John "Coffee" Latta carries on with his grand one-man 12-bar table-talkin'... the emphasis here always on the thick sensuous texture & partic'lars of every thing every day... & as the fountainhead of art & poetry...

Now today on Jack Spicer's modus non operandi... which I find very appealing, but I'm just not so social in that way... & I tend to think, as I read this, in a contrary direction... that is, for every Ben Jonson & his bibulous coterie, there is a lone obsessed Milton, working out her heavy, complicated, hard-to-berth design... the idea that underneath a Shakespeare play there is a kind of implicit imaginative scaffolding, a guiding cluster of themes, Mandelstam's conductor's baton... the reigning idea, the master plan, the builder's dream... slow to develop, hard to find, creating external situations for the said laboring poet which are more like mistaken illusions or social camouflage, than definite arty "scenes"...

& then the bohemian life represented by Rimbaud & Spicer & all, well, perhaps it's like two necessary poles of art-making... hot & cold, compagnevole & solitary...