WRITING EDITING PUBLISHING: A MEMOIR

WRITING EDITING PUBLISHING
A MEMOIR
LETTERS FROM POET PROFESSOR
CRITIC AND EDITOR FRIENDS
LYLE GLAZIER, RUTH WILDES SCHULER,
SUMMER BREEZE, UNCLE RIVER, H.F. NOYES,
BILL WEST, KEVIN BAILEY, SAM CUCCHIARA,
PATRICIA PRIME, NORMAN SIMMS, LORNA
ANKER, ROSEMARY MENZIES, ANNEKE BUYS,
CARLO COPPOLA, JAMES SWAN, BRAJ B.
KACHRU, & OTHERS
--Ram Krishna Singh

PREFACE
I kept in files almost every letter I received during the last fifty years, butat the
time of my retirement in December 2015, I realized mostof the letters had
become too dated and irrelevantto be preserved. I destroyed hundreds of them.
Some letters, however, appeared interesting and worth keeping for memories to
share—personal, professional, academic, and poetic—part interesting, part
casual. It’s memory of not I, who wrote, but others who wrote me: together they
could make up a ‘memoir’, providing the life experiences that might be of some
value in contrastto whatwe experience now, or what was otherwisedrab and
dull in my own life.
I sensed in them a nostalgic hangover, and a possibledocument of the past and
the new in the making, useful to literary historians, researchers, scholars,and
fellow poets and critics interested in my poetry and other writings of my
correspondents.
I also thoughtby publishing them, I can celebrate someof my contacts frompost
graduation onwards, revealtheir minds from the fringe, and communicate not
only my own passion and aspiration quietly but also offer a sortof creative self-
criticism.
The letters, handwritten or typed and airmailed, make my own echoes: my own
likes, dislikes, ambitions, interests, efforts, concerns, frustrations, anxieties,
discouragements, disappointments, dissatisfaction, restlessness, isolation, as
also thrills of successes and search for meaning and purposeof doing what I had
been doing in a mutually negating, intellectually sterile, and terribly restricted
environmentin places of work in Pulgaon (Maharastra), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh),
New Delhi, and Dhanbad (Bihar/Jharkhand). I needed a lot of fresh air which was
missing. Thanks to the company of my poet, writer, editor, and academic
correspondents, I was saved fromturning negative.

They told something more than themselves; they provided a world view and in-
look to my writing and academic efforts besides shedding light on the ‘support’ I
received frompeople I personally never met. Interestingly, they took no time to
understand that I had not been in the right place, that I didn’t belong, that I
searched for my identity, that I needed change to survive.
They were sympathetic to me for my preferences to read and reflect on new/less
known poets and authors rather than the established ones; for my dissatisfaction
with the places I worked in; for my desire to accomplish or self-improve; for my
successfulhaiku, tanka, book reviews, and research articles. They were
enlightening and supportivein my literary, professional, and personal
endeavours.
They recorded some interesting episodes—personal, cultural, social, political, and
academic—justas they reflected on my poems vis-à-vis our experiences with
editors and publishers. They broughtout the limits they self-imposed while
reflecting their own passion, obsession, art, or creativity. Some wererestrained,
some explicit, someprofound, and some dark. They covered a lot of territory just
as they provided a perspectiveto what we shared with each other long beforethe
arrivalof the computer, internet, e-mail, e-zines, and e-journals.
Friends like Lyle Glazier, Uncle River, Norman Simms, Sam Cuchhiara, H.F. Noyes,
Kevin Bailey, Bill West, and Ruth Schuler sound significantfor their non-traditional
scrutiny of norms, certainties, and attitudes. Their discoursecentres round
general truth rather than moraltruth and seeks to project a human nature that is
timelessly universal. Others such as Patricia Prime, Vivienne Plumb, Lorna Anker,
Rosemary Menzies, Anneke Buys, Sam, Sid, and others are collaborativein
editing and publishing. As fellow-travellers, they negotiate the reality of
experiences with mutual respect. They may be taken to be as partof a process to
arriveat a shared view to bring about some kind of change. They talk freely and
frankly, and appear one despite differences, justas I seek to come to terms with
myself, discovering a pattern in the quilt of existence, threading different minds,
contexts, and experiences.

Readers can relate. They can piece together the various contexts and views to
make senseof time and events that are pastbut meaningful. They can relate to
plenty of insightfulcriticism in the letters of Lyle Glazier, Uncle River, H.F. Noyes,
Kevin Bailey, Norman Simms, and others. They can also find empathetic critical
supportfor my creativity in the letters of Sam, Pat, Sid, Bill, and Anneke. The
letters from other editors and academics, renowned in their own fields, underline
different views besides throwing light on my efforts in Indian Writing in English
and English Language Teaching, my chosen areas of writing, editing, and
publishing.
Itis through their eyes that I try to look back and recall what is forgotten in the
fastpace of time and technology. I try to re-discover myself, and indulge in my
own ‘surrogate’ community. I look back to events of the pastand the pastof my
correspondents to commemorate our cracks, struggles, and successes, and
appreciate what it was then, and what it is now. In factthey all seem to add to an
overview of myself in a small place wheresmallness of mind troubled me most.
13 August2016 --R.K. Singh

CONTENTS
Preface
I. Letters from Lyle Glazier
Letters: 1972: 1 – 3
Letters: 1973: 4-- 9
Letters: 1974: 10—12
Letters: 1975: 13 – 14
Letters: 1976: 15—16
Letters: 1978: 17 – 20
Letters: 1981: 21 – 27
Letters: 1982: 28 – 30
Letters: 1983: 31 – 35
Letters: 1984: 36 –39
Letters: 1985: 40 –41
Letters: 1986: 42 –43
Letters: 1987: 44 –48
Letter: 1988: 49
Letters: 1989: 50 –53
Letter: 1990: 54
Letter: 1992: 55
Letters: 1993: 56 –58
Letter: 1994: 59
Letters: 2000: 60 –62
II. A Letter from Cid Corman
III. A Letter from Jerome E. Thornton
IV. A Letter from John Ashbaugh
V. Letters from Ruth Wildes Schuler
Letter: 1993: 1
Letter: 1999: 1
Letter: 2005: 1

VI. A Letter from Rosemary C. Wilkinson
VII. A Letter from Summer Breeze
VIII. Letters from Uncle River
Letter: 2000 : 1
Letter: 2001: 1
Letter: 2003: 1
Letter: 2004: 1
Letter: 2005: 1
Letter: 2008: 1
Letter: 2009: 1
IX. Letters from Haikuist Mohammed H. Siddiqui
Letter: 1998: 1
Letter: 2000: 1
X. Letters from H.F. Noyes
Letters: 1 – 4
XI. Letters from Bill West
Letters: 1 – 4
XII. A Letter from Kazuyosi Ikeda
XIII. A Letter from Frederico C. Peralta
XIV. Letters from Kevi Bailey
Letters: 1 – 2
XV. Letters from Salvatore J. Cucchiara
Letter: 1997: 1
Letters: 1998: 2 –10
Letters: 1999: 11 –15
Letter: 2000: 16

XVI. Letters from Patricia Prime
Letters: 1997: 1 –2
Letters: 1998: 3 –7
Letters: 2000: 8 –11
XVII. Letters from Norman Simms
Letters: 1 – 3
XVIII. A Letter from Vivienne Plumb
XIX. Letters from Lorna S. Anker
Letters: 1 – 2
XX. Letters from Rosemary Menzies
Letters: 1998: 1—2
Letters: 1999: 3—4
XXI. A Letter from Peter Dane
XXII. A Letter from Zhang Zhi
XXIII. Letters from Anneke Buys
Letters: 1 – 4
XXIV. Letters from Carlo Coppola
Letters: 1 – 2
XXV. A Letter from WilliamRiggan
XXVI. A Letter from Grace Stovall Mancill
XXVII. A Letter from Norman F. Davies
XXVIII. A Letter from W.R. Lee
XXIX. Letters from ELT Journal
Letters: 1—3
XXX. Letters from JALT
Letters: 1 –2
XXXI. A Letter from TEAM

XXXII. Letters from Braj B. Kachru
Letters: 1 –2

I. LETTERS FROM LYLE GLAZIER
Lyle Glazier (May 8, 1911 – October 21, 2004 ), who for years “roamed
the literary world from the fringes,” made his home in Bennington,
Vermont and worked and lived abroad in Turkey, North Yemen and
India. He had been in touch with me from 1970s till his death. I wrote
my M.A. thesis on his poetry and shared my own poems with him for
several years. In a way, Glazier’s response from time to time, as his
selected letters would bear out, shaped my poetic sensibility.
Lyle Glazier’s books of poems include Two Continents, The
Dervishes, Orchard Park and Istanbul, You Too, Voices of the Dead,
Azuba Nye, Recalls, Prefatory Lyrics, and Searching for Amy, while
Summer for Joey and Stills from a Moving Picture are his novels. Great
Day Coming and American Decadence and Rebirth are his works of
criticism. Besides being Professor of English and Professor Emeritus at
the State University of New York at Buffalo, he was also a social
activist, who strongly believed that the United States’ path toward
war in the Middle East was paved with a tragic lack of understanding
of the tribal mentality of the Arab world.

The letters provide a peep into history, politics, literature,
society, culture, and of course, personal exchanges -- our families,
profession, concerns--, and our growing, and perhaps, ending! These
also reveal Lyle Glazier's mind as a bisexual poet and writer just as
these help to gauze my own poetic growth from the early 70s to the
end of the 90s. Despite achievements to our credit, we both remain
unrecognized by the mainstream media and academia.

LETTERS: 1972: 1 - 3
1.
May 19, 1972
Dear Mr Singh,
Like many writers, I am flattered to think someone is interested enough in my work to wish to
write about it; however, if you believe as I do that poems must speak for themselves—that
what is revealed in a poem should not be manipulated from outside—then a book of poems
must become its own witness. Like a composer of music, a poet is a creator; like a performer of
music, a reader is a re-creator. He may be helped through knowing biographical and social
background—for example, my poems seem to me to reflect quite clearly the context of
experience from a foothold within the United States. What I have written about my country and
the world is grounded in my life as an American, at home & abroad. Furthermore, I am a
teacher; the kind of poem I write reflects my reading, reflects my experimentations with
traditional verse forms (notably in Orchard Park) and my experimentation with trying to
discover a self-evolved esthetic, an organic form expressing my own tone of voice (Istambul &
VD particularly). But it is more complex than that, for every serious practitioner of traditional
forms tries to mould them into his own patterns—by controlling rhythms, language, images,
and symbols. The Dervishes, for example, imitates Emily Dickinson’s experiments with slant
rhyme and with off-beat rhythms; nevertheless, The Dervishes, I hope is my poem, not only in
ideas that would not have occurred to Emily Dickinson, but in elements of texture that are
uniquely mine. So, although a reader can be helped some through inside information about
biography & social background, he must really look into the poems themselves for the
important revelations. Especially, a poem that “works” must seem to the reader something he
himself might have a share in. Ankara and Banaras are not so different but what VD No. 40
should be able to bridge the miles. You and I are not so different but what VD 169 should be
able to remind us both of our deep longings. Even VD 117—although you have never been in
New England—might be able to communicate something to an Indian about encroachments on
the beauty of man’s natural environment. No. 142 may be more difficult for a youthful reader;
yet you are male, and comprehend I am sure what it might be for a much older man to realize
that a necessary surgery has deprived him of the power to eject sperm; how can he protect
himself from despair except to rationalize humourously, and try to make an advantage out of
his tragedy?

Some weeks ago I sent to you through Dr. Pandeya some reviews of my poems, some
comments of my own, as well as copies of the four books. I hope that by now you have received
these materials. An important new review of VD is about to appear in a magazine, and if I get it
in time, I will send you a copy.
I hardly know what to say about your desire to come here to read modern poetry. At Buffalo,
we have a great library of modern poetry and poetry criticism. Yet it is not easy even to be
admitted to our graduate school of English. For next year there were 500 applications for 20
places; one of those places went to a student at Banaras Hindu University. Even so,he must
somehow find the money to bring him here and support him after he arrives; he cannot get a
visa to come to the U.S. without proof of means of support.
My own connection with the university is being loosened, for I have chosen to retire early, and
beginning September 1, I will be Professor of English Emeritus. My wife and I have already sold
our home and are building a small new one in southwestern Vermont, near Bennington.
I will look forward eagerly to reading your manuscript, and I will try to help you in any way that
I can. I suppose that it is unhappily true that most Indian students of English or American
literature will have to content themselves with learning about that literature from Indian
teachers & books in Indian libraries, just as I had to study British literature under American
teachers and in American libraries.
If your advisors have faith in you, you should try to get a scholarship that will take you to
England or to the United States. I am sure that you have already thought about applying for a
Fulbright fellowship.
Please call on me for any help that seems to be within my province.
Cordially yours,
Lyle Glazier
Professor of English
I loved Banaras very much. It gives me great pleasure today to think that what I now write on
this page will, in a few days, be read by you, there. I wish I were again at the Hotel de Paris,
where you could come to see me.
LG

2.
November 8, 1972
Dear R.K. Singh,
The day I got your letter I wrote to Dr. P.S. Sastri at Nagpur and to Dr. Kamal Wood at Bombay,
sending also a shorter note to Mr. Ezekiel telling him I had written to Dr. Wood about you. I
think that Dr. Sastri would be your most likely sponsor, if he has time. He is not far from you, is
a poet himself, has some of my poems as well as a collection of my essays on American novels.
I like particularly your poem “The best poetry/that I can read/is a woman…” “A poet’s
simplicity…” is also very nice. You seem to master in those poems the different trick of writing
a rhythm that any reader can catch without going astray. That is the great difficulty with free
rhythm; no one else can quite catch what the poet had in his ear. Poems in a diary form—that
seems a good idea.
I am flattered to know that you circulated an article about my poems. Dr. Pandeya has just sent
a copy of his “Memoirs as a Form of Poetry: F.T. Prince and Lyle Glazier,” Prajna, Banaras Hindu
University Journal, Vol. XVII Part (I), October 1971.
A young teacher at Tirupathi is also writing on my poems, as well as an associate professor at
State University College, Buffalo.
When you speak of my poems as confessionals, yes. But the confession is sometimes wholly
subjective, sometimes a looking out at experience. Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow”
lends itself to both kinds of poem. You can—borrowing from Joyce—call them epiphanies; in
Dubliners there are subjective epiphanies (“Araby”) and objective epiphanies (Counterparts),
while in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is the subjective, and Poldy and Molly Bllom the objective. It
is possible to confess to revelations from within or revelations from without. Does that make
sense?
# Uganda’sAmin
slaughteringChristians
for a Moslem
Good is
RichardNixon
underneaththe skin

From PERSON,PLACE,ANDTHING
# 41 Walkingthe brownandgold
Octoberswamp
insearch of a strayhe
stirsthe curiosity
of a pasturedbull
and come back laden
withorange ferns
and froma ruinedwall
a lichenedrock
suitablyflatforone
more steppingstone
across the incipientlawn
#42 Deepinthe swamp
maple and tamarack
birchand pine
give wayto featheredferns
above the glitteringstream
speakstono ear
yearafter year
till now
I come and stay
a moment
and as softlygo
Person,Place,andThing isonlyinprogress,notpublished.Therefore,Icannotnow senditto you.
Cordially,
Lyle Glazier

3.
Nov 25 ‘72
Dear friend R.K. Singh,
Your letter of Oct 19 reached me when I was just returned from a trip to Iceland and New York
City for two weeks with my friend Prim who came from Bangkok to meet me for a reunion with
a wealthy Icelandic businessman and his wife, who paid for Prim’s travel. After that I went to
Buffalo to talk to a graduate class in literary criticismwhere VD was being used as one text, and
to give a poetry reading. That visit coincided with the publishing of three chapters of STILLS in
the magazine PAUNCH; I sent a copy to you. When I got back home, I was abed two weeks with
a virus flu, and then went to NYCity for a week as consultant to a branch college of City Univ. of
N.Y. Now I am at last trying to catch up with a basketful of correspondence.
What you say about The Dervishes strikes me as exactly right; the whole poem hinges on irony.
I am not a scholar of 13th century Turkish mysticism, but in 1962 at Christmas I went from
Istanbul to Konya and saw the dervishes whirling beautifully for an audience of Turks and
tourists. Although the Turkish government had outlawed the dance as a religious rite, it was
clear to me that the dancers still were trying to solve human problems by whirling into a trance.
However beautiful, such a spectacle seemed to me as monstrously inadequate as the mumbo
jumbo of Catholicismor Protestantism, or, if you will pardon me, of Hinduism, or Buddhism, or
Shintoism, or another religious ism, and as inadequate as the bogus Democracy of the West, or
the bogus Communism of the Soviet. Everywhere in religion and in politics there is an occult
search for salvation by means of an elite, and no real respect for a non-competitive
egalitarianism.
In 1968, when my wife and I were spending a year in Ankara, we planned to go to Konya to see
the dervishes again; in fact, we had bought our tickets for the bus and the dance. However,
Amy became ill and we couldn’t go. At that time, December 4, 1968, the English language DAILY
NEWS, published in Ankara, had a front page article on the Dervishes, and I read it carefully.
Later when I was invited to speak to an Ankara linguistics club, I started to write The Dervishes,
partly to illustrate the way symbolism—that basic instrument of language – spreads from
culture to culture. The stanzas on Mevlana and Şems ‘i Tebrizi were taken straight from the
article: “The climax of Mevlana’s mystic poetry didn’t come about until he met a companion
Sems ‘i Tebrizi, who is considered an iconoclast from an orthodox Islamic point of view. He
brought music to Mevlana’s life and to this day music has an essential place in the Mevlevi
order. Their conversations over the Absolute, the Creator, and the Beloved are reported to
have lasted for hours without a break. Şems left Konya just as quietly as he had appeared in

Mevlana’s life because of the rumors spread about town about their infatuation with each
other. Mevlana’s most touching poetry was written after Şems’ departure…”
When I returned to Buffalo in the fall of 1969, I brought with me copies of my book YOU TOO,
which had been printed in Istanbul. A young teacher at Buffalo State College, a friend and
former graduate student of mine, read the book and decided to use it as a text in his American
literature course in Spring ’70. He came to see me to talk about the book in December ’69 or
January ’70 when I was getting ready to go back to Ankara for a semester as visiting professor.
He made two tapes, one devoted to readings and comments for poems in YOU TOO, and the
other a reconstruction of my lecture to the Ankara linguistics club, including a reading of The
Dervishes. This second tape was later typed up and made into an article for STRAIT,Vol 1, No 3,
27 October-November 9 1971, New York State University College at Buffalo. I think I sent you
a copy; this is my completest statement on the poem; if you have lost your copy, I think
perhaps I can scout up another one for you.
In the spring of 1971, when I returned again to Ankara, I arranged with the editor of the press
at the university where I was visiting professor to have The Dervishes printed by the press and
dedicated to the Head of the English department of Hacettepe University, where I was
teaching. Unfortunately, between ’69 & ’71, Turkish politics had shifted Right, student rebels
had been jaoiled, and a government under Prime Minister Erim reflected the wish of the United
States to see political leftismwiped out. Meanwhile, the head of the English department & I
had a falling out over another matter. The editor of the press reported that he could not print
the poem because someone (I presume theHead) had read it and was shocked by my
irreverence for one of the great Turkish Heroes, that business about his love affair with Şems ‘I
Tebrizi. So I withdrew the poem, and sent it to Istanbul Maatbasi, which was already at work
on a publication of VD. When the Ankara editor told me that The Dervishes would be
considered seditious by the official censor, who had to pass judgment on every book printed in
Turkey, I waited until my trunk containing 450 copies of VD and the same number of The
Dervishes had cleared the customs in Istanbul and was on a vessel bound for New York. Then I
gave a copy of The Dervishes to the surprised editor. It was my last invitation to visit
Hacettepe University as visiting professor.
I still have an early draft of the poem, handwritten into the front of a diary I kept during that
1968-9 year in Ankara, and I have a whole folder full of revisions of the poem. Almost the last
revision was the first line, changing “Roused from no motion” to the simpler “Out of no
motion” but the whole poem was much gone over, considerably more than I remembered till
just now when I got out the folder again.
I am sorry to hear that you have troubles of communication with your father. Does he think
you should be contributing more to the support of your family? What a terribly unjust world

we live in, where good, intelligent, worthy people do not have enough to keep body and soul
together! I suppose I was lucky (what a terrible thing to say!) in that my father and mother
committed suicide when I was 22, and I had then only one younger brother to support. It was
in the early Depression, and my father lost his job.
Please excuse my delay. Has Mrs. Petrosky sent you a copy of Rapport?
Yrs,
Lyle G

LETTERS: 1973: 4 - 9
4.
January 4, 1973
Dear Friend Singh,
I write chiefly to send you the following excerpts from letters mentioning you:
From Dr Kamal Wood, Head, Department of English, University of Bombay –
It was nice hearing from you again and I have taken all this time to reply to you because I was
waiting for the young man, Mr. R.K. Singh, to write to me. He has not done so, nor did Mr.
S.M. Pandeya speak to me about him when he was in Bombay during October-November
participating in an all Indian Conference which we had organized. We discussed American,
English and Indian Poetry in English from 1940-1970…. Dr. Pandeya’s paper, as you may have
heard, dealt with your poems along with those of Updike and F.T. Prince. I shall indeed do
what I can for Mr. Singh but I am beginning to give up hope in his interest in the University of
Bombay…
From Dr. P.S. Sastri, Head, Department of English, University of Nagpur –
Your kind letters. Mr. Singh wrote to me also. Later Dr S.M. Pandeya of Varanasi spoke to
me about him. Surely I will take him and give him a subject. I think a study of confessional
poetry from 1930 to 1960 might be a good subject for him. This will really pose problems of
critical approach.
I trust that you may have found a new university post and one more to your pleasure. The one
at Pulgaon indeed seemed grim. But,then, I think that you, like me, may never find teaching
quite what you wish to do. I found most of my university work, except the months abroad, very
grim, so grim that I sometimes buckled. But, as a married man with three growing daughters, I
could not afford to cater to my whims. Never quite breaking into trade publication enough to
make a living that way, it was for me teach and pretend to like it.
Right now I am really enjoying myself. I can write what I please without other duties to impose
upon my time, and without fear of harming my professional status. This is important to me,
because the fiction I am writing hews close to actual experience. Without requiring strict

literal adherence to any man’s life, I am requiring strict accuracy in interpreting a part of
experience that has come into my vantage point of viewing. When the details are not pretty, I
still can find a kind of beauty in the accurate description of events. Like Goethe in his Dichtung
und Varheit (Truth and Poetry), I can hew to the spirit of a life-streamwithout being fenced in
by the need to record facts exactly in the order they occurred. Such is the advantage of fiction.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier
I am planning ahead, hoping to be in India in May 1974, a long time ahead; I hope to see you if I
come.

5.
May 23, 1973
Dear R.K. Singh,
When I wrote last, I was much aware of having delayed a reply to your letter, because I had
been working hard to get my novel done before June 25, when I return to Beffalo for 6 weeks to
teach in the summer session there. For that reason, I wrote so briefly.
As for my irritation at what you had said, I was irritated through a misunderstanding. I see that
now. In order to comprehend my feeling, you must have in mind that what no one in the
United States can endure, above all, is the thought of ownership of another human being—I
mean by this, the buying and purchasing of another human being. Your phrase “as if you
owned me” seemed to imply that you were puckishly telling me that I had behaved as if I had
purchased you. I think now that you meant, “as if I were one of your own”—meaning one of my
own sons, or one of my own brothers. In that sense I am delighted to “own” you.
I doubt if my letters to you have given me more pleasure than your have given me. It is
flattering for me to think that a young man like you is interested enough to keep writing to
someone so far away whom he has never seen. When I come to Varanasi next year, I am very
anxious to meet you. In hope that you will take me where you live. One of the disadvantages
of being an American in India is that I almost never had a chance to visit people at home—I do
not mean a ceremonial visit. I don’t wish to have your mother or sister or your wife spend
hours and more money than your family can afford to make me a large welcome. But I would
like to be able to walk into your house for a cup of tea, only a cup of tea. Then we could sit and
talk, and you could show me around the neighborhood. To see India only by seeing large,
luxurious hotels and the historical monuments is not to see India. I am more interested seeing
the people of today—my VD poem #192 is a very genuine expression of what I really feel. So,
please, when I come, you must come to see me at the Hotel de Paris, and I will come to see you
at K 27/5 Bhairo Bazar.
Of the recent poems you sent me, I like very much #191 and #198. They are absolutely right in
word and sentiment. So very good I myself do not write poems until I finish my novel. Then,
next fall, perhaps, I will go back to my poetry and my music. Since March 15, I have not
practiced the piano.
Affectionately, your friend,
Lyle Glazier

6.
June 8, 1973
My dear R.K. Singh,
Your sister’s remark that “Glazier is far above our status…” was kindly meant, but this is far
from the truth. My origins were at least as humble as yours. My father was a factory worker.
He was a high school graduate who never went to college; my mother did not go to high school.
When I finished high school, we were very poor. My older brother and I went to work in the
factory as common laborers. After a year I had saved enough to pay part of my expenses for
one year at college; by waiting on table in the freshman dining hall, I survived that year. During
the summer and for the next four summers I was a bell hop in a hotel; every school year I
worked in the freshman dining hall as chef’s helper, preparing fruit and vegetables for the
table, washing pots and pans, and helping to keep the kitchen clean. When I finished my fourth
year, I was $1000 in debt, a large amount at that time. It was during the 1930s, when the
economy in the United States was suffering from what we call the Great Depression. I could
not find a job teaching school, so I became the custodian of a Community House, where I
vacuumed rugs, waxed floors, polished woodwork, and was, in general, a kind of working
housekeeper. In October that year my father lost his job in the factory and committed suicide
the day he learned that he was fired; in the afternoon of the same day my mother walked out
through the shallow water of a river and let herself be carried away by the current; she was
dead when her body was recovered. My thirteen-year-old younger brother went to live with
me at the Community House, and for nearly 10 years I was his father-brother. I became a
teacher in an elementary school, then for two years in a boy’s high school, then I began to work
summers for an MA, and the year I got my degree, I found a job at a small college in Maine,
where I remained for five years, during that that time marrying and becoming a father. When
World War II broke out my wife and I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to another college, and
I began to study part-time at Harvard. I became the assistant in the Shakespeare course at
Harvard, and began to study there full time; then I taught freshman English there for 21/2 years.
In 1947, now with a second child and my wife pregnant with a third, I moved to Buffalo as
assistant professor, and after three years, finally, at the age of 39 got my Ph.D. at Harvard in
1950. In 1961, I went abroad for the first time, as Fulbright Chairman of American Literature at
the University of Istanbul. During the past 10 years, I spent four years in Turkey, with increasing
excursions into India. Now I am retired and professor emeritus. During the years I have had
time to write the poems you have read, a book of essay and other essays, 7 novels, none of
which has been published. Writing has been my fulfillment. Also, I have a loving relationship
continuing with many students. Young people like you renew my life.

Your letter wrings my heart with what you say about your parents’ efforts in behalf of their
children, and your effort to find work. I know so well what you suffer. But I believe that such
suffering however agonizing is better than remaining unschooled. I hope that in time you and
your brothers and sisters will have some of the same kind of good fortune that has been my lot.
In two weeks I will go to Buffalo to teach for 6 weeks, hoping to earn enough money for a trip
to India. However, today the American dollar is so depressed on the world market that it may
be that I will not have enough, and will have to postpone my journey. If I come to Varanasi, I
wish to see you and your home, but please – remember that I am one of you and no stranger.
It will disturb me very much if you go to any expense to entertain me. I will come to see you,
please, if you will entertain me with conversation and tea. Some day when your family is
wealthy we will talk of tea-drinking day and remember it as a happy, loving time together.
I continue to read your poems with pleasure-- #103, #105. “my journeying joy on this road of
life alone.” For the epigraph of part III of my new novel, I chose Wordsworth’s tribute to Sir
Isaac Newton (Prelude III) “…a mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought,
alone.”
Yours affectionately,
Lyle G

7.
August 11, 1973
Dear R.K. Singh,
Your last letter reached me in Buffalo, where I was too frantically busy preparing lessons to
have time to write. Not having done any systematic reading during the months of my
retirement, I had to work hard to keep abreast of my two summer classes. Actually, the work
went well, and I felt rewarded with the results.
I am sorry not to have been able to comply with your request to look up some bibliographical
information on confessional poetry. Here, unfortunately, I do not have access to a large library.
Perhaps I will travel to Williamstown, Massachusetts, sometime this fall; if I do, I will try to look
up something for you. I doubt very much that we will ever be working together as advisor and
candidate for your dissertation, much as I would enjoy the relationship. As professor emeritus,
I do sit on committees, but not as the major advisor, only as a consultant. Two Buffalo
candidates will be sending me their chapters this coming fall; both are candidates in Black
(Afro-American) literature. Last year I sat on the committee for a candidate writing on Chaucer.
I cannot be very helpful, either, in advising you about placing your poems. By all means, send
some to Poet Magazine (Dr. Orville Miller); I do not know the magazine or the editor, but you
can be sure of a fair reading. I have not been trying to place my own poems, but I was pleased
to have an invitation to submit a group to a small magazine being published by a Buffalo
colleague. He is not, however, looking for other poems, since he has little space for poetry, and
usually invites submissions.
I have been pleased to be invited to return to Buffalo next year for the 1974 summer session.
Perhaps then I will not be quite so pressed for time, since I will probably repeat at least one of
the courses I taught this summer.
I am trying to make plans for my trip to India. I will perhaps come in late February or early
March. Would that be a good time? In Varanasi I will probably stay at the Hotel de Paris,
where I stayed last time.
I have recently reread your MA thesis, and marvel at some of your trenchant comments,,
particularly what you say beginning page 100, where you really hit your stride. I am reminded
of what Thoreau said of Whitman in a letter to Harrison Blake: “There are two or three places in
the book which are disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at
all. It is as if the beasts spoke.” Of course, I don’t at all agree with you or Thoreau, classifying

you both as puritans. What do you make of my pp. 17, 19, 37, 50, 52, 85 (Orchard Park &
Istanbul ), pp. 5, 6, 14, 18, 35 ( You Too) and no. 63, 67, 89, 103, 148, 166, 167, 168 (VD)? Is it
possible that you and Thoreau are over-responding to evidences of unorthodoxy? I sometimes
wonder by what rationalization some people reach the conclusion that their biases represent
the God-sanctioned only right behavior?
Please don’t think that I wrote that last paragraph in heat or for self protection. I was simply
speculating on what my have lain behind your best pages.
Do you have copies of all four of my books? If not, I can send you YOU TOO, THE DERVISHES,
and VD. I don’t have extra copies of OP & ISTANBUL, which is now out of print.
I look forward to seeing you in a few months. I will be deeply hurt if your family entertains me
lavishly, and as deeply hurt if I cannot come to meet your family in order to talk, over a cup of
tea.
Affectionately yours,
Lyle Glazier

8.
September 26, 1973
Dear R.K. Singh,
Your letter came today with the glad news that you have a job. I am very glad for you. Even if
the work is not quite what you would choose, it is better for you to have work. I remember
being unhappy when my first teaching assignment sent me to be the principal of a small
grammar school. Now that I look back on that year, I realize that it could have been a happy
year if I had not been afraid that I was trapped for life, as, indeed, I was not. My 13 year old
brother was living with me, for it was the year after my parents’ deaths; I managed to save
enough money for six weeks in summer school, and the next fall I went to teach in a boys’
boarding school, where my brother became a student. After two years in that school, the year I
got my MA, I went to teach in a small college, where I spent five years before moving to Boston,
where I started graduate work at Harvard, taking one course each semester for five semesters,
then becoming a full-time student. Looking back one can imagine a pattern, but although there
was effort and ambition, there was also a great deal of happenstance. I wrote a sentence in my
novel: “There’s Fate—something your engineer so perfectly that there’s no way for it to turn
out differently.” We cannot exercise that kind of control over our lives.
Now that you will be in Lucknow, I am wondering if it will be possible still for us to meet. My
plans are to go from Madras to Varanasi to Khajuraho to Agra to New Delhi. Perhaps you can
manage to come to one of those places to see me. At Khajuraho or Agra, if you could come
there, you could stay with me as my guest. Please think about it. I shall probably stay at least
two nights in Khajuraho and one night in Agra. I think that I will be in India during the last two
weeks in February.
Your poems continue to flow and continue to show vitality. #291 has an ending that reminds
me of my mother’s death. I like the two short ones-- #258 & #249. #268 has the same theme of
an article I have just finished: “Atheism as an Article of Faith” yet I think you do not carry your
premises to the same length as I do. You seem to be condemning the malpractices in religion,
rather than condemning religion. When I was in Tirupathi in August 1971, I wrote a poem that
was meant to be all ironic, at the same time it was concealing its irony:
The stepsto the temple are made of stones
The dome of the temple ismade of gold.

It was meant to be a protest over the bloodstained footprints of pilgrims sacrificing their
pennies to religious zealots.
#303 I like very much. But it is #308 that moves me to the fullest comment. Granting the
subject (what Henry James called donné) the last stanza of this poem is excellent. The last line
of stanza 1 is too vague, I think, as if you shy away from naming persons—I would like better:
“the chastity of self, lover, or sweetheart.” The middle stanza troubles me, because your
Puritanism seems so grim. Although I am not a biologist, it offends me to have you speak of the
life-streamas “filth”; what is filthy about the liquid manufactured by the prostate gland as a
vehicle for conducting the sperm? Far from being filthy, I should think that this liquid emission
is one of the purest as well as precious creations of our bodies—perhaps in a physical way as
pure and precious as our poems. What can be shameful about such an abundant supply of the
life source, so abundant that it must be expressed, particularly when so little of it is needed for
the mechanical business of carrying on the race? Nature is very generous. Be glad of that, not
ripped apart by shame.
I am happy for your family that it turns out that your mother is not ill, as you once thought. I
hope that there will be good days for your family, for all of India, for the U.S., and for all
mankind.
Yrs.
Lyle G

9.
November 10, 1973
Dear Mr. Singh,
Your last letter gave me much to think about, particularly that stirring #310 in your poetry
series. Like you, I despair over the new democracy, which seems hardly more humane than the
old colonialism. What the nations of the world require is nearly impossible to achieve—since a
corrupt system can corrupt good leaders, we require a benevolent system; since corrupt
leaders can corrupt a benevolent system, we require benevolent leaders. What we require,
therefore, is nearly impossible—at the same time a benevolent systemand benevolent leaders.
Where and when on earth have men been fortunate enough to have both? Your poem makes
me think of all of this, with sadness more than with hope.
I am continuing to plan my journey. I think you must know that wherever I travel in India,
there will be old friends whom I wish to see, so that my time is not really free. I am glad that
you would like to see me. The question is where and when. I think it is particularly important
that no effort to come to see me should interfere with your work, for it seems to me very
important that you have a job. My plan now is to travel, probably by bus, from Varanasi to
Khajuraho, on Monday, February 25. Several possible opportunities for a visit with you occur to
me. Saturday or Sunday, February 23-4, except to be free at the Hotel de Paris in Varanasi.
That would be a good time for us to meet and talk. Or, if you wish and are free, you may wish
to travel with me to Khajuraho and help me on that difficult journey. I think that there is a
government house in Khajuraho where we could stay. Please think about this. On Wednesday,
Febrjuary 27, I will be going on to Agra to stay overnight, before flying to New Delhi on
Thursday, February 28.
Please do not think of me as a guru, by no means. I am an ordinary person who likes to write
poetry. Don’t embarrass me by overestimating me.
Yrs.
Lyle G.

LETTERS: 1974 : 10 – 12
10.
April 6, 1974
Dear R.K. Singh,
It is very good news that you have gone back to teaching, for I am sure you are a born teacher.
In New Delhi I felt that you were not at all happy in your work with the Press Bureau.
I am glad you like Black Boy. It is one of the books I will use next summer in my course in
Richard Wright and Herman Melville.
I have been trying to work out a way for you to submit some poems to an American magazine,
and keep running up against the problem of how you can have manuscripts returned, since you
do not have US postage. Why didn’t I think of this before? I am enclosing an airmail stamp. If
you wish you can submit two or three poems to RAPPORT, Patricia Petrosky, 95 Rand Street,
Buffalo, New York, USA 14216, and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, using this
stamp. Betternot include more than two (at the most) sheets of paper; otherwise the stamp will
not be enough. Although it is conventional to type only one poem on a page and to double
space, I am sure that Mrs. Petrosky will excuse you if you type two or three short poems on
one sheet, explaining to her the cost of postage. The magazine is respected, though not one of
the great ones. I submitted two poems there last week.
No words about STILLS (my novel) except that I’ve heard rumors that the editing for magazine
publication has been progressing. The NY literary agent sent back the manuscript unread, with
the printed notice that the agent is too busy to read unsolicited manuscripts. So you see how
difficult it is to win the attention of a good agent.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier

Feb 1, Tokyo to Bangkok JAL
On TV
the face of the slaughtered
Indonesianchild
ispure andinnocent
as if she were resting
inher father’sarms,
yetthe distantviewers,
suppliersof weapons,
do notcradle
the supple frail body
or kissthe petulant mouth,
theyare like the OldTestament
Jehovahwhotookthe firstborn
of Egyptfor hislawful fee,
and unlike the Hebrews
whoas beneficiaries
were bereavedinsharing
the commondoom of mankind
the Americanwatchers
see the youngface fade fromtheir channel
and do notmindgoingto dinner
hungry,infact, as hell

11.
May 6, 1974
It continues to give me pleasure to think of you there in East Bhutan teaching poetry, instead of
back there in Delhi as a rewrite man for the National Press of India.
Don’t be too disturbed over your problem with the C. Rosetti poem. Part of what is involved is
the conventional ambiguity of poetry, isn’t it? I often could not fully comprehend the poems I
was supposed to explicate, and took refuge in the thought that much of poetry is not absolutely
explicable: that is its virtue. More than one person, more than one interpretation. I take it that
nearly all readers can agree on the interpretation of the first two of the last four lines of “When
I am dead…” The title itself seems to tell us that the person speaking will by then be dead, and
in the everlasting twilight of death (“That doth not rise nor set”). She apparently addresses her
remarks to an earthly lover in an (unhappy?) earthly lover affair. At the end of the poem’s first
stanza, she magnanimously (dead people can afford to be magnanimous toward the living)
grants her still-living earthly lover the privilege of remembering her, or forgetting her (after all,
what difference will it make to her). At the end of the second stanza, she shifts the thought to
her own situation in the limbo of death, imagining her good fortune (“haply”) in being able to
remember, or to forget her earthly lover, and now the net result will be the same. I suppose
that part of the force of the poem is in the contrast between the dead person’s fortunate
fortitude, and the living person’s irritation that leads to writing the poem about how nice it will
be when the pangs of lover are over. I’m not by any means confident that I’m not
misinterpreting the poem, nor am I much troubled if I am. Poems that are written moodily can
be interpreted moodily. The recreator has nearly as much right to his idiosyncrasies and the
creator had in hers.
When I go to Buffalo in June to teach in the summer session, I expect to meet Patricia Petrosky
for the first time, and no doubt we will mention you and your poems. I hope that by then she
will have accepted something from you. But, at any rate, don’t be discouraged if she doesn’t
take any poem in the first batch. She sent back all my first submissions before finally accepting
one.
I liked very much your #428 “The flame swallows the creeping road…” and hope that it may be
one you submitted to Rapport. Have you submitted to NissimEzekiel, The Illustrated Weekly of
India, C/o Department of English, Mithibai College, Bombay University, Vile Parle, Bombay?

You asked about my tour beyond New Delhi. I went regretfully to Turkey, but became glad I
had gone. Everywhere there were friends to welcome me.
From TRAGIC AMERICA 1974
#47 Ankara, Mar 4
What frightenshimis
that afterthree years
he is so torturouslyalive
#50 Istanbul,Mar6
Last nightgreetingwithGuzin
erasedtheiryears
ina moment,
once he hadbeenhumble
to knowthat thiswoman
knewhisdarksecret;
nowthere isno need
for humility,love
istakenfor granted;
theykissandhe doesnotsee
the fadingof her beauty,
and she remarks
not onhis thinning
but onhis ungreyedhair
#59 Istanbul,Mar 12
Can he possibly
returnto Vermont
or shouldhe geta divorce
at hisage and
live inBangkok
or Delhi orIstanbul
rentinga room
on hispension
and somewhereinafewyears
be foundina gutter
knockedoutby some
freakirked
at the pittance
inthe oldfool’spocket?

12.
July 20, 1974
Dear R.K.Singh,
I have had a meeting with Toni Petrosky, when we talked about you and your poems. She is
interested in what you write, but feels that you haven’t yet sent her a poem that works quite to
her taste. However, she hopes that you will continue to try Rapport. I gave her $5 bill to pay for
a copy of the magazine, which she will send you, and for return postage for some poems you
may send her.
My summer courses here are at the 2/3 point this weekend, with my most strenuous efforts
now behind me. This weekend for the first time I have breathing space. From Friday till
Monday last weekend I returned to Vermont for a 35th wedding anniversary celebration with
my wife. Amy’s sister, who lives in the old farmhouse where Amy was born (across the road
from our new retirement house) prepared the anniversary dinner. Only one of our daughters
(and her husband) could be with us. Our oldest daughter Laura, a pianist, is in Fontainebleau,
France at a summer music school, from where she called us long distance. And the youngest
started to join us, but partway on the trip from Boston, her boyfriend became seriously ill from
a kidney stone passing into his bladder, so they had to turn back, and we had only a phone call
from her. But it was a good weekend, and I returned here refreshed.
My classes conclude on August 2. I send two poems:
(July 1, 1974)
How like agreekshepherdboy
inher blue tunicand
longtrouserswitha
chasedsilverbeltabout
herhips,she walksinto
my roomand my heart
leapsbecause Iguess
howclevershe iswiththe
cleverintuitionof love
matchingmy cleverness,for
I knowI have entered
herheart by pretending
to be invulnerable

to a woman,Ihave made
herso curious,so eager
that inspite of impropriety
and the warningsof pride
whichwouldnotrisk
offendingfamilyandgood
neighbors,she isentering
my roomnow inherblue
tunicto level me withher
gaze and stripme of defences
while myfingerstease off
herlinkedsilverchain
(fromTRAGIC AMERICA 1974
Amsterdam,Mar 22)
Acresof crocuses
--purple,yellow,andwhite
erectionsgently
strokedbythe sun
Yrs. as ever,
Lyle G

LETTERS: 1975 : 13 – 14
13.
Jan 1 ‘75
Dear Mr. Singh:
I am glad to hear from you again, and particularly glad to have your report on the way your
Principal responded to PAUNCH/STILLS. It is typical that he should think that the novel is naïve
and weak because it does not draw a caricature of a homosexual so that he could recognize one
when he meets one on the street. I am extremely flattered by this response, because it
suggests that I suggested well in my objective to convey the impression that there is no
stereotype homosexual like the one your friend imagines, or if there is (I suppose that the
flagrant QUEEN is what he is thinking about, and such people do exist and are easily spotted).
But over and above that obvious type there is a whole range of persons who engage in sex with
their own gender. Many of them are respectable family men like Jim Gordon in my novel.
Many of them have distinguished careers. They dress conservatively, talk without a falsetto,
walk without a feminine gait and in all surface ways seementirely normal. If your friend can
learn that much from my book, he has learned a great deal, no matter how annoyed he may be
to have it pointed out to him. The differences between the great majority of such men and Jim
Gordon is that they never write a book exposing themselves. However, I am willing to guess
that even there in East Bhutan there are many decent respectable men, some unmarried,
others with wives and children, who enjoy a romp on a mattress with another man. They
would be no threat to your friend or to you.
I am much disappointed with Mrs. Petrosky that she should accept my $5 and not send you a
copy of RAPPORT or reply to your letters. I will write her. I have been holding off from doing
so, hoping that you will hear from her. I will ask her to send Rapport #7, which contains two of
my poems.
Please givemy good wishes to your family, and convey again my disappointment that I spent so
little time in Varanasi that I couldn’t come to see them.

I am quite busy now revising Book II of STILLS. I have one rejection which begins: “Your book is
an extraordinary piece of work, but I am afraid it is just plain not for us. I just don’t feel that it
is strong enough in its meaning to permit it to carry off the enormously explicit and erotic
sexual scenes. I am afraid it would be read for all the wrong reasons and the right ones would
be hidden…”
Thanks for #487 and #520. Good, good.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier

14.
May 24 ‘75
Dear R.K. Singh,
Thank you for the letter and poetry enclosures. I am glad to hear that Mrs. Petrosky sent you
some copies of Rapport . Did she send #7 (Vol.3 #1) with two of my poems?
I am happy to be able to supply you with some airmail stamps for return postage. I think it is
best for you to submit your poems. It’s never a very good policy for anybody else to submit. I
hope that Patrick Ellingham will accept some of yours. He has one of my poems in his last
booklet.
It pleased me very much to hear that you have used “Hurt and dismayed…” for your reading
list. I began my October poetry reading at State Univ. of N.Y. at Buffalo with that poem. In 1945
it was awarded second prize at Harvard in an international poetry competition; the judges were
two famous Harvard scholars—F.O. Mathiesson (author of American Renaissance) and
Theodore Spencer (Shakespeare and the Nature of Man). As a result of that award, I was
invited to become a teacher of freshman English at Harvard and Radcliffe, a position held for
two and a half years, before coming to Buffalo in the fall of 1947.
I am trying to find a market for my novel. Vol. III is now done. The New Yorker magazine sent
me a note (they usually send only form rejection slips) for a chapter about Jim Gordon and
Crispus Atticus Bronson (James Baldwin); now they have had the very last chapter in the book
for about two weeks. I dread opening the mail box. Their usual return time is about one week.
I go to New York City June 2-7 for a week of consulting for a program at one of the branches of
City University of New York. While there, I hope to see one or two plays, and one or two
movies (The Day of the Locust & Deliverance) and at least one ballet.
Our oldest daughter comes tomorrow for overnight before she leaves for France where she will
study piano at a school at Fontainbleaur. While she is here, our second daughter and her
husband will drive up for brunch and dinner. That same day a professor from Buffalo will arrive
for a three day visit. He is collecting material for a critical biography growing out of my poems.

Last semester he taught all sex of my poetry books in his course in Four Buffalo Poets. I was
there twice to take his classes, and in April I returned to give a reading with two of the other
poets…
From Tragic America 1974
Amsterdam
March 22
Acresof crocuses
purple andyellowandwhite
gentlystroked
by the sun
Yrs.
Lyle G

LETTERS : 1976 : 15-16
15.
Feb 26 ‘76
Dear R.K. Singh,
I am not in the least indifferent to you, not changed a whit, glad as ever to have a letter, and
hope you received all mine, though I suppose there is some chance that a letter to you in East
Bhutan may not have been forwarded.
Your M.A. thesis lies here on a side table in my study. Only last Sunday, the wife of a faculty
member from the University of Massachusetts, pointed it out to her husband, when they were
here on an overnight visit.
Please tell me where Dhanbad is. I haven’t located it on a map, but I gather it is somewhere
about 100 miles from Gaya towards Calcutta. I’m really in the dark. I know you are much
nearer home in Banaras than you were in East Bhutan. I hope you will enjoy your work.
You ask for help in selecting a Contemporary American poet for your dissertation. I think at
once of WilliamCarlos Williams as your kind of poet, and I’ve asked my bookstore to order his
selected poems and in about two weeks when it comes, I’ll send the book on to you—
regretfully, perhaps, for I don’t have a copy myself. But your needs are prior to mine, for I’d be
keeping the book only for my pleasure, while you will combine pleasure and scholarship, if you
decide that Williams is to your taste.
Your other consideration—the Savitri—seems very good, but I have no knowledge of the epic
and obviously, therefore, no measure of its worth.
My new book of poems you ask me to send you has not yet been published, is slated for around
the end of April. I have had no final word from the novel, which still languishes at Viking Press
after having been there nine months.

My life is very quiet. Monday evenings I sing with a chorus that is preparing a new patriotic
chorale written for the Bicentennial by a Bennington composer, the director of the chorus. The
music is enharmonic, sort of Bartok, whose music I particularly enjoy.
All good wishes.
Yrs.
Lyle Glazier

16.
June 4 ‘76
Dear R.K. Singh,
How can I thank you for going to the trouble and the expense of sending me SAVITRI? It is an
extraordinary book, an extraordinary document in social history, even though there is no poetry
in it. I ask myself what kind of man encrusts himself with such a protective shell of illusion to
shield himself from everything that is visible in his teeming India. There is more poetry in any
one of your little lyrics than in that whole grandiose volume of make believe. To be sure, he
wears the mantle of mystic and protects himself again by claiming that anyone who doesn’t
vibrate in tune with his revelation is out of touch with the GREAT TRUTHS THE TIMELESS
TRUTHS OF ETERNITY. I found his letters fully as revealing as his cantos, and was not surprised
to come upon long passages venerating Milton. What he does not seem to comprehend is that
Milton ‘s vision, like Dante’s , pulses with human being. Satan, gargantuan vision, is all too
much a man, and behind the creation of Satan is Milton’s own Restoration England, which to
the poet, Protestant that he was, was Hell, in which he had to believe he had the power to
construct a new heaven and earth in the “own place” of his mind.
I doubt if you will agree with what I am saying. I suspect that it will seem to you another
instance of the remoteness of Occidentals from the Oriental Mind. However, since you send
me the book, in the context of trying to reach a decision on a subject for a dissertation, I can
only tell you that in my opinion you will be deluding yourself if you believe that you are writing
about a poem if you write about SAVITRI. All the other things you mention “the lengthiest epic
in English” an opportunity to “exploit the tools of archetypal/mythical contextual criticism”
may be there to some extent. But the rhythm is flattering, the imagery is cloud cuckooland,
and the language is that of an evangelist who does not dare look out at the world surrounding
him, so he pulls down that tawdry curtain of imagined absolutes.
If I seem to be hard on Sri Aurobindo, it is because I think you are too good a poet to be taken
in by his nonsense. He is a waste of time as a poet, and worse than that, unwittingly a social
commentator, he illustrates how a weakling can run away into the Heaven of mysticismand
ignore every social gangrenous sore that cries out for redemption.
Please forgive me.
Your good friend,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1978: 17 – 20
17.
April 22 ‘78
Dear R.K. Singh,
I wondered why I had no answer to my last letter to you, and now that I have your report of
recent activities, I can well comprehend why you have not had time for foreign
correspondence.
It is with the greatest happiness for you that I read of your marriage and of the baby in
progress. If getting a baby is fun, having a baby is even more fun—a great responsibility, too.
You speak in your letter of my “daughter”. Actually I have three daughters, all of them so
much loved that it would be impossible to single out one of them to be preferred for the one
you mention. I loved them from the time they were conceived. When they were small, I loved
helping care for them—feeding them with the bottle by night or day, changing their diapers,
washing their shitty bottom – I hope my language won’t seem objectionable to you, but babies
are real little animals as well as spiritual human beings. They require the kind of attentions any
other animal requires along with the special attention needed by human beings. Sometimes, I
feel that parents fail most when they ignore the animal nature of their children, who are
spiritual, but not pure spirit.
Your report on the progress of your research interests me too, even though, as you know, I am
not particularly inspired by Savitri . As I write this letter, however, I am looking at a small poetry
journal ORIGIN, fourth series, October 1977, and a second one ORIGIN, fourth series #2,
January 1978, edited by the American poet Cid Corman, living now in Kyoto, Japan, and the
little books printed, as I find on the inside back page, at Pondicherry 605002 by Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Press. Your news that you will visit Pondicherry makes another meaningful circle in the
many overlapping circles in my life.
I will be happy to read your 17 page paper on Sri Aurobindo’s poetics, but I would not be able
to help you find a magazine for it, I fear. I cannot find magazines to publish my own writing,
and at my age, I cannot take on the chore of trying to place someone else’s. Please understand

that this does not mean I have no interest in you. I continue to be interested in what you are
doing, thinking, writing, but at 67 years, swamped with my own unpublished writings, I feel
frustrated enough when one of my own poems, stories, or articles is rejected. I can give you
one possible address: Shantih: A Journal of International Writing and Art, C/o Brian Swann, The
Cooper Union (Liberal Arts), Cooper Square, New York, N.Y. 10003. I don’t know Mr. Swann nor
does he know me; I found this address in a current listing for writers. It will be best for you to
send your article direct to him.
You ask about your student’s situation here if he fails to have the $1500 required, whether he
will have any trouble from official sources if he has less? I really have no way of knowing. I do
know that today $1500 is a lot of money. It is,in fact, ½ of my retirement pension for a whole
year. Most Americans in my position have much larger pensions. Mine is small partly because
when I taught abroad in Turkey or India, my university did not pay into the pension fund for
me. I don’t complain about this, because my whole life was changed by my visits to Turkey and
India. Think of it, without those trips I would not have had the inspiration of your
acquaintance.
I am adding for your curious inspection a rejection just received from a national foundation that
gives grants to poets. (1627 poets applied.) I submitted 10 poems about my responses to travel.
Informing me that I was not one of the poets to receive a grant, the Director of the competition
wrote:
“Dear Lyle Glazier: One of the readers, Michael Palmer, made these comments on your work:
‘This is fine work, a succession of images from travel with the power, often, of summation.
Glazier’s art is as much in the selection of the scene as in the language, which is (almost)
transparent.”
May I express my loving good will to both you and your wife. And please don’t be offended by
this further comment. You wrote “…she is extremely nice and is rearing in her womb my seed.
Too early, but what to do?” I am reminded of 40 years ago, when my wife and I decided that
we would wait at least 5 years—until I could finish graduate school—before having a child.
Then almost immediately Amy became pregnant, and Laura was born within the first year. It
was difficult for us, but I’ve never had any real regrets. It does become important to take
precautions lest you have more children than you can well support. We managed to hold off
five years for the second, and another two years for the third.
With my warmest wishes to you both,
Lyle Glazier

18.
May 19 ‘78
My dear R.K. Singh,
It is a pleasure to have your letter from there in the heat of India. I loved the heat of India. It
was as if, when I was there, my vital center uncurled. Even in Madras, when it was 44 degrees
C, I luxuriated in the heat, but of course I kept out of the sun at mid day, except one noon when
I walked from the US Consulate on Mount Road to my Savera Hotel partway down Edward
Elliott Road, and that day I wilted even though Indian workmen and women were busy building
a new bed for the road.
You speak of working in the house when your wife is pregnant. I have always helped out with
such work. I can cook and dust and sweep, and during the years when our children were in
school, when Amy and I both worked, I came home to help with the sweeping and helped get
dinner at night. As each child was born, I pitched in and prepared bottles for feeding. When
the baby wet itself or dirtied itself, I changed the diapers. This (house husbandry) is much more
common in the States than in a European or Asiatic country, where the social custom still
makes it important for a male to protect his reputation for virility by never doing a woman’s
work. One of my brothers is like that. He prides himself on never having lifted a finger to help
with the dishes or washing or ironing. He believes that such an exclusion makes him a better
man. As for me, I always enjoyed taking care of the children, never minding if I washed a shitty
bottom, anointed it with fragrant oil, and covered it with a clean diaper. It was always a labor of
love.
This year when my wife has been crippled with arthritis, for several months I did nearly all the
housework. Now she begins to feel better so I can come down to my study to write. She talks
of selling this house, but I love it too much ever to leave it. I would like to die from this house.
Last month for a few hours we had a visitor from Madras, one of my students from my seminar
there in ’70. She has been in Kansas City for two years, earning a Master’s degree. She must
have done very well. Two of her papers were accepted for American journals, quite a record, I
think. But it was hard for her to be away from her husband and three children for two years.
She works at a Catholic College (Stella Maris) and the Church probably helped her get a
scholarship here. I felt homesick for India when she left.

Don’t fear that your creativity will dry up. I always have had such a fear, but the impulse keeps
coming back. The poems you sent me seemed fresh and clean cut, but in #801, if I were you, I
wouldn’t use the “poetic” word “swain”—not even lightly—because the rest of the poem is
very direct and immediate, and I can’t believe that the word really conveys a current impression
of Indian young men on the street.
5/26/78
Aftermidnight
across far meadows
a fragrance of apple trees
puncturesthe windlessair
leakingfromanoldorchard
thisyearover blown
Love to you both,
Lyle G.

19.
July 24 ‘78
Dear R.K. Singh,
Your last letter was filled with such contrasts. I am as deeply moved by what you said about
your great love for your wife, compelling you to take an early departure from Pondicherry. The
happiness of a young man in his wife and her for him can be matched only by the deep spiritual
sympathy between an old husband and wife who have lived and loved together many years. I
hope that you can have the added happiness of children. Amy and I knew what it was not to
bring a child to full term; in fact, we lost one child almost at the very end of a pregnancy. It is
sad to have this happen, but in due time we had three healthy daughters. Please tell your good
wife for me that I wish her good health and happy, healthy children.
Your news about Pondicherry and the deterioration of spiritual values in the Aurobindo
community was very depressing. As you know, I am not a great admirer of Savitri as a poem
but I have tried to believe it could be a great spiritual social document. Your account of the
rivalry or bad feeling at Pondicherry is a real blow. I cam believe that all this increases the
burden of your progress toward a doctorate.
What you said about your family troubles back home also depresses me. It is sad to see our
parents grow old and the family coherence break up. I never knew this to happen as you have,
because both my parents died the same day when I was 22, the fall of the year after I got my
bachelor’s degree. My youngest brother was thirteen and came to live with me, and for several
years, until he went into service in WW II, I was in loco parentis to him. We are still good
friends.
Please, in all your troubles, do not lose sight of your compensating gift for poetry. Let your
poems express your feelings. You have a talent that must not be allowed to shrivel up from
disuse.
I write on the back of a notice for my poetry reading next Sunday.
My love to you & your wife,
Lyle G

20.
Sept 7 ‘78
If you wish to, please send a half dozen of your short lyrics to David Henson, Ed., Applecart,
12201 N. Woodcrest Dr., Dunlap, Illinois 61525, USA
Henson wrote me recently asking if I know any poets who write “transparent poems,” and I
thought of your short lyrics.
If you decide to try Applecart, please write to me at the same time, and I will send Mr. Henson
an envelope made out with your name and address and stamped with US postage for returning
the MS to you. I know that you cannot send him US postage for the return.
I’m writing Mr. Henson to tell him that he may have some poems from you.
Don’t despair of the times when the “poetic madness” seems to have fled. It will come back, if
you really court it.
Love to you and your wife.
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1981 : 21 – 27
21.
February 1981
Dear R.K. Singh,
I am delighted to have your gift of a copy of INDO-ENGLISH POETRY, printing 10 of your lyrics.
The poems are deft and readable, with clean insights. I think that they are from a craft that has
been improving over the past few years. A poem like the one on page 154 with its
winter/spring antithesis means something different to me from what it would have meant forty
years ago when I believed 70 is so old that there can be no passion enduring so long. I am not
sure that I get from the poem what you wanted me to get. Are the lovers happy in their
passion or are they “jinxed” by it? “Rains” throws me off, because “rain” is passion, as are
“jungles” and “warmth” and “vigor” – all of them seeming affirmative to me, where “calamity”
“nemesis” “jinx” “empaled” & “end we detest” must be negative. I wonder a bit if I’m thrown
off because, like Whitman, I am hedonistic and physical, whereas the poem baffles me with a
hint that I ought to be looking for pure spirit. You see how you stirred me.
My problem is different from what I imagine yours to be. Your poems seemalways
internalized, while mine have a tendency to grow from externals, so that I wonder if I make a
transition from reporting on an experience to living an experience. How to get there inside
where the real life of the psyche goes on?
I spent the last part of October, all of November, and early December as visiting professor at
Sana’a University in Yemen Arab Republic, where S.M. Pandeya has been visitor for two years.
It was a great pleasure to be near him for occasional talks, though we did not meet as often as I
would have liked. He came to some of my classes. I think that he plans to return to Banaras
next year. I don’t know whether or not I will ever visit Sana’a again. I am invited.

We have had a hard time because of my wife’s arthritis, and last year she had four operations
for cataract. Her vision is better with new glasses, otherwise I’d not have been able to leave
her for two months.
I am enclosing the lyrics on Sana’a I am working on now. I find it very hard to create an
impression to share with a reader. It is necessary to believe that he has no signposts except the
ones you give him, and yet he carries all sorts of taboos and faiths that can lead him away from
where you want him to go.
Please write to me again, and please give my good wishes to your wife.
Yrs.,
Lyle Glazier
Sana’a
Whennightabruptlystabs
intothe crater
of thisextinctvolcano
windowsof ancienthouses
shudderwithprimarylesions
blue,green,yellow
clottedred
A visitorfromthe West
plotsthe lie of the land,explores
thoroughfarestwodaysperhaps,thendares
strike intodust-deepalleys
across fromSam CityHotel,enters
a lane trustingitleadsto souks
Standinginshadowencounters
crazy layersof housefrounts
handcrafted,four/six/eightstoried
Babylonianskyscraperscorniced
off plumb,a rattledcubismdesigned
by whimjustrightforthe eye
Eyesaccustomedto dark
ina streetlevel well
he makesoutdoorknobshandforged
and latcheshandhammered,above
himwarpjointedwindowsembroidered
fantasticallyinmortaroverblocks
of handtooledgraniteorbrick

The stranger imaginesentering
a ground floor,windowslitted
for storage andstalls—
donkeys,acamel?goats—
imaginesclimbingstairs
to a dark door opening
on stainedglass
prisoninglight
to splashona tiledfloor

22.
March 12 ‘81
My dear R.K. Singh,
Your generous and detailed letter has many passages to fascinate me.
I am glad to know that I didn’t completely misinterpret your “complex of emotions,” in the
“anti-romantic” poem on page 154. What you say about the origin of the emotion in one of
those universal downsinkings of communication when a wife and a husband fall out of tune—
for a trifle, maybe—sharpens the edge of my understanding and rings true to my own married
experience. The ironic tear of emotions is particularly shattering when the attempt to
communicate is sexual. How small an incident can throw one or the other partner out of tune.
Maybe the baby cries for a change of diaper. Or the husband remembers an unhappy
experience with a student. How rare and wonderful—almost a miracle—when both partners
are perfectly in tune. During the honeymoon joy is possible, for then every discovery is new,
but after sex becomes a familiar routine, how can the miracle be sustained? Not every time,
perhaps, but again and again, the wonder will be revived. But your poem, I think you are telling
me, is about one of those unhappy occasions in between the crests.
May I comment about #875. I like the first stanza very much for its simple naturalness. Would I
like it better if in the second line “by” were changed to “in”? Autumn, a season, cannot,
perhaps be personified now, as it once was personified by Keats. In the second stanza, I think
you stray far from poetic voice when you use the word “Jupiter.” Jupiter is not your god nor
mine, and we do an injustice to our deepest inspiration when we become allusive to a tradition
that is not ours. Perhaps if there were a cutting edge of intellectual comment, the allusion
would have power, but here aren’t you simply drawing on a cliché that has no force in your
world? For a similar reason, I cannot use Christian symbolism, except with an intellectual
comment, because I am not a Christian, but an agnostic.
The seasonconfers
throughsoftgrey clouds
a growingfreshnessonnakedtrees
Not good, but perhaps I make my point.

I like your including the paragraph about the fourth year of your marriage, and your wife’s
inquiry about me, and the gentle naughtiness of your one and a half year old son. You draw me
close. If I could afford it and had the power, and it weren’t so hard on my wife, I would always
like to have a child in the house, and indeed to discover the joy of having a son. I may have told
you that our three are all daughters, three beautiful girls living away from home. My wife
suffers pain from arthritis, but after four operations for cataract last year, she can now read
again, and after an operation on her hip, she can walk, but not easily nor far. She no longer
moves with the speed of light “right out straight” as she used to say.
Thank you for informing me about your having completed your dissertation six months ago. I
had no idea, and I am very happy for you, and wish you a favorable verdict. I recall my own
waiting from September till January in 1949-50, and how glad I was to have it over after my oral
examination in May. Please tell me whether you submitted it at Banaras Hindu University, and
who was your advisor. In Sana’a I renewed my friendship with Dr. S.M.Pandeya, whom I regard
as one of my best friends anywhere. We seemto share a common critical spirit. I remember
from 1971, when I was traveling around India lecturing for USIS, Pandeya reported to me that
somebody, some Indian scholar,had spoken witheringly about my pairing Henry James’s Daisy
Miller and Melville’s Billy Budd in one of my proposals for a lecture, but, Pandeya said, “I knew
at once you had in mind how both Daisy and Billy are victims of a corrupt Establishment.”
You speak of spirit of “dissatisfaction” in my series of Sana’a poems, and of course you are
right, but there was also vicarious joy in my envy of their pleasure in the beauty of stained
glass.
I do hope that your Ph.D. degree will lead to a happier location for you. I don’t know how old
you are. I am sure that financially and intellectually my situation in Buffalo was probably better
than yours—in the U.S. a Ph.D. is the terminal degree and therefore used to reward the
successful candidate, though now there are so many that doctors have trouble finding
positions. In my case, I had the good position, but I was psychically profoundly unsettled, and
my professional life became ruined—not wrecked because I was on tenure. I began writing
fiction and poetry (as well as literary criticism) to vent my need to rebel. It is only now, recently,
that I have the satisfaction near the end of my life to feel that I begin to fulfill my visions.
For the past three years I’ve been writing short fiction that has sometimes appeared in gay
magazines, and a major work of non fiction, a sexual autobiography, telling how married gays
are not uncommon but legion. The title of my new book comes from my recent discovery that
my family springs from the very first English settlers in New England, the ones who came on the
Mayflower to New Plimoth. WESTWARD FROM PLIMOTH has been at one of the great
publishing houses, being read by the vice president of Holt, Rinehart & Winston. When I
phoned the office last week, his secretary said, “Dick is reading your book now. He likes it very

much, but he is very busy and may not get to write to you at once.” Then she added, “Perhaps I
shouldn’t have said so much. I hope I haven’t been indiscreet.” I submitted the book the day
before I left for Sana’a – October 22—and still I wait. The same editor has had the MS of STILLS
FROM A MOVING PICTURE (my novel that you looked at) since 1976, holding it, hoping the time
will come ripe for a novel about a married homosexual. I trust that your wife will not be
revolted to learn this fact about me. I only begin to realize that I have been a good husband
and father and have nothing to be ashamed of. I begin to be more comfortable with myself. I
was not a threat to someone who did not seek me out.
Affectionate greetings to you both,
Lyle Glazier

23.
April 14 ‘81
My dear R.K. Singh,
It is hard to advise anybody, but I sympathize with your predicament there in Dhanbad. When I
was 30, at the outbreak of World War II (i.e. World War according to the Western view), I lost
my job at a small college in Maine, after being there 5 years. It was a blow, but turned out to
be good. I went from thereto Boston to teach at Tufts College, about 5 miles from Harvard
University. At Tufts I was a teacher of freshman English only. This meant that I had four classes,
each with 30 students, each of whom had to write at least one 500 word composition every
week. This meant that every week I read and corrected 60,000 words of student writing. I
taught summers as well as winters. At the end of two and a half years I got sick to my stomach
when I would pick up another pile of those papers.
Then I was offered as much money to be an assistant in the Harvard Shakespeare course, so I
left my job at Tufts, and went on to get my Ph.D. in 1950 when I was 39, and by then the father
of three daughters, and by then teaching in Buffalo, where my load was one class in American
literature, one in British poetry, and 7 more students preparing for comprehensive
examinations, and each of them meeting me once a week for a half hour. I thought I had
landed in heaven.
I don’t know what there is in this for you, except that sometimes no one can foresee a better
outcome. Not that I was ever a great success in the university. I rebelled too much against the
administration, never attended social functions, never became administratively ambitious.
My new book WESTWARD FROM PLIMOTH is an autobiography. I have tried to make it as frank
as my poems and my novel. I am afraid I may have been over optimistic when I last wrote you. I
have had no further word from the publisher, and begin to think I was hoodwinked, and that
my book isn’t being seriously considered. I called the office again, and this time got no news at
all. In June, if not before, I will travel to New York and bring my manuscript home, and try also
to bring STILLS FROM A MOVING PICTURE which the same editor has been holding now for five
years.

To return once more to your poem # 154, which I consider a most interesting poem, what you
say about “fear of sexual failure”—“self-generated”—takes me back to the words of my
psychiatrist when I was trying to come out candid about being gay: he said, “Sex is symbolic.”
For somebody like you it doesn’t help much, however, to be told that success or failure is a
product of your own illusions. Sensitive people become hypersensitive when they try to
comprehend themselves. Poetry helps—writing poetry—because no matter what the trauma,
there is some help in comprehending what it means to be human—and mortal, and your
Greeks believed, for to them only the gods were immortal.
When I saw Dr. Pandeya in Sana’a last October, we talked about you and about Savitri. I trust
his judgment so much that he strengthened my own somewhat guilty conscience over having
taken such a dislike to a poem to which you devoted so much time. But then, soon after writing
my thesis, I lost my devotion to Spencer’s The Faerie Queene.
I will gladly give you the address of the editor of Origin but I hardly encourage you to submit.
The man is extremely rigorous, and I never expected that he would print some of my poems. I
knew him frist in Boston in 1945, when I was teaching at Tufts from which he had just
graduated. He went on to the Black Mountain College, and then traveled in Italy and spent
many years in Kyoto and married a Japanese wife. Now he is back in Boston. His masthead
informs poets desiring to submit: “Unsolicited manuscripts will not be returned. The sender
must assume all risks. Response will occur within 24 hours may nof receipt or not at all.”
Cid was not in the least encouraging about my first submissions. As he says, he never sends
poems back, but he will let you know if he likes what he reads, and sometimes may accept
something.
If he doesn’t like what he reads, he may never reply, very hard on the poet. And right now is a
particularly bad time, because Cid and his Japanese wife have just opened an ice cream shop in
Boston, and after great effort and expense are working hard to make the shop a success.
I am sure that if I hadn’t befriended Cid when he was a young man, I would never have
persevered to the point where he accepted my twelve poems. Nobody could have been more
surprised than I.
Origin
CidCorman,Editor
87 DartmouthStreet
Boston,Massachusetts
USA 02116
I have started a new novel O MY SON, imagining a married homosexual who has a son who is
homosexual. I begin with an account of my experience in Madras with a massageman who

commercialized sensuality, nearly managing to sublimate sex even when merchandizing it.
There was no personal involvement with his client, only his marvelous hands. You no doubt
know about this, may have read about it in The Kama Sutra. Very curious, very different from
hustlers in parks in Istanbul, New Delhi, London, New York—all over the world, where the
hustler justifies his sexuality because he never engages in it without pay. The massageman also
is paid, but he is an artist, whose artistry justifies the payment.
What you say about your youngest brother makes me think of young artists all over the world,
who seem to know what they are doing, and when they are young succeed beyond the hopes
of older people looking on. How do they do it? What is their intuition?
O MY SON: “He was a solid young man, not massive, but with a solid trunk nearly hipless,
where the cloth of his dhoti hugged. Above the hips he was bare, having flung off his upper
garment. He was bare but not naked, for there was no sensual invitation in his having partly
disrobed. His manner was disengaged except for the skill of his hands. The trick was to seduce
the client into yielding to pure sensuality. To have offered his own body, to have thrust, to
have erected, to have pushed his own cock into play would have been to cheapen
professionalismwith the currency of commitment. Only by being absolute for merchandize
could Ganga sublimate commerce into spiritual consent. A ten-rupee note lay on the table, but
money was only symbolic….”
Cordially yours,
Lyle Glazier

24.
June 13 ‘81
Dear R.K. Singh,
I did get your letter of March 30 and recall replying to it, responding particularly to your
unhappiness there in your position and your anxiety over your thesis and desire for a new post,
as well as remarking on how remarkable it is that your brother has been able to launch himself
successfully so young.
I agree that it is time for you to publish a book, and I’ll gladly write an introduction, and try to
make editorial suggestions, but not quite (if you please) what you had in mind. I think it an
important part of creative expression to arrange the poems in an order, so I think you ought to
do that yourself—chronological order of creation, if you will, but you should make the decision.
Above all, I would say, don’t arrange the poems by common elements of content. Every poet—
Wordsworth, Whitman, to name two—who has tried to do that has failed. I would suggest
chronology from the time of writing. Also, for an 80-page book, I would suggest you curb your
sure-to-be greedy desire to crowd a great deal in. Limit yourself, rather, to only one poem to a
page, even if the poem is short. I haven’t always done that, but in VD I was trying to get in all
the poems written over a 4-month period of time. Your time span will be much broader. Give
each poem room to breathe.
This, I suggest. Select perhaps one hundred poems. Arrange them in the order you like. Then
send them to me, and I will select out the number you have room to print.
Find your own title for your book.
It will be a pleasure to read what you send, but don’t expect a miracle of editing like that of Ezra
Pound on THE WASTE LAND. In general, I would want to accept your vocabulary, your imagery,
your concepts, and only exercise a critical voice in selecting out the final 80 poems for your
collection.You ask for Dr. Pandeya’s address. By the time my letter reaches you, he will be back
in Banaras, and I assume you have that address.

I have no real influence in academia to exert pressure to help you find a new place. I know that
Sana’a, like most places in the Middle East requires a doctorate in hand, and in addition, Sana’a
specifies that the candidate have taught at least 5 years after having earned the degree. Believe
me, I know from my own early experience the drudgery of teaching English report writing.
The only thing I have to enclose is a short commemorative series for my uncle’s and aunt’s 50th
wedding anniversary.
Affectionate greetings to you and your wife,
Lyle Glazier
No word from my book sent 10/22/80

25.
July 10 ‘81
Dear R.K. Singh,
By now I hope you have my letter of June 13, in which I offer to help what I can to select and
arrange poems for a volume. I suggest that you make your own selection and organization of
100 poems and send them to me for my cutting the group to 80. In order to make your
communication easy, you should keep your own carbon list, so that I won’t have to send back
the poems but can make short comments that you will be able to refer to your copy.
Somebody did this for me when I was collecting VD, and I found it immensely helpful, even
though only a few poems were omitted.
Today I got your letter and bundle of enclosures for June 26. Everything interested me. The
abstract of your thesis makes much more sense of SAVITRI than I would ever have made by
myself, and I can see how hard you worked. The sociological implications still excite me more
than the poetic for that epic.
Before proceeding further, I must congratulate you for having your thesis accepted. The viva
voce I am surewill be a formality, for you will know more about the poem than any of your
examiners. Yet, you will be on your mettle, happily discovering as you go on in the hour, that
the climate is in your favor. I recall even now from 1950 how that realization dawned on me
somewhere along in the examination on my thesis for Spenser’s imagery.
I wish I could believe I would have success in placing the article on “The Mythical Construction
of Death…” but it would be foolish for me to engage to market your chapter, since I never know
how to market my own, and wait for the inevitable rejection with a growing intuition of doom.
I will, therefore, as you suggest, keep the copy in your file along with other papers. In my own
case, with my thesis, I managed to salvage two articles that appeared in journals, but the thesis
has lain on the shelf, quite dead from 1950 to 1971, when it was disinterred from the Harvard
library for a brief mention in J.E. Hankin’s SOURCE AND MEANING IN SPENSER’S ALLEGORY
(Oxford).
The three published articles all found my ear receptive. What you say about teaching poetry
mirrors what I have been saying for a long time. At Sana’a last November, at the first class I told
the students that we must find some way for them to be active—it was not important what I
did unless they were being active. Your analysis is more systematic and thorough than anything
I have tried. Is there a danger in systematization, as if a poem can be exhausted? Is there a

virtue in leaving analysis open—tempting the student always to come back to the poem? I like
to let the students take the initiative with a comment on one element—a word, an image, a
formal construction, an allusion to another poem—just anything that gives evidence that the
student’s mind is alert as he reads the poem. Then I pick up from there with my own
comments, usually first enlarging on what the students have said, and trying to reach the heart
of the poem without in any sense “finishing it off.” Do you see what I mean? But I did like your
essay, particularly the first paragraphs, which match my own experience both as to students
and many academics.
The article on technical institutions carried me back to 1942-45, when part of my teaching load
was one class for Engineers at Tufts University—a smitch of literature, and more than a smitch
of technical writing: a screw driver is a means of turning (the acting part), a means of applying
force to the turner (a handle) and a connector between the other two (a shank).
The acting part is made up of
A
B
C
The handle is made of…
The shank is made of …
Always accompanied with a diagram/drawing.
The problem of effective writing is omnipresent in all universities. The greatest problem is
probably that most teachers are not ready to read papers and give detailed comments.
I must not fail to mention how much I like your poem #895. I think it is nearly perfect.
Best wishes to you & your wife,
Lyle Glazier
The boy comesintoa clearing
stripsand sprawlsinthe sun
curvesfingers
cannot control
the freshening
the leap
the out-thrust

callshisdog
reachesunder
bothstreaming
the dog (hindlegsspread) continuing
a longtime squirting
on leaves
the boy watching
watchedbythe eye of the sun
triesto cram intoits sheath
the tough nutabove the shudder
failing,hidesintrees
the dog joinshim
theyrun ina team throughthe woods

26.
September 28 ‘81
Dear R.K. Singh,
I hope you will not be disturbed if I have cut words from your poems in the same way Cid
Corman, a superlative critic, cut words from some of mine. In fact, I sent him copies of five of
these poems to the University of Iowa, where he is spending six weeks as a critic for Paul
Engel’s seminar for poets from the Orient and Africa.
You can put the words back if you choose. I have especially cut out abstractions and adjectives
that seem to obscure your essential meaning.
My numbering does not conform to yours in the small book you sent me, but it does follow the
order of the poems, and I think you will have little trouble following along in your copy.
I am sorry that I don’t like your title, not at all, because it is slackly sentimental, but the poems
are tightly realistic like the bits of life you record.
I have decided to carry my copy to the library to make a Xerox in case something happens that
my letter does not reach you. In that case, I will send you another when I hear from you next
that you worry over not having heard from me.
My introduction should be very short, not to take attention from the poems. Something like
this, I think.
R.K. Singh writes with the directness of an overheard whisper, or a wind through trees, a
ripple in a stream, or a cry in the street after dark.
Yes, I think that that is about what I would like to say about the poems that have moved me
powerfully. Don’t be afraid to give a small poem its full force by publishing it alone on its page.
You can ignore all my notations if you choose. I am flattered that you invited me.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier
Would MY SILENCE do for a title?
See poem #3 (my numbering)

27.
November 9 ‘81
Dear R.K. Singh,
I opened your envelope fearfully, afraid I may have offended you with my suggestions for
emendation. Nothing is more private and personal than a poem.
About the title: as I told you, I have no very clear thoughts. MY SILENCE was a reaction against
FLAMING ROSES, which seemed florid for your poems.
Cid Corman is not a professor, but a deservedly celebrated poet/editor. I sent numbers 1, 9, 11,
and two others I did not mark. Corman has not chosen to comment. Don’t feel bad. He is a
very special editor with extremely strong biases about the nature of poetry.
When I came to read the poems, I found many more than 80 that seemed publishable. Those
marked OK are as acceptable to me as those in the first column. Many of them are longer, and I
was trying to save space to save postage.
What you could do, if you choose, is to print the very short poems two on each page, and have
room to fit in the longer ones, taking them in turn as they appear in the manuscript. I like some
of the ones marked OK fully as much as the others. In fact, it seemed that as I approached the
end of the script, the newer poems became very interesting, yet I didn’t wish to cut out any of
the earlier ones. In spite of my warning not to print too many poems, there’s no reason why
you shouldn’t have more than 80.
If I were you, I would keep the dates in your private manuscript and not publish them. Unlike
my book VD, yours is not a log of a specific, limited journey, and except for, possibly,
chronological order, there’s no need to supply dates.
Like you, I am poor at titles, and believe that many poets would better omit titles.
In 16b, by all means keep “methodically concealed,” as you should keep everything that strikes
you as right and important. Did you consider keeping “hidden” rather than “methodically
concealed,” which seems, perhaps, rather heavy?
In #55, my “slant room” was typographical. Sorry. Shd. be “moon”.
I intended the red circles for the word no, then found on turning the page that my red marker
had come through to the back-up page. P. 21, “messianic” was only for spelling, e not a, as you
had it.

From now on, for your book, you should be on your own, and should make decisions without
consulting further with me. Anything you decide on is right.
As for me, please don’t let me into the book at all except as you wish to acknowledge my
foreword if you use it. This must be your book, the final decisions all yours.
I hope you find a new job more to your liking and ability.
I do like the new poems, clean and crisp. Save them for your second volume.
Cordially,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1982: 28 – 30
28.
January 7 ‘82
My dear friend,
With every year our ages in years pull toward each other; though they will never coincide, our
differentials diminish, because youth is ephemeral and age is not, and you now grow older at a
faster pace than I do.
Therefore, if you can do so without harming your psyche, I suggest that it is time now that man
with a Ph.D. and a Readership in an Indian college should stop addressing me as “Respected Sir”
and use the name of “friend.” I recall so well, years ago, when I was young in Buffalo, being
summoned to the chairman’s office to hear him say, “This will come harder for you than for me,
but I would like it if from now on you will use my first name and I yours.”
So, please, my dear R.K. Singh, whom I very likely will not again see in the flesh, please do me
the honor of brushing away on paper that pallid fence of deference and accept me as your
friend.
I like your new poems, and it does seemto me that you catch the trick of diminishing the
adjectives, though as to that “eisonophillic” is quite mouthful.
I look forward to hearing that you progress in finding a publisher for your poems. For me it was
a long courtship before my first was published by Alan Swallow.
I wonder, did you ever feel, as I do, that in a sense each lyric is a kind of ejaculation thrown into
the teeth of fiscal social determinism? Each of the little poems comes out with a certain
formlessness as if it is important to keep from being academic.

At the telephonepole
kneesdefine
boneshiftpastprime
Day tipsto dark
yearto freeze
road tipsfromclimb
NextyearI
will driftwith
snowon that
saddle beyondthe
saphouse,itdoesn’tmatter
whoownsthe woods
That group of three poems-in-one called “Haying Season,” is as you guessed, difficult only in
particularity of allusion. A Bullrake is a tall rake, 6-feet tall, very wide at base, whose two
handles are bent till they join above the head of the small boy who usually mans this rake
meant for a grown man. The image is visual and refers to a real thing, a farm implement. The
men, too, are real. Perry was my father’s brother. Erwin, my grandfather’s brother. “Rowen” is
a second or third crop of hay. The grindstone is mounted over a trough filled with water to keep
the stone cool and moist for cutting & sharpening the scythe edge. The boy has to turn the
handle that turns the stone. His great uncle steps in to relieve him. “Mowing away” means to
unload the hay in the barn loft. The “lumbar of the hayrack” rides on the hay wagon floor.
When you write next, please give me more news about your wife and small boy. What a
wonder it is to have a child and how often the parents are too busy to enjoy to the full their
privilege. Sexual love followed by conception followed by childbirth must be the chief, perhaps
the only miracles, and yet they are all explainable by interlinking natural laws.
Affectionate greetings to your tripartite family—
Yrs.
Lyle Glazier

WRITING EDITING PUBLISHING: A MEMOIR

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