“[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.”

On his father: “If I asked him for money, he'd say, ‘Are you going to publish some more of those books that I can't understand?’ And I'd say, ‘Yes.’ And he'd give it to me.”

They call me Jack Jigger because
I'm entirely made of little pieces
Taken from other people (some are

Let them twirl a dance
Of shadows, she so graceful
In the hand over hand, he

They call me Jack Jigger because
I’m entirely made of little pieces
Taken from other people (some are

Each day the purple clematis climbs further up the wire beside the kitchen door
Green fingers twine around the strands of wire
And soon there is another blossom with a yellow star at its center

When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I

It was raining during her lunch
hour and to keep dry she went
into one of those shabby little

Sometimes when I am working
In the forest clearing brush from

A whole stolen afternoon before us
no hurry no haste savoring every

The hate began a few months after
the blissful wedding he     discov-

The mind of a lover is a labyrinth
of false starts and miscalculations

is visible to the sculptor
but it is invisible to me

Remembering Nabokov

 A dark damp night and a sudden hatch
of moths has covered the glass of the

 

The lightest touch
if it is gently giv-
en can yield as much
affection as a deep

the sheep have formed
a nibbling ring around

the old horse all they

 

Make It Simple

make it so simple a child
of six can understand the

big long hard
bright loud hot
burn light hole

 

 

Could it be that I am the one
who is the false Dmitri the

 

He is a delicate flower indeed
talk of the princess and the pea

 

 

Did he imagine that her letters
were written to him those ones

 

 

The ritual of the poem in praise of you
demands the vision of a goddess   an ap-

 

In the films when the couples kiss
they grind their lips together as

 

Rilke writes of the expectation
that a beloved is about to ap-

 

 

I always feared that things
would end badly between us

For those little stabs of pain
in the region of the heart the

 

 

My theory that the people on both sides
of the mountain range were Brabers is a-

 

 

I am falling into the abyss
My fate is sealed
What a cruel martyrdom

are such an orderly race

Egon Schiele knew that he was two people

I know two lovers who could not see each other correctly.
They kissed a lot but what they saw was not really the
other person. It was a person each one had made up.

is too much with me daylong and
in my dreams my mind is invaded

 The apparition of these faces in the bough;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

The apparition of these boughs in the face;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

 

you must get well right
away your mistress loves

you and she needs you to

 

I do not know if you intend to pay any attention to unsolicited contributions to New Directions, but I think the enclosed pieces are the kind of work you want for your anthology. If I am wrong, forgive me,

Pound always set his sights high. Nothing but the best. When I was studying with him at his “Ezuversity” in Rapallo in 1935 he advised me not to waste time trying to write stories. Stendhal, Flaubert, James, Ford and Joyce, he told me, had done all that could be done with the novel. They had finished it off.