Letter to David Walker, February, 1974
Glad as hell to hear from you, know you and yours are, if not prospering, thriving well. If all your poems are as good as the two you enclosed, then the other David Walker's will have to play second and however many others there are fiddle. The two poems go together like earth and water. Although only twenty lines, the Mandelstam poem has the reader accompany, musically as well, the poet down that long row, which is called Death. I really like it, especially after reading Olga Carlisle's books. Read the poetry of Osip's wife, too. And "In August" is fine. You life sounds well, like a deep channel. I can't really remember the last time we were in touch, as you say. I know I spent alot of time, drunk, with nice people on Eberhart's yacht and other folk's boats,looking upand down the coast for Alna, but hell, that was one, no two summers ago--I think. As you know, I was living on top of a hill in a log cabin in Fayetteville, Arkansas, keeping strange company--some of whom are now dead, trying to plow through the bad soil of every genre known to man--and woman, while at the same time trying to make fourteen years of early, Huckleberry Rimbaud mss. readable. You know, you go down to these strange and ungentle dives and gamble with the creatures and rebuses of your inagination and, by the time you wake up for air, you've lost everything and don't know it, and sometimes no longer know what hand or die or bone you're playing. Whiskey, women, and the bad nights of poetry will always fill your mouth with cold ground: I bit the dust. For some reason, danger calmed my nerves and made me sleep. As Jean Cocteau said, I think, the old myths are constantly being reborn without their heroes, their victims, knowing it, like lies who always tell the truth, the poet lives beyond his era, thus tragedy, therefore black comedy, ad infi.... Anyway, I left town with nothing, only the clothes on my back. I could have been in bad trouble with the law, an irrate husband was going to do me in, besides. I was living nine lives of mystery and real-life madness, still believing my tongue and my dreams and sweet poetry could raise the dead, like an anonymous cathedral of fire, floating through my youth like a barn when the river floods. The only safe place to go--after I set fire to my cabin, where nothing burned but all my manuscripts--boyuscripts, that's true, was this monastery, where the brothers were the finest consolation, their vision, wine, and song. However, no poontang. So, after letting me share and work and dream with them, one monk showed a rich old fool a bone, promised indulgences, etc, gave me the bread to hit the road. Pate often delivers an undoomed earl. The bard who wrote Beowulf wrote that, as you know, so we wouldn't be prepared for the good and brave Lord's death at the end. Anyway, stripped down to the long ago time of having not written a word, which never freed one blue capillary from the dark and sometimes good prison of my heart, every thing burned--I thought, searchless as I had already found what I was looking for, I hit the bottle and virgin page again. In a few months, I'd filled up a few tow sacks full of poems, etc. (I forgot the part where they put me in the horse pit et al, to dry me out, only Alan Dugan and Cowley and some others found out and called the nuts at the nuts house and tole them let me go. Poetry will put you out of your misery for no charge, and then will do the undertaking cheap and sometimes it rides up out of nowhere like the opposite sister of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and gives you a lap or at least a deathbed to dream in. Here endeth the days of youth....) Get it? Got a job with an editor doing films on older poets. Met, filmed, drank, etc, lived, with Eberhart, Ransom, Cowley, Wilbur, and so on. He did Wilbur because McLiesh almost kicked off that summer. Gained experience with camera and personages. An odd way to meet literary people, isn't it. Lived in NYC with some black dancers and some jamacians. (No bulletholes, stabs, robbings, etc.) I'd start to work on the cultural side of the city at daybreak and go until about that time the next day. Met alot of people by chance. Really. Everybody I met there, met by chance. Drank and sung in alot ofethnic bars, hatethat word. Saw everything in NYC. Helluvalot of experieces but can't go into them here. Met rich woman from Scotland ass ociated with museums etc. We rode all over in her M. B., leaving the city, until somewhere, I forget, I got on a bus with nobody but blacks, met an old man who had worked for my uncle in Miss., got drunk, rode busses, trains. Met up with girl again. SHOWED her the so-called south. Almost took off on ship on blue swan-path to anywhere, but got drunk, didn't make sailing time. Lived on houseboat. Lived in joints and whorehouses, hotels, just enough money to live and write on, trying not to take advantage of any-one, trying not to rape experience, trying to think more than I feel, passing through fields of men and women, some of whom shall go unrecorded, some of whom are with you and I always. If I was a pilgram, I only had a raft and the river was low. If I was a poet, then who was Shelly and that one F. Villon. If I was trying to be somebody else, then why was I becoming myself. If a beautiful woman is death, my own, then how come I'm still alive. (Okra, wine, Keats, etc.) You fill in the blanks. I winded up in the Hotel New Orleans in Eureka Springs, Ark. Then from there, to a cabin on spider creek on the river as a fishing guide. From there, a farm with no animals on a big lake, working as a field guide for land surveying, the mountains and hills and topography of my soul. The poets finds another woman. She is an artist. Time Passes. There is rest for the wicked. I won't bullshit you anymore. My wife love living here, alone, old house in timber in fields, with garden, Warm Morning wood stove, two cats, making bread for life and living, and the untold days of the poet. I bootleg screenpoesm to film-makers working on Masters, etc. in film schools on West Coast. (For awhile, I assume another name, started a foreign film theatre in a land of hillbillies, and although I'm not a surrealist, no theory accomadates me, I'd like to know of a shenanigan better than that, going over a thousand in debt on film rentals, for the sake of the poor, who didn't understand a word of it, not even the english subtitles, but they did like Klondike Annie, though they did like a a good place to drink in the dark.) David, my life is no longer that of a traveling recluse, since what the doctors told me about being term. ill just didn't happen. I went back, and nothing is wrong. No miracle intended, just thankfulness. (I often think of some monk, down on his knees in the hogpen, a bucket of slop beside him like a censor for the hungry, praying for me--which they do, because they love me. And I love them. I'm still without virtue or faith, but I'm now proud in spirit. Like a tree, a horse, a ship, or a fool. The only problems I've had, whatsoever, was that of recovering from amnesia, which I didn't include in the previous epic one damn fool. There are still strange streaks that I couldn't tell you about, like heatt 1ightning during a crime or thunder when people make love, but, what with this job of earning a fairly good living, and this 1over of love, art, I don't mind. I quit whiskey, but I made friends with wine. I want you to know this: whatever you intellectual and emotional investment in my ever becoming a worthwhile poet, I hope to pay divedends. I can't tell you when. I sort of did something dumb in NYC--everything else was stupid, I had a scene with an editor in a bar who had secured a large publishing house for a book of mine. I might still be on the big boy's black list, but hope not. Everyone I hope will forgive and forget when it comes to wild oats sowed, especially when someone else is an aesthetic sow. Which brings me to that great lot of bacon, those people you met at Meatloaf. (No, I'm just kidding.) That's where this amnesia is a tight rope. I know who a couple of those guys were, as I know the smell of bacon; it is the hickory of the past--or at least part of it, that is hard to comeby. There were or are, probably no longer in Fayette Nam, four or five fine writers: John Stoss, John McKernan, John S. Morris, and Jack Butler. I don't know what has become of them. I might have met Miller Williams at a party. The big guy is a fine teacher. They are all good and honrable writers, only better poets advised me not to tow their line of neo-fugative, neo-redneck verse. It is difficult to break with ties, but none I had there were over two years old. I think you will find alot of good work fromthem and their students though, although I haven't had a chance to read any. They do alot for young writers, I know that About "getting on" in poetry. I'll send you a list of the places I've published, accepted under this name. I might throw in ANTIOCH and another because they've held alot of my poems for over a year and a half. I'm embarressed about screwing up an acceptance with a large publishing house, childish, but also about not accepting some smaller press offers, but only for this reason: I hate to say it, but I've never heard of so many poets and presses and, without some sampling of their other work, I didn't feel I should tread. So, those guys might be mad at me, but I feel well knowing some other poet got a book. I have a heap of Ms. which escaped the tongue of fire and critics. 1957-1974. One book accepted by Lux and M. Ryan of Barn Dream, the former the former editor of I.R., the latter the now editor and Yale winner. Another accepted if I accept. Also, five or six chapbooks at Mill Mountain, formerly of Roanoke, Virginia, now Seattle, Washington, and the editor will move next year again. He is also producer of Mill Mountain Films and editor of MM Review. He is also going to produce some of my shorter films and documentaries. I was advised to become less-"wild" before I send a ms. to Kunitz, which I never did do after a note from him. I might have sent you a xeroz copy of it, but Berryman sure did write me a nice letter. Bless his soul. This job of land surveying takes from dawn until dark, but it gives us a fair livelihood. And, I still manage to write alot. I'm working on too much fiction for my own good. First story was accepted by Iowa, about fifty pages. 2 "A PAST WINTERED LIKE A CIRCUS". After I send you some poems, I'd really like your advice about some things. I ask others, but they say, yea, great keep ahead on man, just keep writing. But, believe it or not, I approach poetry like a musician. I hope you don't flinch from som many words in one dose, but a shy dreamer like me can see a friend. I'm writing alot, maybe too much, and my wife is painting alot, but my friends are dying off. And one, one of the best from days gone by, is on trial for two counts of first degree murder. I accept all information and advice. New, good books, poets, films, magazines. And so on. Sorry to hear about you're falling out with Fox and Long, freedom from lov e and hate, and one's own will should always be tested, have its way. I'll send you a chapbook if you still want to review it, and the ms. of others coming out, which will give you more to WALK over. Of course, I consider you're regard for me very much, and if you wanted to call me sonofabitch I'd still buy you a beer, any brand. You send me some poems long about this spring, too.
David Walker |