Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters

Letters

Letters 14 “” “” The list of poets and little magazines in Jones’s letter sets the stage for the heart of the Lower East Side poetry scene in New York City. In 1959 Jones and his wife Hettie were already editing, writing for, and printing Yugen, and there were often parties and gatherings in their home attended by the many poets, painters, and actors living in and visiting New York. Hettie Jones notes, From a quick first look at Yugen 4 you’d say Beats, as the three Beat gurus— Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg—were represented. Except the “New consciousness in arts and letters” was more inclusive. Like Basil King, Joel Oppenheimer , and Fielding Dawson, the poets Robert Creeley, John Wieners and Charles Olson were out of Black Mountain College, where Olson was the last rector. Frank O’Hara, like the painters he knew, was a poet of the “New York School.” Gilbert Sorrentino lived in Brooklyn, Gary Snyder in Japan, Ray Bremser in a Trenton, New Jersey, prison. (74) The Allen G. in this letter is, of course, poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), a great facilitator in mixing circles of artists, introducing everyone he knew to one another. That sometimes worked the other way around though: it would be Jones who first introduced Ginsberg to Langston Hughes. Jones and Ginsberg began their own friendship when Jones moved to the Lower East Side: “I wrote to [him] at Git le Coeur in Paris when I moved to the Lower East Side asking him was he for real on a piece of toilet paper. He replied he was but he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. He used a better grade of toilet paper.” 26 Oct [1959] Dear Ed Dorn, I’ve been reading quite a lot of your verse recently (I’d read it before in Ark, Moby . . . Measure & Evergreen) . . . but I hadn’t drawn all those separate threads together. Recently tho, with that lgish poem in Migrant and the mass of poems I saw at Don Allen’s . . . I finally realize what a strong thing you have (a strong separate voice &c.) Anyway, I’d like to have a couple of poems for YUGEN. (I was very much impressed by yr 6th, 7th & 8th . . . also the lg mother poem.) Don tells me he’s using some of them in his ant’y . . . but it’d be alright to put them in the magazine. But I thot it’d be better to ask for anything you wanted to send &/or for permission to use those poems I saw at Don’s. Whatever you think! We have some kind of loose deadline for the next issue (6) . . . say about the 2nd wk in Nov. (but that’s stretching pretty close). At any rate, I hope you’ll send me something . . . or let me hear about the other poems. Thanks and take care. best, LeRoi Jones Letters 16 meant to be taken as a way you could write poetry. I always thought it was meant to suggest to you that you could get involved physically with the poem in a way that, up to that point, hadn’t actually been suggested. . . . But, for anybody who thought that it was meant to function in a way that a VW manual will tell you how to set the valves, I just never took it that way.” Projective Verse found its way into the many circles and schools of poetry burgeoning in the ’50s and ’60s and continues to be a key text for understanding the history of American poetry. 5:XII:59 Dear Ed Dorn: Finally looked at those poems of yours again, & I think 6th & 7th “Communications” wd do us best this time. Both, very fine. Your clear & marvelously exact images are really good news. That communication about that large woman or such I really dug, but space is always the kicker in this small shot business. But anyway, I’d like to use a couple more for the next Y6 (after one this month). #7 (if we can hold). #6 as I see it ought to make it later on in December. Or maybe we’ll get pushed into the sixties. (Wow, isn’t that straight out of some science fiction hash . . . THE SIXTIES . . . I mean, where are the goddam anti-gravitators &such. Maybe we lived too soon anyway. Poo) Saw Olson last wkend. Spent 3 days up there in froze Gloucester. But lovely to see Chas...