Dear Craig,

releasing your poems from line rhyme tyranny is a big step, as i am sure you know.  are we using a language or does the language use us after all.  poems should stand as a tree stands.  it is appreciated by its colors, shape, motion and a poem should also.  Sounds of some words are sufficient enough to have images attached to them.  “mourn” is such a word.  I have just rediscovered this magic of word sounds (rhymes)  It is better to discover them from the free verse direction than the other way around, i think.

it is february, they say.  I only know the cold mornings wrapped in my winter garments looking at the frozen river.  This is what they call winter, also.  the eskimos refer to it as “season of night” (6 months – earth rotation etc.)

Your letter Craig, reminds me of so many things.  But mostly the times we are together these times we never get beyond this surface noise.  But for me at least, it is the experience of talking rather than words themselves.  Of course there is something beyond art between us.  It is something superhuman — existing beyond words and personality.  It is an essential sameness that many people speak of but which few experience.

I have always spoken more clearly in my writing and so have you, Craig.  maybe we are to be closest when the distance between us is greatest.  Can it be true?

I am enclosing another poem, about the third written this year.  I love the sounds of the bells on a cold night.  am working on a short sketch which i will send later, when it is finished.  it is yet another version of “John worked in…” your short story which has dominated my story work for 2 years.  maybe someday an expression will come close to the simple eloquence of your story.  i continue to work.

There isn’t much else for now.  Toboggon (or whatever)

Larry
6 February, 1972

P.S.  Can a poem really sit on a desk with feeling?  it’s true

Re-reading this, I was surprised that Lawrence regarded anything I wrote as a model — for me it was always the other way around. – CHC