Letter from Robert Creeley

This letter from Robert Creeley was rejected from inclusion in his Selected Letters.





 64 Amherst Street
 Buffalo, NY 14207-2748
 (Presently San Diego)
             
 March 30, 1994



Dear Bill,

We've managed to get ourselves to edge of charmingly vast Pacific, and if wishes were wings, we'd head for Moorea this very moment.  Ah well!  I love poem of Phil Whalen's that has line: "Let's call it the Pacific."  One of the few "lines" I've remembered ever after (along with "Little Orphan Annie came to our house to play" and "The road was a ribbon of moonlight." etc. etc.)  So San Diego is hardly where you are at (or so I imagine) but it is a great relief for this brief week after the characteristic hanging on winter of Buffalo.  So good to be somewhere where one isn't endlessly having to think of inside and outside "edges".

I don't know finally what to think of Cid's quite evidently flat finances.  As Puritan I would mumble he "wanted it that way" but that's not true.  His ventures, as the restaurant in Boston, or the teahouse scene there in Kyoto don't make it apparently, despite his wife's incredible labors and devotion.  Anyhow I just don't know finally.  But I do know he committed all his attention to his imagination of poetry years ago and that's been the point of it all, good or bad.  I don't therefore have to feel guilty.  All in all, he's had remarkable response, given he all but rejected it so often.  You'll sense, like they say, that there's an aspect of Cid's scene that both drives me up the wall and down into doldrums--worried I don't deserve etc. etc.  But no one deserves nothing, if that's the question--figure Cid's where he figured to be, and Japan is not next door to 51 Jones Avenue, Dorchester, Mass.  So be it, as the Zen Buddhists say.  Onward!

All best as ever,
Bob