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

10 April 73

Dear Cid,

One thing I like about your writing-about you, more exactly-is that you keep making discoveries, the beautiful little So Far which Jim [Weil of St. Elizabeth Press] has just sent me, as instance. I think of so many writers who come on only after long rehearsal to tell us what they know as though all knowledge is their birthright and we, their readers, must acknowledge them as gurus. But, to you, experience is still a surprise and we make it together. If I had been aware in advance of the double entendre of that last phrase I might have dismissed it as too snide. But it is said. You should forgive. So be it.

I was in NY for a week for theater and to get away for awhile from the office and also from the pressure and distraction of constant company which has been the feature of this winter and which resumed almost as soon as I came back. Much of my habit has been solitary so I don't go to communing and carousing but when they come to me as they have I have little resistance to them and in spite of some resentment they give me pleasure. It is like the old joke about disaster which it is recommended that one lie back and enjoy. I don't know how else to deal with it.

March was like April and April is acting like March. Snowdrops blossomed and the blue squills and grass is turning green but today was a piercingly cold wind and a temperature in the low thirties.

No poems for awhile. I did a short prose piece on costume as metaphor. Recovering old ground. Ideas largely from the poems with perhaps some new accretions. There is a difference between prose and verse. I couldn't begin to say what it is.

I have my '72 statement from Laughlin: $9.30 Ninety-four copies of TWTW [The World, The Worldless] sold and thirty-one returned. I may not be neglected but I am certainly not much read.

[ . . . .]

My love to you both

Bill