October 21, 1964

After all every one is as their                                              1519 48th Ave
land is                                                                                San Francisco 22
— G. Stein[1]                                                         21 Oct 64[2]

Ed —
             Thanks for yr card, esp. a Patchen one (its against the wall now where I can see it).
                                                                                                                                                                     Yes,
god knows where one goes finally — only finally goes — & I’m here, the fall mov’t west finally, even to living here (48th Ave), to hell & gone out west almost to the ocean, near nothing of the city, except that sea, & Golden Gate Park, just north of me (but then, those are of the real importance to me, not N. Beach or that area, scene, whatever). From here, where does one go? Having come here, I keep wondering (or at times, not “keep”) where that country, of Kansas most, I came from, is in all this mov’t now. Well, don’t we always. I met Don Allen the other day — he wants to use that photo of Olson I took, for the dust jacket of Human Universe[3] — & he said something abt a lot of people cracking up here — that, literally, it came to seem there was no place to go, once here. Jim Clyman[4] went back east, over the Sierras & then to (Ohio was it?) home, way east, in 1846 — but it isn’t an easy mov’t — I can go north (after all, to come to SF from Albuq isn’t finally a simple westward move — only so far as Los Angeles, & up to LA it’s as if the muscles moved w/o thought, toward the sunset — but from LA to SF, north, takes an effort of the will, a decision of the intellect (?) — & one wonders the why of that move, but not of the one to LA, as a direction), but to go back to the midwest now, no, or not at all easily. Oh well. I begin to feel, for real, at last, as a physical, palpable thing, the motion of the currents of this continent, ours — & do they, circling clockwise, west, to north, to east, to south, to west again, center, go down in a whirlpool, in Kansas finally? or never touch center, go round & round? idle conjectures. But I feel the mov’ts, as if an undertow under me.
                                                                                                                                               The ocean
fascinates & repels me, as it must always to someone from the plains. Calm? one knows across the plains, & cannot come to, w/ the sea, its endless restlessness (not at all the same as grass moving —). But fascinating, yes, & now, for the first time in my life really living near the ocean (in Cambridge it was miles away), worth coming to. It, and these hills of California, that are like no other landscape of the U.S. — bare but for the yellow grass & scattered few trees, rounded & steep. Why do they haunt?

Oh well. Its like coming to know a woman — not just the sleeping together, but the long contact day to day, intimacy, unconscious knowing of all habits, conscious knowing of them … that kind of knowing, not some silly symbol “the land is a woman” etc etc. Only recollections in the flesh, of how it’s lived before.
                                So I come, too, to total despair — & that’s been coming on a long time — the job in Albq held off — & now, free all day & night (as long as my little saved holds out), & knowing no one here but one friend out of the Army, come up straight against it — quiet & dull, the slough of Despair Despond did Bunyan[5] call it?, but mostly dull, inactivity, paralysis. In & out of, mostly lonely one figures. W/ all the work in the world to do, I can’t do anything — the Zukofsky book,[6] book reviews, an article, a prose thing on the Army, poems, wow. Slowly things crack — tonight (viz., this letter as evidence) coming out, maybe drinking quantities of strong black coffee — a cheap high, one I used to use broke in the Army — or the pitch reached re-reading War & Peace, listening to Bach’s B minor Mass & now the St. M. Passion — 
                                                                   anyhoo! up & out — (of myself, toward at least the street outside & the beach & most of all G G Park)
                                                                                  So, wow, there are the mov’ts now. Vegetating mostly — soon maybe move to show.
                                                     The prose concern has been w/ me a long time — & now, feeling hung on what I was/wasn’t doing every time I tried to write a poem, its been a way to let loose, not care, do what the hell I like. I started describing coming to Albq in the Army, I went off for 5 pages describing the Army barracks, in detail. No one’s done that — that information, I mean — & the try at least stays with me. Only Jones has written anything abt the Army worth a damn (not war, you dig, but the life, way of it, in the Army). I don’t yet feel where the focus is in what I’m doing — where going? More what seems important to talk abt, include? It isn’t a “story” I’m telling — & yet recounts incidents — a form finally set only by the time involved — I went in 4 Aug 60 & got out 3 Aug 62. Where I move & how, w/in that, is my own predilection. It all happened. I’ve never read more than 10 pages of Proust, so I don’t know what he did. I’m not, whatever it was. Gertrude Stein, by god, seems closer to me than that — Bob’s stories & yr own — in that 1) they deal of the emotional instance(s) personal; 2) let themselves happen as they go, that form. (Again, no plotted “story”). Though if I wrote a novel I wdn’t do it like Bob’s (& I haven’t read more’n’ a chapter of yrs, so can’t say). But what I’m writing isn’t a novel, or not so simply? Damned if I know what it is. But goes. Very baldly (not badly), description mostly. 1st person w/ asides, senses of what happened, & the facts of the instances given pretty much in skeletal outline. Ah, lordy.
                                                                              I even plan to read James, yet, next (starting w/ darkest James, The Golden Bowl). What did you come to, reading him & then teaching that class? I’d like to know — I’ve avoided him except for a few stories, & they a long time ago — but it comes finally that he was American, his concerns & perceptions — & he was no fool, god knows. It’s always seemed to me his focus was totally on what I guess I’d call propriety — & that seemed to me finally only so deep, no matter how adroit you were in according all its angles, shades. I’m ready to. Last night I found EP’s article on James in the Literary Essays & read it w/ a good deal of interest. & I know Stein drew from him a lot. So I’m green, god knows. Wd like to know what you found.
                                                                                                                                               God, there is so much to do, if I only cd get my ass in gear, as they used to say. Energy simply — I want, or have wanted a long time, to do a study of the town I grew up in, as a place to focus on & draw in whatever, historically, 0f that whole area. Not a year by year acc’t, you dig, but a reckoning w/ what that town is, was, why, where, how, its mov’t. Literal reality of it — photographers (as I use in writing of the Army drawings, diagrams, sketches: of barracks, rooms where Inscription Rock is, etc). What wd one have, w/ all that (I mean really I guess, what the hell of me wd emerge — calculated or not, there) —

Malin has already written several articles on early theatrical entertainments in Ft Scott, & on several philosophers — two — who lived there — amateurs, of course, but significant of what was concerning people there, in that place, state, area, at that time (1870’s). Malin being very keen on such sense. Barbed wire, plays, grass, social darwinism, the railroad, why the library seems the center of town. The presence to me, w/ me, of that town is not at all (or that’s another thing altogether) bound up w/ the people, individuals I know, knew, there — but w/ its corporeal presence, as a body. & it isn’t WCW; “a city is a man,”[7] god knows, no. It’s extremely particular, houses, streets, smells, light, weeds, where vacant lots are (were, still are), where streets go when they run out of town, hills — all, on & on. The people change, or don’t — individuals come & go anyway — & a sense of that place, yes, means something as tangible in the town’s whole presence, as buildings. But I don’t feel any Spoon River Anth. or midwest Peyton Place acc’t (or Look Homeward, A.).[8] Me, except as relator, omnipresent then, don’t count. I don’t know that I cd ever summon to that acc’t the objectivity of resources & all history Olson does to Gloucester or anything now he turns to. I mean, a sense of my reactions to, evaluations of, perceptions of the place, wd always be on past specifics of history — always? I mean that the whole idea as it now is, is perception, & the reality of the bldgs, etc, not to illustrate or investigate some mov’t of human history — ?? The emotional, I’m hung on? God knows. It wd have to come out in the work of it, I can’t fore-guess now. God knows I’ve got to come to a pt where Olson doesn’t freeze me up in awe & frustration to ever do anything he hasn’t already seen, understood, & done long before — i.e. feel I’m w/ him, not down below & no where — & not against, who’s competing?
                                  Anyhoo. Enough of all this. How are you all there? Snow yet? All seasons blend here, but still the angle of the light is Fall, clearly. Is Idaho Out out yet? & that Wagnon,[9] in SLC, how’s he? I wrote twice, & asked for WD 10,[10] which I’ve seen, but no answer yet. Clammed up, pissed off, cracked, or busy? What’s become of that anthology on the West — god I cd ask questions all night, & that’s dull. / I liked yr various views from the N. side grocery in MATTER 2[11] (this is 1st I’ve had chance to say), only felt a generalizing in 6 I hadn’t before in others? Or am I full of shit? The lines’ mov’t is fine; very very fine — I admire so much that long sinuously, more adroit here than even The Newly Fallen. Yas. Damn, the moon’s near nigh full & it’s close on to Halloween — I’ll have to go & scare somebody. Barricade myself in w/ enough to drink, against the marauding kids that’ll come. Or turn on & laugh. Anyhow, write, when you can! One longs, almost, for that frost you must have already had up there — breath of it on envelopes, at least. Hang loose!

 love

 — Ken

P.S. Peyote can be had by mail — maybe you already have the info, but if not — 100 buttons for $11 (ask for it cured & they’ll send it so w/o charge)! /

H. C. Lawson
Lawson’s Cactus Farm
1223 S. Alamo St.
San Antonio, Texas

 Abt 5 buttons — ground & put in capsules is easiest — seems a “normal” high.

1. Stein quote from Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 250. Stein mentions Kansas on the previous page.

2. Irby to Dorn, 21 October 1964, Ed Dorn Papers, series I, box 1, folder 17, Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

3. Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Don Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1967). The photograph now appears on the cover of Olson’s Collected Prose, ed. Don Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

4. James Clyman (1792–1881), ranger and explorer of the American West, explored the South Pass with Jedediah Smith, about whom Irby wrote a lengthy half-narrative poem, “Jed Smith and the Way,” which originally appeared in Caterpillar 17 (October 1971): 99–112, and was later collected in Catalpa (Lawrence: Tansy Press, 1977). Clyman went back to Ohio, as Irby recalls, after his missions out West, but thereafter returned to settle in Napa, California.

5. John Bunyan (1828–1888); the “Slough of Despond,” is a bog in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

6. For a period of time, Irby planned to write a book on Zukofsky for the Twayne’s US Authors Series.

7. Williams’s author’s note to Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1946) begins: “Paterson is a long poem in four parts — that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody — if imaginatively conceived — any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”

8. Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1915); Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (New York: Julian Messner, 1956); Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel (New York: Scribner, 1929).

9. Drew Wagnon, coeditor of Wild Dog, beginning with vol. 1, no. 3, in 1963, until the magazine’s final issue, vol. 3, no. 21, in 1966. Wagnon was a student of Dorn’s at Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho. For further info, see Clay and Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side.

10. Wild Dog 10; see endnote 11 (“April 30, 1963”).

11. Dorn’s poem “Six views from the same window of the Northside Grocery” appeared in Matter 2 (1964), and was collected in Geography (London: Fulcrum Press, 1965/1968).