During the next two days I got a copy in the mail of the introductory essay Richard Kostelanetz wanted me to critique, the manuscript of a poetry collection John Bennett my press was going to publish, and letters from Jake Berry and Jack Foley. Richard’s essay was is fairly good but I saw a number of things I counted wrong with it;. As for John’s manuscript, it seemed fine–one poem in particular, whose main image was a car wash, I especially liked. I wrote a short letter of full acceptance to John and a card acknowledging receipt, and suggesting he delete much of one section of his essay, to Richard.
Jack’s letter was friendly but he quickly.got on me for under-representing females and blacks (and Asiatics) in of Manywhere. In my reply I tried to skirt the issue. I didn’t pugnaciously tell him that my purpose was accuracy, not making the world better for members of victim-groups. Hence, I wrote about the four canonical poets, all male, whom I admired enough to put explicitly into the sonnet my book was partly about, and the fifth, also male, to whom the sonnet strongly alluded. Except for a few short passages about Shakespeare and a mention or two of contemporary linguexpressive poets like Wilbur, my book is about an area of literature few women have done anything of importance in, and no blacks that I knew of at the time I wrote it. The late Bill Keith is still the only significant black American in visual poetry I know about, Larry Tomoyasu the only Asian American. I don’t know whether I knew him when I wrote the first volume of my series. I don’t believe I mentioned him in it.
The ever-amiable Jake was fully positive about my book.