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monstrous clannishness and a more hybrid emergence. Yet this eminence should be both shaped and amorphous, with its own critics guide-wiring and giving form and numerical integration, cultural insertion, to our writers. This does not mean confirmation or confinement but a transelementation of mixed voices into a more visible shape. The fresh air of a new culture, the magnetism and meaning and hope, the exactness of our energies—these things haven’t, in any sense, been harnessed or realized. And until they are . . . five or six old men, craggy and steatopygous in university chairs, will be the hierophants of our poetic universe.

Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell
    Dear John Bryan:
    . . . Look, on the war-thing, I can give you nothing in poem form since I just wrote something about how I ducked the shells (WW2) for another magazine and rolled off with banana leaf and used car oil off a duck’s back, and now, after this, my pecker hangs limp. If you keep poeming about the same thing and in the same way, you become the same thing and the same way, which is—nothing.
    I can bullshit you a little about the subject, though. (There’s nothing like the oscillation of the balls in quiet complication.) How do you begin? I imagine it hurts like hell to be torn to pieces and die for something different . . . every century, every 50 years, every 20 years. I read someplace where Man will eventually be replaced by robots he builds that will be more intelligent than he. It about figures: all they’ve got to do is stay out of the rain and the lightning and replace the parts as they wear . . . they don’t have to worry about toothache or hemorrhoids, or fucking. They’ll just go on walking around the place looking for things to do, and there won’t be much to do because they won’t have to worry about eating and they won’t be stupid enough to pay rent, and if they make the drunktank, they’ll be smart enough to enjoy it. But I wonder if these babies, these unlamentable babies who will not know pain, pity, tenderness, the meaning of a lover walking away and into the arms of another, I wonder if these babies will be intelligent enough to avoid war ? I’d like to think so—that these tin shadows of our past could sweep out the last disease. But I don’t know why—I’ve got pictures of these grappling masses of tin . . . crushed electric eyes . . . beautiful silver brains spread amongst their copper flowers. . . . Christ, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?
    Now, I’ll start right off and try and tell you why I have this vision and why it is so hard to stop war . This mainly being the rusty side of the coin, the portico of recant, and it works badly, always has, because it is hard as hell to get emotional about peace , or religious about it, or sexual about it, or wave it around on the end of a flag, or whatever. You furnish the words; I am tired. I mean, padre, peace is as propitiatory as a Sunday bell. They don’t write national anthems about peace and girls don’t strip in front of you for peace , and you don’t see countries and waters and hills and sunsets and whores that you never would have seen, and you don’t get drunk in some tongue that is a town you do not speak and pinch the mayor’s wife because you’ve got nothing to lose. War even makes art . Without war , Hemingway would have been a wine-drinking pink-eyed picador for a fat and farting matador. War gave him the golden gate to point up some fairytale about guts for the cockeyed bats of the occident. Salique seems peace . Peace, baby, is hard sell . Why, why, why, why, hell, why???? Adjust your jock, and I’ll tell you. People don’t know what peace is because people (most people) have never had peace in times of so-called peace . Figure it yourself. Take a kid, a child. As soon as he gets so he can walk around pretty good,