RJ: March 21st, 73 Elgin Park, S.F. Ca. 94103.

Dear Jesse Glass,

Thank you so much for your letter. I see, of course, poets like Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn here, as well as a few young ‘uns, but I simply no longer have any sense of a reading ‘community’. I just write em and send em out in high Xerox to 15 friends, even then I seldom hear anything sensible except from Guy Davenport. Everyone liked my books so when I was starting, I always thought how wonderful to get to the point where no one could yet look at it. Well, being there is wonderful, but it is true no one looks at it. The first book of ARK was Northpoint’s first book, and so there were no reviews to speak of (unlike their books now). It was up for a National Book Award, but who remembers where that prize went?

But not to complain–I’ve got beyond Zukovsky at last, and how lovely the language lies ahead, and up! After the Foundations, there are to be 33 Spires, then 33 Outworks. What is now RADI OS will become ARK 100. (I felt I cannot write a Cantos, or A, or Patterson, etc. without a superstructure.) I am now half way through, Spire 50 having been completed, and there are first drafts of RADI OS & VI.

The Palms part of The Foundations was written by extraction from the Psalms: at least one word per psalm, and it all–punctuation even–had to be in strict sequence. These are kind of Shoenbergian kind of devices, but they yield music. They are also what Zukovsky often did, like translating Catullus’ latin into english rather than the words. Or 80 Flowers! In the Spires there is Prospero’s Songs to Ariel, which is made like a sampler of only words and phrases culled from Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to Western Birds. Following, is Ariel’s Songs to Prospero, made as a musical tape (and the aid of a sound studio) from recorded songs of Eastern Birds. But of course no one these days thinks about any technical innovations in the humble art of poesy.

Yes, you can have a Spire for your Cream, if I can have proofs. After Clayton butchered my beautiful 12 line stanzas in Sulphur, I really must be able to see, before. I’m sending the first fountain. There must be a beautiful cap of S at the beginning (like the beginnings of Milton’s books), and the kind of ‘concrete shapes’ out not to be hard to set: the Bach has to be square and the shape has to be a circle…(Easy on a typewriter, but not so in type).

Cheers–

Ron Johnson

[Note: is in paragraph one, line four is underlined. This program doesn’t allow me to indicate this. The Cream Ron mentions is my first issue of the Cream City Review. Jesse]