the 2nd Ave kids who let me know. And I'm just back from the Coast (seven months) and it was PATTERSON out there. (Rexroth Everson Duncan)

My highest respect and affection

A man's honors here are in the ears of young men. The only trouble is, they keep their mouths too god damn well shut. This is a yell: get well, Bill.

wash 2 dc

fri. april 21 50

bill,

thanks, thanks, tho Creeley and I have already crossed,
and I had to tell him he was off his trolley (had to remind
him, there is a man's language, sure, and a man better damn
well come to it, syntax and song both, but, that there is a
language fit for each poem under hand as well - it would seem
to me one of the principle advantages of staying out
in the open where you and ez stayed, is, that the language of the
poem is not declared ahead of time by feet and fart again (o couplet,
o sm爾ly sonnet) but has to be made as the poem is made; i've
dubbed it, in the PRO VERSE, "composition by field") trouble
with these editors, is, they got to be significant, and they can try
you guys on for imitation (is it not, you who threw me something
yrs agone on Amor and St John, of the Cross, was it, is it not
a matter of AMOR, once again: let's love, not imitate, you & ez,
and thus find out the only recourse is, love the self, which, by
nature, her paradoxies, does a murderous job on the Egocentric
Sublime) (((ho-ho, olson, ho-ha)))

who called me up last night but, Richman, Poorman, Beggar
sheik he wanted to know whether i thought he should ask you
direct to come this spring i sd i figured you'd sd you didn't,
and that that was that, so far as i was concerned, yet, that i
would welcome our Pat-Fest at any time so he may call you when
he is in new york these next few days (rudd and i stand by,
ready - and in any clothes)

this, in case you may have missed it:

There was a young sheik, or sheik
Who was a bit of a sneak, or a snake;
He abducted a belle
From Shepherd's Hotel
And kept her a week, or awake

amor,

to be talking off at the mouth abt you Ez any man who's done his job
if my own ain't there to measure my mouth)

Now (1) i got to have somebody see this thing whom i value, and you( re it;

(2) would you advise me, considering that my own reputation as poet
is so in the rear, so far as publication goes, to salt this away,
or to let it fly? in other words, does it add anything as cri-
tique valuable enough to bother with now, or does it only, be-
cause of its form, add adulation where there is beginning to be
too much

((i am so sore at ezra one-xounce, these days, i can't
see for the blood)))

& (3) I'm plopping this on you, because you are the only one writing
on ez who makes sense at all, and I'D value this thing at this
stage only if yr own big eye saw it as standing alongside yr
various announcements abt the same character SO GIVE THE GUFF
BACK TO ME BUT GOOD! you know a swede when you see one

love,

MAY 29

6 PM

1950

THIS SIDE OF CARD IS FOR ADDRESS

william carlos williams
9 ridge road
rutherford

NEW JERSEY

BILL - Thanks. And it comes at just the right time. We've won (that way) and lost (money, no money, not enough, plenty of students -and the writers starting to come in good, that is, good writers (Rymaker a sign, a boy named Wheners from Boston, like that) - but the students are as poor as we are, and we've spent all that any of us had in the bank, and now it's bust, simply that we have to sell the place - or part of it, if we can find a buyer. If it's the latter, we might be able to keep the thing riding - up

But the point is, it is up. You see it, in the Review -

which, by the way, is all Creeley's doing, all his, every damn bit of it. (He's arriving, by the way, in NY abt the time you get this. And you may see him before I do. If so, tell him all. Or in any case I'll keep yr letter for him (framed)

For it's the first word, what you say. And I felt so much the same I decided right then & there that the evidence of these two terrible years was out there, to be

come in, Bill. And if you are willing I'll
come over to see you, if I may, when I'm in
N.Y. and give you more of the dope.

The Melville book *spills* day and night.
I don't know what I've got - won't until
spring - and maybe then I'll throw it all
away. But I've been at it here for four months
steady. I wanted to break its back before I
moved. It's damned cold here these days: I'm
in the summer shack and there's no water and
more air in than out. So I'll be shoving on
to N.Y. soon.

I hope your own work goes on as it has.
I was delighted to see Am Grain republished.
And when am I getting the chance to read more
of the Mule: the first part seemed the best
thing to me in Am writing in a hell of a while.
And what happened to your "Friends"!

My blessings on everything and my regards
to Mrs Williams: I still bemoan my loss of
the meeting at your place.

Oceanwood Cottage
Stage Fort Ave
Gloucester: Mass: Dec 5

My dear Williams,

Ever since my dive last spring I've
wanted to write to you. At first it was be-
cause I liked "Against the Weather" so much.
That's the only way to write about art - and
I've stolen and stolen from it. The other. And
then it was to share with you my sense of loss
in lovely blue-eyed Ford's death. Now winter
with Ford out of the world and war in it is
colder than ever.

I now write to ask if you'll join several
of us in a book on Waldo Frank's work. The idea
is for a group of us to put down just what we
think about Frank's writings and bring them
together in a book edited by M.J.Benardete.
He's the fellow who was mainly responsible for
that volume the Spanish Institute put out in
1930 on "W.F. in America Hispana". Not that the
projected thing will smell like that earlier
job. Quite the contrary. No memorial, no epi-
taph. A chorus of voices, sharp, loving, stri-
dent, exacting, angry. For twenty five years
the man's written himself - and today the
mags are silent, his play's refused, and the
last novel - Bridegroom - was six months late
in America because the publishers' cash regis-
ters read no sale on Markand. Hell, you above
anyone know the old story, and the idea is to
challenge all that with this volume - another
kind of "Les Amis". Mumford, Niebuhr, Dick
Wright, Chapman, Oko are some of us, and
possibly Brooks and Charlie Chaplin, and we'd
like like hell to have you with us. Some as-
pect of Frank or the man as a whole -- and the
mss not due until next fall, the book expected
out in the spring of '41. I myself hope you'll

SPECIAL DELIVERY

217 Randolph Place NE
Washington 2 DC
Tuesday March 14 L

My dear Bill W:

I finally managed to get Richman to light long enough to
get the date for the FEST-PATERSON blocked out.

He asks me to offer you your choice of six - count 'em -
6 nights (and for my money I wish you'd take as many of 'em as
you can stand!):

Aprils 18 19 20
25 26 27

What do you say?

Fleming is also very excited - and a little scared!

It occurs to me: if it has to be, within you, a one-nighter,
what we might do, to give these weak moderns (who can't take it like
the Greeks could take it) the run of the whole PAT, would be to have
you start it off with a running resume of I & II - with passages of
your choosing -; then do all of III together as RHABDOI; and then
you end with both what you want of IV and, if you like, a resume of
its intent.

Does that make sense - I mean, in terms of time, that dirty
bitch daughter I hate?

And I shuggest we have two breaks, like a 3 act job, coming
after the 1st and the 2nd 3-1/2 hrs, breaks of, say, a cigarette in
length

And I hope your silence is not 'cause you're sore at this
pore inch-worm

who is,
yrs,

monday

bill:

ashes & thanks, ashes &

THANKS!

Like more the boonton idea:

like books broadsides anyhow (until the mags get done with this de )for god damn ( ductive principle, until they kiss themselves in the ass & come down all in pieces, are formed on the idea not of proving something (this goes for the vers-e too) but of presenting men with their hot as it is, as it comes, stem on, head after ---they'll never take work as it has to be these days kick, was what i meant!

The idea of Shapiro & poetry

I'm toying with, sick as it makes me to think of it (richman, god help me, told me today shapiro has taken 100 lines of his on the unicorn: god, i grabbed my guts right there on 14th street) (this fucking game -you know bill, politicks belongs to..yes ) (i came up with this one, a propos: you kiss my versy-arsey, i'll publishe yr arsey-versey)

Only for dough to buy my baby (30, & calypagean) anything But if shapi-
ro don't pay, to hell

ya,

olson

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

BLACK MOUNTAIN. N. C.

November, 1954

My dear Bill:

The formal part is this. The Faculty here asks me
(small as we are, we are that, call it so, a painter, a composer, an
actor, a weaver, a potter, and three writers, one of whom teaches
such languages as Provençal, Mallorcin, Catalan - one Robt Hellman -
and another of the writers edits the *Black Mt Review* - from Mallorca,
Mr Robt Creeley, than whom etc. - and both the mag and him you know

all right. These all - and count me in as desirous,
so very desirous too, that!!!!

will you, William Charles Williams please consent to
accept our joint invitation to constitute, with Albert Einstein, phy-
sicist, Willem De Keuning, painter, and Norbert Wigner, mathematician,
the first four members of a new Advisory Council for this collidge????

What it means is this: that, without necessarily putting
your life on the line for a college, but out of your knowledge of the
literary push here, would you let us have your name to identify us
to the world at large as a group of men who, at least in the writing
biz, would seem to you competent to give the young an education in
how to begin?

In other words, what we would like to assemble, based
on you four, is a carefully picked group of men whom we respect - and
who respect us - to see if we can thus do what promotion and publicity
damn well isn't what we care about: give the world a sense that real

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

BLACK MOUNTAIN, N. C.

men know enough about what goes on in this isolate desolate somewhat busy place, so that the young will get here and get what we got to offer

I dare say you should also want to know if this involves you in any fuss. None, so far as I can see, at least all. We would simply join your name to those, and carry it as a pennant to the world, to say, here's a damn little boat wants to keep moving, because it thinks it does this education thing clean. And puts writing, painting, weaving, music, acting, pottering at the center of how one might then want to find out something; knowledge would then be the cat some man or girl swings, not, the, reverse

What we god damn well need is just a little money to go on (haven't paid ourselves since January last, yet, in that time, have added the Black Mt Review, now include the Divers Press, Jargon Presz under the wing, and have added Creeley and Hellman to the Faculty, as well as a new young weaver (23 yrs old), a new potter (Blunk, from Hapan, coming, age 28), and, with spring, shall have (we hope) Martin Sprenling, age 80; from the Oriental Institute, Chicago, to give us the word on the alphabet etc, as such things arose in the Middle East, 3500 BC to 1500 BC. It's that sort of a rumpus you'd be lending your name to.

And no touches on you; all from us out to da world. Which we want to let know about us.

WELL; please, if you possibly can. It would honor us.

(PS: as you have damn well done same by me in these letters on Max to Wms, which, hereby, I tell you were a shot in this arm! Muchas gracias. And god bless you for telling me!

LOVE,

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

BLACK MOUNTAIN, N. C.

Friday Dec 3/54

BillBillBill;

Great. And thanks, from all of us; the honor, Mister
Lovely Man, is Black Mountain College's.

Lawdamercy; the Beloit Whit-
man is in here, and that Jewelled Prize of
the Work in Progress (of which I imagine it is a part?

I did the crazy-
pest thing with it. Have been reading such things as round & about
1500 p William Cernish, a guy named Heath whose first name didn't
come down. And Skelton. And happened to set yours - this new one -
right on top of Skelton's two or three to two or three Mrs. (Wentworth,
etc.

You oughta hear yrself in that context! It's real gene, all out,
wild: even yr Antony & Cleopetra gets that ring of, the call of, like
you mean it, the, luffers as peats also: "Fair Isyphill

And still the craziest, to me is how that
three-line
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate

the way you have it placed there, doesn't at
all be... oh, of course, it's the "doubts" does it! Beautiful

OK. Just to tell you. And the thorns. And the children.
And the last three lines doing just that. By the way, that biz of
yrs, that the will, shall be once more, a garden is

well. Uh-huh.

You are blessing life all over the place - people
(and now this place, for which I am personally moved, as well as
these others are, I can tell you:

we will be mounting an appeal
shortly, and from the dough won't you and Flossie take off, fly
down here, I meet you at the Asheville-Hendersonville airport, and
you come stay here awhile, just to get away, and do anything you
damn well please?

If you can, it could be a "vacation", like they
say, in the "mountains".

Well, try.

Ok. Love,

C