Lloyd Addison
609 Trumbull SE
Albq., New Mexico

July 3, 1957

Dear Mr. Hughes:

I received my first communication from Mr. Van Vechten, the meat of which contained your suggestions and I am forthwith complying. (He addressed me as Lloyd Patterson, the allusion intriguing me.) Enclosed are a late group of poems in the style of my larger work, ethos and personal, much of which is still in the mill. I shall write to the Whitney Foundation and the Negro College Fund today, and send these all off together.

Your book, _The Big Sea_, I read long ago and was fired by the things you have done by way of experience, and by the fortitude with which you persevered to gain outstanding recognition. I doubt that I could promote my efforts quite so well against such adversity and come through without warping my personality to the point of being repulsive. I have admired your originality - critics, I know, consider you a rebel and a crusader; to me you are a poet who is the master of himself and his technique, and who fulfills the confidence of the Muse that covets him. In the latest edition of Louis Untermeyer's _Modern British and American Poets_, the anthology which is a text at UNM for an upper division English Course I attended last year, several (not nearly enough) of your poems were included. The instructor, Dr. Jacobs, read them very mediocrably. There were also some of Johnson's and Cullen's. It is a blight in the school practices that the contributions of black Americans are dealt with so flippantly, so in-passingly, if at all. Even seeming progressive liberals like Dr. Jacobs fail in this.

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After talking for about ten minutes, he seemed to sense disinterest or anxiety, and so go on to greater Western civilization. I also recall your book, *Fine Clothes of the Jew*. The earthy pervading mood of "Brass Spittoons" is lucidly disenchanted; in fact, I have found most of your poems - if I may venture to say - to be rather sublimely disenchanted. And I remember your telling in *The Big Sea* of how you used to take them out every so often in a set to distroy all things foreign. I recall the criticism emphasizing their secularity. They are distinctive and genuine.

In my present work, I am working out of an ultra-romantic mood - it is the main stream of my personality - trying to enlist the ultimate beauty of feeling within me to delineate a modern American setting, ethos of the great black culturally marginal American and the subtle essence of that which makes me a poet, which may not be as obvious in these poems I send you as in my more extended work. I have, of course, evolved from standards in form.

Very much, I should like your opinion - needless to say. Perhaps, Sir, if you have time, you will lift me off the pins with a post card, or something.

I am very serious, Mr. Hughes, about the larger work I have been developing during the last year, and I fear for all-around involvement that it may not develope with the publishing strength possibility which I should like to endow it with - along with the purest sense of my self's esthetic and semantic meaningfulness in this medium by which I convey the searching man's and artist's conceptual and perceptual awareness of his world from many ref-

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ence points. An impingement is the feeling for ultra-romanticism
in the desire to work from the reference frame of art for art's
sake - perhaps a chiche. But ultimate things, ideals, fascinate
me. I am geeared to think teleologically with a temperament that
tends to blend all things back into a oneness, a high spiritual
order of affinity and identity.

I shall cease my ranting here. I trust you have been patient
with the youth-blossom pointedness.

The poems I place in your hands are, of course, free to become
subject to any suggestion or movement toward their ultimate purpose-
fulness that you may be gracious enough to propose.

With deep gratitude and delight for this opportunity, I am

Sincerely,

C O P Y

July 28, 1957

Mr. Lloyd Addison,
609 Trumbull S.E.,
Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dear Mr. Addison:

If your poems were my poems, I think instead of seeking book or magazine publication (or any printed form) as a means of communicating them to other people, I would seek tape recordings and the long-playing record, with a number of voices doing the reading, since the poems themselves seem to me much like trios, quartets, sextets in operas, themes and voices interwoven; and it takes a good and sympathetic ear to extract a sequence; the ear I think being better than the eye to pick up what you are doing.

The ones I like best are And Some---, Q, I By You Put On, and On the Road to Five, and I like them better read aloud, with each indenture a different voice. Try three boys and two girls on And Some--- and see how nice it sounds. Real cool like mingus!

If you don't mind, I would like to keep your poems for another fortnight or so, until Arna Bontemps gets to New York from Fisk via New Jersey where he is spending some summer weeks. I would like to show them to him, before returning them to you.

Do you ever go to Taos? And do you know anything about a supposed Negro poet named Mason Jordan Mason who is published by Judson Crews there---interesting poems in books interpersed with nude pictures? Nobody has ever seen (whom anyone knows here in the East) either Mason or a picture of Mason---so one wonders is he real (in color) or isn't he? Let me know if you know about him, please.

I hear tell you were born in Brooklyn. Do you remember Harlem?

My day needs 92 hours, sundime lately and half of night being taken
up with my SIMPLY HEAVENLY show opening (reopening from littlethearte)
on Broadway on August 20th; and after midnight trying to catch up on
long overdue literary deadlines, plus tons of mail, some of which
has to be answered. I wish I were out there in that nice sun-and-
desert country where you are---between shows, since I have another one
playing in Los Angeles, A PART OF THE BLUES, based on my life, times,
and poems---only someone else adapted it, I didn't have to work on
it (gracias a dios) and haven't seen it, but would fly out and catch
it if I had $800000.

Thanks for all the kind things you say about my work. Now all I need
are a few laurels like these $80000 to rest on.

All good wishes to you,

August 13, 1957

Mr. Langston Hughes,
20 East 127th Street,
New York 35, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Hughes:

I regret the long period of silence - having often the
intention of writing to you in reply to your considerate letter
but without something accompanying the resolve, or near-decision.
At this time, I'm not certain how to proceed, except to answer
some of your questions pertaining to things in general. I am
sort of against the wall, having made a number of related erratas,
one of which has grieved me considerably - pertaining to Carlo.
(I'm not sure I should call him that. I'm really not sure of
much of anything.

A letter from <u>Free Lance</u> arrived last week to which I am
relying with a few <u>poems</u>. I am much obliged to you for the
recommendation. The poems will be others than the one I sent
to you, of course. Recently, I received a rejection from <u>Kenyon Review</u>; in addition, I sent some poems to <u>Poetry</u> and <u>Sewanee Review</u>. My expectations are just routine.

Carlo mentioned three of my poems that he liked particu-
larly, among several small one I sent a couple weeks ago. I am
sending him a long poem, complete, and another incomplete -
just the prologue, the original one, to my Black in Search of
Beauty. These are unsolicited, but I presumed to have the lib-
erty in the letter I sent along with the last bunch.

Your idea about voice recordings was well received and I
agree in part - just that I don't know which should come first,
print or voice, or if one could do without the other, and how
either might be affected. I do often strive for musical effects,
an obsession, in part - if I could only pour out the feeling onto
the paper and have it take its own form....

I'm afraid I haven't gotten to Taos - $$. Until you wrote,
I hadn't heard of Mason. I asked Robert Creeley. He thinks
Mason is Judson; says there is some identication in both; that
Mason is always in Africa or India, or some other such place,
which, of course, isn't entirely plausible. (Understatement.)

Brooklyn isn't very familiar to me, although I lived there
about seven years on the head; Harlem, of course, less. I was
born in Boston and spent eight of my first ten years in Newport
News, Virginia. My eldest sister used to live on 133rd Street
and I visited her severally. I remember the Appolo Theatre and
the atmosphere of 125th Street - and that park on the hill. I
remember a bookstore somewhere near the Eighth Avenue Subway,
stocked with issues by colored authors, a bakery on Seventh

Lloyd Addison
609 Framball SE
Albany, New Mexico

Mr. Langston Hughes
20 EAST 127TH Street
New York 35, N.Y.

Lloyd Addison
609 Trumbull SE
Alba., N. Mex.

October 11, 1957

Dear Mr. Huges:

Thanks for your card. Sorry I didn't get to meet you in
person. I would have been extremely delighted.

Providence willing, your trip was fruitful, I trust. Un-
fortunately, I didn't get to go anywhere this summer, nor rest,
nor relax from wishing to. And school is griding again.

My story ran 193 pages. Principally, the original idea of
a dominant delinquency theme carried shortly, then love - absolute
love - then a philosophical trend - in placing my protagonist,
an artist, in the midst of the workings of contrapuntal world
orders, filling in and failing to fill in epistemological purpose,
and costing the hero his life for his lack of identity with either,
but by the flesh attached to a bold and beautiful woman.

Dr. Tedlock at the university suggested Jonathan Williams
as a possible outlet for, perhaps, a poem or two. He is writing
to him - I believe you are familiar with the Publisher, Highlands,
North Carolina - and sending my poem "Portrait of the Woman."
I am wondering how you are disposed - if this seems slightly indi-
cative to you of publication, and if you might drop him a note
of comment or encouragement, or something. Perhaps it's a shot
in the dark, but I thought that - just in case - since the Profes-
sor was somewhat brightened by his own suggestion, it might well
be worthwhile and seemingly worth attempting.

The newspapers have had good copy lately with Little Rock
followed by the satellite. And Asian flu is creeping up an
Albuquerque. I'll probably get it. I catch all. But never go
completely down - so far.

Incidentally, I sent the book to Ballantine. If you have
any suggestions, I welcome them - needless to say. I don't know
how to judge it. I MAY BE biased. At any rate, I wish I could
have had a little fire in my blood. It was a struggle.

Hope to hear from you whenever you get out from under the
mountain of pressing obligations.

STATEMENT OF WORK PLAN

I propose to do general writing, continuing as at present, from now until the time of expected graduation, June, 1958. This will mean work especially in poetry; however, I hope to write and sell a number of short stories in the meantime to augment my income. After graduation, I should like to complete a book-length poem begun about November, 1956, which is at present one-third done.

This work is an analysis of the artistic, spiritual microcosm, assuming a process of advancement with a mystical stepreferent from light inarticulateness toward purposive communication.

DEVELOPMENTAL THOUGHT: A search for artistic essence, i.e. beauty, and a search for racial ethos, i.e. what is Negro esthetically.

ASSUMPTIONS:

1. That the overall cultural emphasis upon glamor has goal value as an ideal.

2. That the pre-apparent inability to attain this ideal forces the creation of a sub-ideal.

3. That where the "ideal" group is dominant and in interaction with the "sub-ideal" group, the esthetic image of identity of the "sub-ideal" group is subject to fluctuation, and cannot remain constant additionally because of mass communication media in modern society.

4. That the artist does not pre-conditionally subsume his artistry(potentially) in similar compromise, but that in relating himself to reality the man is objective and super-sensitive.

5. That the artist in the "sub-ideal" group has two socially esthetic standards and a tendency of sentiment toward the unit of one esthetic.

The search for beauty (the man, the artist, the Negro) and the -- moving picture -- portrait of identity are the preoccupations of this work, as the three contiguous roles combine in one biographical body of feeling.

Related to the above projected work, I have recently written a novel which I am currently attempting to market; if and when it is accepted, I hope some interest will germinate to favor publication of the poem.

Lloyd Addison
609 Trumbull SE
Albuq., N. Mexico

December 18, 1957

Dear Mr. Hughes:

An earlier communication seems to have been precluded by
the fates. I recall your last letter, which was of course as
usual enjoyable. I hope that your work load has diminished
somewhat with greater returns in do-re-me. (I don't have the
dollar signs on my typewriter.)

I have been struggling with classes all semester and this
is the twelfth week. Christmas vacation is upon me, beginning
this Saturday. I plan to make good use of the time to sleep
and write. Unfortunately, some term papers are due, and I must
write those also.

The editors of Free Jance are smothering me somewhat with
anticipation. I received a bunch of poems back from Commentary
yesterday which were more than three months making the circuit.
As usual, elsewhere my material is also returning en todo. I
realize I'll have to improve the form (make it more conventional)
if I hope to get any of the houses to print it. But just how to
redo the form is somewhat puzzling.

Included among my reasons for this letter at this particu-
lar time - which reason probably fell out when you opened this -
is what I hope is not an imposition upon you, but, for me, an
attempt to formulate for myself a more positive future. Undoubtedly,
I should have mailed these earlier, but I only recently decided
to try for this - nothing ventured - and completed the applica-
tion a few days ago. If it isn't practicable for you to do so,
I hope the application will pass on the others. Certainly it's
my fault for not having written to you earlier.

Also, although we may not be the first-hand acquaintances
mentioned, unless my privilege of your correspondence could be
considered such, I simply couldn't think of...otherwise....

Please forgive my crudeness. And for the coming holidays,
I wish you The Best, and to you and yours happy tidings.

Lloyd Addison
609 Trumbull SE
Alb., New Mexico
February 24, 1958

Dear Mr. Hughes:

I received a card this morning from the Whitney to the effect that their office had not received the reference form I noted as coming from yourself, Sir. I am presently writing so as to ascertain whether or not it has been overlooked in the mountains of material arriving at your address, or if there were something objectionable about my request or the ideas or plan that I proposed. Although I realize that if the latter is the case you may not feel obliged to divulge your opinions, nevertheless, I may stand to profit just in case you do.

Additionally, it was rude of me to thrust upon you this quantity of work without your specific approval. And, whereas the deadline had already passed when I decided to initiate the application, there had been ample time previously for me to have secured the consent of all potential participants.

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October 7, 1960

Dear Lloyd: [Addison]

I was most interested in the new poems you let me see and, if you don't mind, I will keep them for the time being (unless you need the copies back, in which case let me know).

Several of your poems went to the university press considering the NEW POETS anthology. The manuscript went the rounds of its readers and the general opinion seems to be to limit the book to about a dozen poets---but just which ones is still not settled, and I've been so busy the past weeks with my Theatre Guild show, TAMBOURINES TO GLORY that I haven't had time to correspond with the prospective publishers about it. Just this weekend find time to work on that particular project again, so am sorting out material and reading new poems that have come in now.

It took 3 years to get my recent anthology, AN AFRICAN TREASURY, accepted, so I guess one just has to be patient.

Cordial regards to you,