As Dan mentions in a previous posting, I’ve been going through my archives—scattered between Shin-Urayasu, (Japan), Westminster, Maryland, and Burlington, Canada and stretching back in time to 1973.

Here are two from Guy Davenport:

18 October, 1991.

Dear Mr. Glass:

Thanks for “Lexical Obelisk”. I thought it was going to be Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Very dense, these darkish poems! But they make sense and are well written. Some are too much in everybody else’s style (look at page 13), but most are nicely original (”To A Bird Killed on a Power Line”). Cultivate your gnomic gift; e.g. “The devil remains unconvinced”.

Good luck with Die Young. (What ironies crowd upon that sentence!) Yes, the Volsi saga fragment is thoroughly Icelandic. And you have an impressive round-up of writers.

I wish I had something to submit. None of the things I’m working on is suitable (that is, they are prose, and far too long).

best wishes,

Guy Davenport.

&

6 May 1992.

Dear Jesse Glass,

I sometimes wonder about audience. For whom are you writing? This isn’t a challenge but a question that interests me, probably because I taught for 37 years (and you turn out also to be a teacher). Do you have a sense of readers? In a civilized and highly literate culture you would have readers. My sense is that a poet like you is preserving an invisible kind of language and imagery. Also an intelligence and a sensibility. Quite an activity!

You are by no means alsone: that makes it the more interesting and mysterious. I don’t mean of course that all your poetry is mandarin and arcane–”Picture Postcard (1916)” is available to all. Perhaps all poetry is difficult (the scholars are still deciphering Dante, and one of these days I hope to understand Cocteau and Yves Bonnefoy, never mind Rimbaud).

I’ve been reading Horace. If he’s poetry, what is Holderlin? Thanks for sending these poems; it’s a privilege to be aware of them.

gratefully,

Guy