to Dorothy Brownfield, 28 September 1949
to Dorothy Brownfield, et al, 4 November 1950
to Philip Whalen, 7 July 1957
to Donald Allen, 18 December 1959
to Charles Olson, 9 August 1960
to Larry Eigner, 7 September 1961
draft of a letter to Robert Duncan, July 1962
to James Schevill, 16 October 1966
to Robert D. Wilder, 19 June 1969
from How I Read Gertrude Stein
To Larry Eigner,
from 2273 California Street, San Francisco,
7 September 1961
Dear Larry, I've just gone through On My Eyes for the third or fourth time & want to tell you how beautifully I think you write.
For one thing, there is a speed in poems like the one starting "It's getting there" which I've only seen in Olson & Whalen, and I think you're even faster. By speed I think I mean only that really all the old lumber is finally gone, and that what is being got at is hit directly. The impression from that poem is exhilarating, a trip, a swift ride.
But it is a much deeper thing you do in the poems which, like your title says you are doing, speak in that big range just before what we see enters the world of words. I don't know of any poem in our language that does this better than the one about all that equipment about to work on that field, "the noise they make." (I just looked it up and find it's "the noise they were making.") & it's the look into that world which runs all through the book which makes it so astonishing and fresh and good.
But this is craft & the rest is harder to talk about: that I am moved by those poems, lifted out and shaken up a bit — something that after all is the only point to it. It is the big thing that you are doing (and I think what that is is the strong statement which translates out: "I walked about this planet for a while, it was this" or, like what Van Gogh did "I saw a sunflower, I Van Gogh," but I blabber, possibly).
I have to use your lines
there are all types
of an animate gaiety
as a dedication to a section of the poem I am now working on — a long poem about salmon fishing, commercially, the job I am now doing & which may finally have freed me altogether (or not). I will try to keep all my bitterness out of the poem — a thing you do so beautifully in yours . . .
As I write this my cat is nursing an old T-shirt of mine. He chews & purrs and kneads & today we discovered, upon lifting him up from these devotions, that he had his (perhaps) first erection. Now he has stopped. He sleeps in his flea-collar (September in San Francisco is the month of fleas: world famous). It is all about us, at every speed at once Lew Welch
SECTION FOR FISHPOME
There are all types
Of an animate gaiety
— Larry Eigner
Porpoises all the way out
I shoved fishhooks through herring carefully, the
Hook as near the tail, body straight (the bait can't spin), &
A pin through the head and hook
Tied with a rubber band
One after the other
Neatly arranged, belly up
Their bellies always white as
Porpoises, first, fast
White, driving through the water faster than you, then
Big black shape and splash
(Startled from herring, laugh, I
(Always feel lucky when they
Jellyfish, brown, like turkish pillows or
Ice — white in clumps of thousands, the
Goo all over the fishing wire, sting when
Splashed in the eye
"The slimy ones," filthy son of a bitches, nothing
To my knowledge, eats them
| Green water, brown water, water with |  |
|
| Patches exactly like chicken shit even | PLANKTON | |
| Feathers in it, the |
"Penguins," to fisherfolk, murre, I'm told, up
To dry their tiny wings (stand like emblems on Roman standards)
& swim as fast as roadrunners run
"caught one three stops down" (60 feet)
A bird on a fishhook!
or the barnacles when we painted the
boat bottom: cluster of them on the
screw shaft. A whole life spinning! &
then I wire-brushed them into
void for how many Kalpas, the
Whole business very hard on sentient beings
It's all crowded around us as we walk our bellied floor
The salmon so big in August we
Shoot them in the head before gaffing them
Pounding their heads in, guts ripped out & thrown to the gulls
lice in the gills
lice by the fin behind their vents
Like tiny rays or skates
very "You can't do that and be a Buddhist."
end
So much the worse for Buddhism.
next to end: No more fish to gut, the
Gulls ignore us into port
Or:
So
much
the
worse
for
Buddhism
at times a fishing boat is visited by canaries
"I had dozens of them once, albacoring, they
stayed with me 3 or four days, hopping all over the
place. One died in the scuppers. Just sat there
sleeping, so I didn't disturb him. Then, plop,
over he goes with his little feet straight up in the
air. It was awful. And not one canary has lit on
the boat since."
That's as far as I got on Sept. 6, 1961