12/27/72
Dear Bernadette I was leaving the church with Paul after the
workshop last night and he suggested I send the poems to you
to give to Ann Waldman I picked out five and typed them here
at my office during the lunch hour so they are really lunch
poems! On the way home last night I read Basil Bunting several
times and couldn't sleep later so I kept reading, while my
girl was sleeping and I was awake so it had the feeling of
happening right then it is a difficult work to read the kind
that makes you work the only kind I really like I was writing
this letter last night in my head happy to have an excuse to write
a few words to you & gossip the reason I wrote Phase as 0-9
your Story and those magazines really stimulatetd me I had only
read a few issues by April 1969 when I left for Europe and when I
got there & tried to write long poems theycame out differently,
lyrical again so I ended by doing some collages instead
which were also lyrical it was only about two months before
the workshop started that I could do some "automatic" writing
using source material, etc By the way you know that letter
by Frank O'Hra was interesting because I was in Zagreb in the
summer of 1969 and the people (especially the young men) are
really crazy one guy picked us up (we hitched from Rapallo to
Banja Luka, Yugoslavia) and spent all night in the train station
with us drinking cognac at 20 cents a shot the next morning
at 6 Am he took us to the zoo there it is tiny & beautiful
and the animals there are very lively, clean and active one bird
cage was full of birds of different shapes and colors & when we
found the flamingoes one immmediately went into a dance so gentle and
graceful that I literally fell down on the walkway from dizziness
(I was also whacked out from no sleep and the strangeness of being
with somebody I really liked a lot and couldnt speak one word
with) later during that same time, going back to Zagreb we me
a guy who was just as friendly and wierd all he could say
in English was "I love you Bob Dylan" also, the guy who took us
to the zoo could say "I like Dean Martin" "He is from Yugoslavia"
Well, I have to leave now thank you for trying to help me get
into the world o yes the Alan Grossman bet was written for
was my shrink
rhetorically yours,
Nick Piombino
