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

8 June 70

Dear Cid,

Summer now, praise God! The warmth, the floods of light, the lavish variants of green. I am just in from walking on the towpath and a bathe in the canal.

I don't keep up at all with history (not believing it after all) but I was interested by an article in a recent NY Review of Books ["What is to Be Done About Medieval History?" written by Geoffrey Barraclough in 4 June 1970 New York Review of Books] which discussed several new books on medieval history against theoretical fashions in study as "Quantitative History" and the traditional method of critical exegesis as a result of which latter "practically not one certain fact is left." " The trouble is you are left in the end, either with other myths-the myths historians have substituted for the myths of chroniclers or older historians-or with a vacuum: you are not left with the truth. And the reason you are not left with the truth is that history is not like a statue lying on the ground covered with leaves, and when you have cleared away the leaves, there is the statue, complete and perfect. On the contrary, history--or at least that kind of history-is more like the successive layers of leaves, and when you have cleared them us, you are left with nothing, with the bare ground."

This struck me not as a metaphor for history but a metaphor for experience-for "reality" in my poem

"As though it were something that lay like a lump in the yard, that anyone could kick."