Prequel. Letter. Spicer.

Dear Jack Spicer,
    You are dead and the dead are very patient enough for poetry. My dreams will be prose. Even though the subconscious is not patient prose, I will go home, sober and dissatisfied, and sleep—and other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking to destroy each other or attract each other. Listen to each of these two poets who speak to me. And I to them and we to he speak in prose. Presciently I should go to a bar and there be one with a mad man who is talking to himself. But in the room next to mine: image. Prose invents poetry, discloses temporary untruth, unable to yield to the substance of a single. If fifty poets in fifty languages, they still would be these paragraphs—poetry couldn’t be translated, transformed by a chain. See how weak prose is? I invent a word like invention is merely the enemy of poetry, but calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else? Invention never loses anything. This has nothing to do with losing something. With each transformation, such as, of course, telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining on generations of different poets in different countries, patiently worded: tradition means much more than that. It means Pantheon, which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare town, or obscure hints of obscure bits of magic and published bygones, of Elizabethan quotations or guide books. Oh, the poet’s hone cements lately into an historical patchwork like weather made up for these letters that will think by this. We mean what tradition seems to. In my last letter I will speak of the tradition. The fools that read precisely written letters are unnecessary because they must be in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help. Let them swallow their permanent teeth. They will establish the bulk, the wattage that, my, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be Love.
    Arc hill night,
    Scott