A Faithful Account of Where I Live: The Letters of Cid Corman and William Bronk

8 March 70

Dear Cid,

The light is Aegean , invincibly vernal, but the cold wind and the low temperature keep us in winter still. This afternoon by the canal, boys with a kite to remind me of you; but I was already thinking of you before I saw them. In the sun and cold the old snow has the crumb and crumble of pastry. In the middle of Hogan's big field at the bottom of the hill I look at the sky, pale blue near the horizon and clarifying gradually to a deep violet directly overhead, the color of nothing, and I looked all the way to the endless emptiness where there is nothing forever. It couldn't have borne so much as a cloud.

The London Times Literary Supplement for the twelfth of February has an article on the reissue of the old Black Mountain Review. Tomlinson wrote it. He credits you and Origin with making BMR possible and speaks of you in other ways to praise you. And toward the end of the article he speaks very generously of me regretting my neglect in England. (I am known in the US?) He sent me his new collection (The Way of a World, Oxford). He is greatly talented has a good eye and a good ear, a beautiful voice with a wide range, a perceptive heart, a clear mind. And besides all this is a generous and responsive person with good will and good humor. How is it that, after a little, his poems leave me speechless and deaf? I asked the wife of a young friend if Bill was enjoying his temporary work . . . and she said yes but she had never known him not to enjoy what he did. How very nice how sweet and good the well-balanced and smoothly functioning are. And how finally eccentric. As you say, wisdom is meaningless. The best we can think and do is beside the point.

One reason I have been so long in writing you is that I, too, had not read [Henry] Adams's Education and wanted to do so to know what you meant and I read very slowly now and have only a few days ago finished it. I read a library copy from many years ago-wide margins good paper. I had forgotten how nicely made a book could be. Yes, how much of what we know, or don't know, was his experience also. An historian friend told me about his wife's suicide. I should never have suspected he had a wife even. Strange. I also read a little reminiscence (in the Yale Review '66 Spring) by his niece Abigail Homan.

How beautiful and moving your little poems in [Origin] #17. No one does it so well.

No, I don't mean to praise music above other things. I mean music as metaphor for all we praise:

"I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being."

"Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him: talk ye of all his wondrous works."

How else? How not?
I send you all my love

Bill