Letter to Allen Dugan, undated, Subiaco, Ark.

Dear Alan,

Yours of the other day received. Maybe this funambulist (sic?) will get to read some of your work, soon, I hope. Won't say anything about the secret book. Who would I say it to, here! I'm glad you even getting another together. When you say you've "managed" to get them typed, know what you mean, but probably am not wise & old enough to comprehend your suffering - but already I'm taking a crack at it. Please understand that here is one who is waiting to read your work, however unknown and lowly a poet I am; anyway, know this: "there is someone who is wanting to behold your strangeness and the mirages you make, bitter troubadour of every man's court, every woman's chamber." Once again, the voluble quotes are mine. In this world, these days, I hope I can be of some help to you in that way.

When I said "you help, you help", I didn't intend it to be taken as a command, request, or a perjoritive remark. I meant it as the words of a young, weaker man who is down, and in Pain, trying to get up, to an older, stronger man, who is bearing his two sticks of a big tree of pain on his own two feet. Standing quite upright, as you are now, and seemed to be, beautifully, on Cape Cod. They were the lost words of a boy, to a man he admires - It is as if I know you know how it feels to be down and out in "spirits" like that. I admire you more for helping me get up by myself out of the drunken & perilous regime. Now, these aren't the words of a boy. They are phenomenological: they escape from the poet keeping watch over the flocks, the bad shepard who is dozing through the bulk of his youth.

At the xyst of all poets, I went down, because, unlike you, I hadn't the experience to know that first rounds of going all out, will get you flat on your back by the seventh. You know how to conserve your strength. Which is the wisest thing a poet can do. -one of-(as you can see, I still have much to learn.) I make a few glib tunes like a lost goose drinking water, and I expect to be passed over by the swan hen who has been singing her heart out for so many years. Bear with me until the reef is not a rock, onlv the back of a white whale. Jonas & Ishmael.

Anyway, good man, you know not to waste your time in letters like this.

When you said "I wish it were the other way around" I don't understand what you mean. If you meant, you help me (Dugan), I hope I can. How, I don't know, as I'm still more or less in the dark. If my letters are harmful, I'll stop them. If I do you no good. I am doing you harm. By being "fluent" I hope I'm not condemned-at best acquitted -"by your words"

Whatever, any criticisms you might have of me & my work I'm willing to listen to, as I'll heed them & know you are doing it for my own good.

You have helped my soul and my poems: whatever I can do for your sake, I will. Some of your poems are at the bottom of my heart and no one will ever get a look into them. We are both going to hell.

Clarify.

Yours.

Frank

(A note in the margin reads:

My best and most difficult bow to her ladyship, Judith.
X is where there is
no treasure)

Allen Dugan