“[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

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

Sometimes when I am working 
In the forest clearing brush from 
The hemlocks, a wood nymph approaches 

Don’t Try to Explain

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

 

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

Make It Simple

make it so simple a child
of six can understand the

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

rousing violent controversy and censure

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

Egon Schiele knew that he was two people
there was no doubt about it Romain Gary

wanted to be two people but he made a

 

 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.

 

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

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.