More primitive fantasies

Amazon has now made available almost the full text of Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and Jose Rodriguez Feo, which I edited in the mid-80s with Beverly Coyle at Duke University Press. Prior to Secretaries about eighty percent of the letters Stevens wrote to the Cuban poet-editor — member of the literary movement called “Origenes” — had already been published in Holly Stevens’s Letters (1966). But a number of Stevens’s letters, including several of the more idiosyncratic he ever wrote, had not been published, and none of Rodriguez Feo’s. Stevens’s letters without the Cuban’s, it turns out, are only readable in an abstract lit-crit sort of way — in a way that left the question in one’s mind: what the hell was this young Cuban saying to the great poet, after all?

So here is your link to Amazon’s digital Secretaries of the Moon.

I’ve written here before about the gay Cuban literary culture Stevens was somewhat wittingly walking into when he struck up such an intense correspondence with Rodriguez Feo.

I have also written here, months back, about the primitive fantasies the letters with the young Cuban enabled.

Finally, there’s this page I put up about the book some years ago.