2

This is simple and credible, I think,
and does not commit you to later
work; it is also refreshingly unlike
the tower "toppling adjectives" that
are being showered on such gilded
mediocrities as Schwartz and Patchen.

Please let me know. By
the way, why can't the younger men
read your prose and learn from it?
The rhythms of American speech and life
are caught so JUSTLY in your recent
New Directions sketches: no one else
approaches them now.

Sincerely,

Apt. 17

128 West 13th St.
New York City

January 14, 1940

Dear Williams,

Decker of Compass Press
wants to do my book on very good terms
and so I have at last decided to let
one appear - an entirely new collection
or almost entirely: to be published
four or five months from now and called
LOVE WORKS.

Of course Decker wants
"things said" and I may eventually ask
Stevens to remark on the collection as
a whole. You seem no longer in especial
sympathy with what I have been doing
for the last few years, but it would
please me a lot, and Decker too, to
quote on the jacket some remarks you
made in a letter concerning my "Three
Examples of Love Poetry" . . thus

Williams Carlos "williams said of the
author's "Three Examples of Love Poetry":
"The best thing about the poems is that
the form of each seems so expressive
initself. I like that. . . I salute you
for the excellence and seriousness of
your craftsmanship."

2

or in any American street, no matter what the observer's
idiom. The complex question of specific values will be
discussed by individual writers, but first and foremost
will be valued the purity of the impulse.

The first number will appear about the middle
of December. At least six numbers are expected to appear,
others depending upon the review's reception. The initial
wedge will be prose articles, as poetically evocative as
possible.

Can you promise us the article?

Matta has suggested that the two of us might
come visit you, if it will be agreeable, some day on a
weekend. Or perhaps you will be coming to New York
within the next few weeks, and we could get together then.
At any rate, I hope you will reply very soon to this
letter as they are anxiously awaiting news from me.

1 East 53

NYC

March 3 1943

Dear Williams:

Here is the copy of the poem you asked for. It will go in the forthcoming number of View. Incidentally I think it a triumph of your language and insight. We're also using one we like very much from--dont blow your top--Randall Jarrell. Strange as it seems. Wait and see.

As ever,

PS I'm still attracted by the idea of publishing the APOLLO poem though I don't know how its to be done. I think K Burke would like it. He dropped in with an essay we're using. Told me he'd done an extensive analysis of "The Metaphor in the Jungle" (the title poem) for his new book. Yes, I'm all for the experts!

View

the modern magazine of the arts

1 East 53rd St.
New York City

Dec 20 1943

Dear Williams:

Sorry to return this. For once we agree
with the majority. Seems to be a
by-product, no? or rather, seems to fit
into the *notebook* of poetry you keep, and
appears best when with a series of such
notes. Again, your subject is a rather
logical one (a "controversy") yet the
exact controversy remains... some what
"arcane"... unless it's the very old one,
which I suppose it is. In this case,
your ellipsis seems *not* unjustified.

I hope you'll forgive my saying something
rather personal--which I wouldn't say unless
I had read the "controversy" you conducted
inadvertently in the Partisan Review. I
know so well the anxiety-feeling as it
tends toward pathological conditions. I
find myself using absolutely idiotic
language to myself, cursing the world and
its inhabitants like a truck driver. That's
all your "nuts to you" means, isn't it?
It is a world without justice for the indig-
vidual. That must be the wise man's inclusion.
And how alarming it is when we find
injustice closer to us than we had sus-
pected, much closer. Seems to me I divine
your solution of this common problem: a
rationalization about the great forces of
the world APART FROM POETRY. Hence, the
resemblance of your ideology in the PR
piece to the idology of Stalinism. The
case you have, from any reasonable and
objective standard, is hopeless befogged
and be fuddled. I was much pained by reading
it.

Now I don't say that in certain poems you
might not be able to express some similar
sentiment to your arguments in your prose
piece. But these sentiments would remain
subjective and detached from real persons

over

Charles Henri Ford, Editor ★★★★★

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PUBLISHED BY VIEW, INC.

Tel. Plaza 3-7522

and real issues. They would primarily be
symbolic devices for expressing your feeling
for emotion and the value of having emotions.
But if you sought to decry intellect, that is
to set up emotion AT THE EXPENSE of intellect,
that is just tomfoolishness. Your basis for
judging certain lines of behavior and certain
individuals is ludicrously abstract; your
method, at its most "poetic", has an allego-
rical crudity. Intellectual defect is intel-
lectual defect, and no amount of "instinct"
or "feeling" or "emotion" will make up for this
defect,

I was over at Rahv's with Harold Rosenberg
one night and he read me your piece and his
reply (then in proof). I told him bluntly
that his "rebuttal" seemed sound but it was
the lowest plane on which he could reply to
you. Then we argued like hell, Rosenberg
taking a sort of neutral attitude but agreeing
at the senselessness of your argument.

What does it come to? You've made some ominous
hints in recent letters to me and Ford. Oh,
I know so well how difficult everything can
be. But I had hoped of you, as I still hope
of others, that we wouldn't yield to some
facile form of "controversy" on such issues.
You really imply philosophical and ethical
issues by no means shallow. Yet your argument
is both glib and shallow. For Heaven's sake,
let it go. It'll never help you. And you
won't ever help it--or them.

Sincerely,

P. S. To sum up (and perhaps clarify):
You have degraded your ideas in the
PR piece to a level on which poetic
intuition plays a MINIMUM part. Same with
the political line of Stalinism: it has
a vague poetical intuition at bottom--but
its practical abuse is incalculable.

Dec 21 1945

Dear Williams:

I send you concurrently a copy of my
newest book, "The Granite Butterfly."
My eccentric young publisher, Bern Porter,
is likely to bury it what with waiting
till reviews are promised before sending
out review copies; it's been hard enough
for me to get hold of copies. You'll
probably find it something to dig into
and if you are stimulated, I wish you'd
write something on it (a review) and send
it to some magazine (View has published
a review of it by Marius Bewley).

This poem is the myth (so utterly simple
and yet so extremely complex!) which I've
been trying to apotheosize for more than
a decade. Now, it's final.

I've written a long prose analysis; if you
feel you want to read it when you're through
with the poem, let me know and I'll send it
to you.

Best regards,

Oct 18

Dear Bill: Of course I expected to enjoy your talk but what seemed especially rare and impressive was your courage in the frontal, unflinching attack on journalism. Oh, how many poets (good or not so good) agree with you, and many intellectuals too, but how many would dare speak so bluntly, sincerely? - and why not? - because of the myth of newspaper prestige (alas, real!): some editor, some interviewer or book-reviewer, might hear and be offended... and how much "higher journalism" do we get in the lit'ry mags! Your statements about Eliot were more percipient than any I know... Best from
Sarker

240 W. 16th St.
New York 11, N. Y.

November 27, 1950

Dear Bill:

I've read the greater part of your book, skipping around to get the length and breadth of it. Pardon me if I'm egotistic enough to think that something I wrote of you about a decade ago (maybe you recall it) to the effect that your poetry "gives a home to the floating population of images" is richly confirmed by your prose stories. And why not? The imaginative drive sometimes thins down to anecdote but the observer (the doctor-writer) is always there or almost always: *saving* and while *saving*, *judging*.

The great virtue of the "knife of the times" stories is that the artistic design and the irony are in the material, pure and simple, not in any psychological interpretation or "sublime" coefficient. Henry James imagined the acts in his novels thoroughly so that his elaborate psychology, however much beyond life, did appear as "true" fiction. But it seems nature which produces, for example, Stewie's pattern, its incarnate irony (ukelele-playing through his hermit winter) and the fine symbolism of the encounter with the bull; again, the superb ironic tag: "though he was never as able as he had been as a kid - naturally." Here, I would daresay, is a stupendous hint of all powers that come to peak and must decline: the unalterable pattern of life and death - and here (egotistically again perhaps) I find the pattern of the icebox plums. . .

Did you note the *Poetry* reviewer's left-handed tribute to the quote Vivienne K. made in her book from my essay? If people took the trouble to read all you've done as art they would see the continuity and the symmetry of what you write and they would see how exactly the judgment quoted by V.K. applies and *applies* and *APPLIES*. It is the paradox of the humane-scientific emotion, whose play emerges humorously and splendidly in the case of the little girl who defends her throat so ferociously: the doctor begins to admire her and despise the soft cowardice of her parents (Balzac would have appreciated this incident).

Humanity's heat, science's ice: it is your dialectic; you are its virtuoso; the quick flame of irrational feeling, the cold steel of order, control, and proportion. Take the very title of the third section: "Beer and Cold Cuts." Beer is iced but it is alcoholic; the surgeon of the autopsy (see "Jean Béicke") is forced to his "cold cutting" but the observer-narrator is there to record everyone's warm human repining for the little dead person; again, the dialectic: the spunk of the degraded organism of the baby girl in augmenting itself, seeking to live, even while the hidden rot cancels the beautiful, severe thrust toward life. Then, just for sheer literary skill, "Pink and Blue," whose plain tremendous symbolism could not have been bettered by Flaubert. And look: again the dialectic: "warm" pink for the life-ceremony, marriage; "cool" blue for the death-ceremony, the funeral.

And again: *thanks*.

240 W. 16th St.
New York 11, N. Y.
Oct. 27, 1954

Dear Bill:

How are you these days? Your Later Poems have the same wonderful vigor: the humor of the surprised, laughing _entente_.

My friend, Charles Boultenhouse, had been so much moved (while I was in Europe last Spring) by the "Two Pendants" that last night he read it to me from the book and at first I thought--his pace was slow--"diffuse"--striking," I said, 'but hasn't Williams' method loosened up?' After reading it for myself, I'm not so sure. . . But I am sure that I see there something I saw in the "Plums" poem (something Vivienne praised in me but that others still gape over): the

AMBVALENCE (life/death, heat/told) . . . It's like the love/war in the lovely "Birth of Venus" and like the instantaneous identification in the "Savage Beast" (self/other). . . So

the way I interpret the "pendants" is that its two parts are equivalent and opposite things for the ears to hear, not to wear. In this poem, the man becomes his antagonist the beast, the babies are their own mothers, and Elena is someone who directly questions identities and wanders free among them.

In the twilight of birth and death (and sometimes in dreams), the essential ambivalence that proclaims us all one substance roams as in a natural habitat, and haunts the mind that tends to submit itself to that lucid twilight. . .

Your mind has an instinctive and omnipotent impulse to set sail, place foot, take wings or just slip in, to . . . that dusk, that

Domus: lit to your taste. . .

The police may not have been notified! but _you're always there_.

All the best

Parker Tyler,
c/o Henry Harrison,
27 East 7th St.,
New York City.

NINETEEN IS CROWING, TWENTY IS TREMBLING

1 is not being before beginning for it is begun

2 is remaining after 1 with nothing in particular

3 is remembering between 2 and 4 that one was 1

4 is remembering everything to forget everything except that one is 4

5 is to realize

6 is to fall backward on 7

7 is to complete without being willing to begin over

8 is to begin to resent being 8

9 is to end resenting

10 is to be bright

11 is to be dissatisfied without knowing

12 is to walk on two feet and to forget 11, 10, 9, 8 and maybe 7

13 is to promise without meaning it

14 is to walk in a dream

15 is to discover, after a little, oneself 14

16 is beating 15 to death