Beerspit Night and Cursing (23 page)

28/feb/61 sm pobox 46 san gregorio cal

buk dearest one/ for kaja thankew

I needed something new to chew on & writ th’ gal letter to straighten her exposed cunt that she taketh for a mind…she has an undressed & pissyassed mind…poor infant sittin’ on front steps playin’ wiff hersalf…& is that all of Buk to appear wots on sheet of yellow? it is very funny…I fogot ah lo’d yew
“moth going by 1/2 mile an hr”
…oh godtttt…&
Pay Yr Rent or Get Out
…you funniest yet…my kid…let the kid have his bottle pop…my kid need dot shit fo’ fuel…I want one when comes out & how much is & who “Jon” & wot “46”…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…Babe read
Selected Poems of H.D.
Oh Buk she is a better poet(essa) than Ezra/ she is the number
one
Scribe for god’s sake get her…$1.45 Evergreen with her pix on front/ get get get/ & I mail her yr book soon’s arrives/ now in switzerland she is…are you going to write something for her????? the coming issue???? and I love you my goodtttt kidtttt/

youse mamma

mah ma

Sheri

March 2, won 9 sickswon

Oye, Sheerie…

I guess with the kaja, she is trying to say too much, and in too goodpure a way. Could be she wants the whole populace to swoon and ask wat’s ’er name? Katherine Jones? I don’t understand quite why Webb should send me this thing, unless he thought it was good and I thought so too. I tried to see what I could, and I appreciated the simple line, but I don’t take any sugar in my coffee or my beer.

No, the sheet of yellow page is the beginning of several poems by Buk. Jon mailed them to me because he is that way about things, he is not standoffish. The
Pay Your Rent or Get Out
poem at the bottom is the
beginning
of another poem. I don’t remember what the rest of it says or what the other poems are.

Jon is Jon Webb,
Outsider
, 46 is page 46, and I rather suppose he’ll mail you a copy gratis because he knows you, although I don’t know if he has your new address. When I say he knows you, I mean he has mentioned you. You are our new Gertrude Stein, only you don’t look as grubby or travel around with another lady.

Aw right! Aw right! I git H.D., I get Hilda Doolittle,
IF
she at bookstore corner Western and Hollywood bull, they have almost everything but I am not one of those mail them in and wait boys.

Sure, I write something for new A and P. Only I figure new
AP
far way off. There’s plenty of time, right? You sure as hell aren’t going to crank off another one right away? Nobody
that
tuff.

Your
Wilder Bently
or what’s his name. I didn’t try to contact him. Time I don’t have anything of. What I mean is, sometimes just not being anything or doing anything for 5 or 6 hours or 5 or 6 days or 5 or 6 years is most important. You take in air and space and stems and roots, and if that’s
all
you take in, you have made it.

Not much else today, mama.

lufftwaffe,

Buk

[
followed by a drawing of CB watching a woman walk by his window
.]

L.A.
March 8, sixwon

Hoy, Shed:

I kant get your h.d. Enclosed 2 bucks, if you have copy or know of one, ship it on down. The bookstores down here carry the Sat. Ev. Post, Time and murder mysteries.

You gona pull kaja’s hair? You might straighten her at that.

Been hearing from a prof. at L.S.U., first letters ok. Last one he got confessional and I heard all about it. Also enclosed some poems for me to read. I don’t run a magazine or a confessional booth.

Sherman did the same thing to me. Got very homey.

Your rock-salt letters never miss. Why don’t you teach these people to write
LETTERS
, mawwma?

kaja, I believe will be in
Outsider
which will be out, I hear, in April. Webb is a tough boy but he can be fooled because he works so hard trying to get it done that sometimes it doesn’t give him time to see. It’s hard to see when you’re running.

He has things banging against the walls with his energy.

On Ernie, I don’t know what the hell. Those things sometimes run in circles, and he may yet circle back on you. And I told you Po Li was stronger’n any of us. In his way, that is.

This is short. Some outside workings have ganged-up on me.

H.D. is H.D. why name it?

LOVE
sure,

Buk

March 8, 1961

Deah Sherie—

If you can’t use these in a future
A & P
, please return them so that I can try ’em elsewhere. O.k?

Buk

10/march/61 pobx 46 san gregorio calif/

yes will get the H.D. for buk/ and will enclose some herbs/the hops are plain ol’ hops & buk is to make a tea of them…not many as bitter/make tea for resting the nerves…the same for chamomile flowers & the wormwood…wormwood bitter needs honey

am keep. poetry for
next
a & p
/ poem for the dead whore
very moving

Yes “got very homey” the pore americans/ no manners/ no ‘distance’ Ez on subject “when yr nearest neighbor is 100 miles away it is gonna make ya friendly…the britts got dif. manners because the island is crowded…”

The Flowering of the Rod

How moi lamb…can I better teach these people to write letters (as yr req.) except by doing it myself…as a model…even if it interfer with my own work…it was the humblest task I cd think to set myself & teach ’em…

but Buk…a voice from the aether…& a command…& I am
painting again…my
Lux in Diafana
…(canto 93 the Kati Canto)

am sending you the hole you’d wear in the sock anyhow (to fit yr poetry) (as requested)

rest of

SOCK

will follow/

Los Angeles, March eleventh
nineteen sixty one

Hoy, Sheeerieee…

I Yam sending you these set of
blurbs Webb sent
me because

and can’t stick them in the mail for this gruff old goat, and I thought anyhow, you’d be interested. Your law is always to have a reaction and I thought you’d have a reaction to these. Maybe Jon sent you some.

My reaction is why 3,500 copies?

What the hell’s he gona
do
with ’em?

If I had a little machine like that, I’d turn out 200 copies. Or if I had a mimeo, I’d turn out 20 copies. By doing 200 copies I could turn out 17 and 1/2 magazines in the time it takes him to do one. It’s rarity that makes things valuable. Who in the hell saves old copies of
The Saturday Evening Post?
What’s Jon
trying to do?
Post
us up? Or trying to turn a buck? Still he’s a hard worker, and I guess in his own way he’s grinding in the fire, and he is an individual of a sort, and he’s not trying to turn a buck at all. But Jesus, threethousandfivehundred copies! It’s not necessary. It only takes a sculptor one sculpe. This mass-production business strangles its own meaning. If it can be worked off a press with a worker-bee doing the work and not the artist, well, all right, ten thousand copies is all right, if the content is all right, even if you never get rid of them, it doesn’t matter. But Jon is virtually assassinating himself in order to get out a mag.

Nothing else much new. Somebody in New York thinking of bringing out a 2nd. collection of my poems—
Longshot Poems for Broke Players
. It might be a mimeo, I don’t know. The title is tentative and, of course, as awfully usual…Mid-Victorian. I typed him up a group of the latest, including those in the last issue of A & P review. The
Flower, Fist
group was mostly my earlier, and I will feel closer to home with these, no matter what he takes.

I won’t come up in April. I feel it might spoil something. As Jory might tell you, I don’t know how to
TALK
. I just sit there like a frog on a leaf, blinking. I’m not even thinking. Most of the time I don’t think. I long ago tired of thinking.

Going through the mags typing up poems for New Yawk friend came upon Mr. Wang writing about photo Mr. America 1951 stuck in mag,
The Naked Ear
. Mr. Green (Mr. America) is showing his cock and his muscle and, believe me, he has more muscle than cock. But why does Mr. Wang worry about such things…Mr. America 1951 in a 1959 magazine? And the editor has changed the title of my poem
Layover
to read
Lay Over
.

To show you what this does to the central essence of my poem, allow me upon the next page to show you the poem.—

Can’t you see that the changing of
Layover
to
Lay Over
violates the essence of the poem? By
Layover
, I meant getting out of the stream of dead life. But my editor friend seemed to think it was just a lay that was over. Which it probably would have been if it had been him or
Judson Crews
….and while we are on
The Naked Ear
#9, there is a poem by your friend Mike McClure.—

This is a poem? Or are the boys just playing with each other? There are too many homosexuals, and handshakes under the table to suit me…All right, Shed.

Truly,

Buk

Los Angeles, Calif.
March 12th., 1961

Dear Shed, Spirit-Love Mine:

First, hello, to my buddy, Po Li, hello, hello.

Bad day: blades turned in…but not for shaving.

I hate to see a full-grown man cry (or woman either) and use Art as an excuse, but on the other hand, I hate to see them going around being soft and subtle as if they have everything under control and are tasting their words like olives or pickled pigs feet. (See
Gil Orlovitz: Act of the Sonnet
). Yeah, it’s an act, all right. He gave himself away and didn’t know it. Even to stealing one of my lines after first carefully draining the blood from it.

I hate to see a full-grown man cry, but maybe that’s the hun in me; the hun and the pollack and everything else backalley; but I don’t hate to see the sun go down, especially after I have walked around in it all day dreaming pleasantries against the blade. Besides, I am pretty good in the dark, I’m told (I was once cornered in a closet with a man with brass-knucks, but I guess he was only a boy because I left him in there among the ladies’ habits and scarf-shadows, and I stepped out and asked for something cold to drink).

I furthermore do
not
care for the Ginsburg flippancy of seeming-modernity about his grandmother’s beard
Howling
, or whatever, and it was tough of him to go visit Castro amongst the chicken bones; but why why why…do they call it
DARKNESS
simply because I can see light and shadesdown growing flower
AND
weed, love
AND
the spilled bottle beside the elbow of what was once a halfgod…or now a fishpond is floating dead tadpoles that might be better than any of us? Certainly they
can
be…dead as they are…if they do not sell out, and it is so hard not to sell out with all the lights they flash upon us, with the weewee shit full of sea fulla boats fulla whores.

I know that Ernie is the new young Jew of the Adoration, but I hope that you have caught your head by now, and not lost it again. It’s none of my damn business. maby it’s Ginsburg’s granmaw’s business. I’ve elected you ar knew Gertrude S. but insteada u keepin’ me in shape, now an’ then Gerty, Buk gona
SAY
.

Let’s begin with
some lines
you didn’t understand.

Shed: bird-light is very simply any light that falls upon a bird or follows it around, just as Po Li has his very dark little ball that follows him around on a leash. As I was saying, any light that falls upon a bird or any light that falls
away
from a bird
UPON
something
ELSE
. Say in a form of final living light