WRITING EDITING PUBLISHING

A MEMOIR

LETTERS FROM LYLE GLAZIER TO

R.K. SINGH

--Ram Krishna Singh

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 the Indian English poet,
Ram Krishna Singh, from 1970s till his death. Singh wrote his M.A.
thesis on Glaziers poetry and shared his own poems with the
American poet professor for several years. In a way, Glaziers
response from time to time, as his selected letters would bear out,
shaped Singhs poetic sensibility.
Lyle Glaziers 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 20th century. 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 themselvesthat what is revealed in a poem should not be
manipulated from outsidethen 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 backgroundfor 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 patternsby controlling rhythms,
language, images, and symbols. The Dervishes,
for example, imitates
Emily Dickinsons 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 Englandmight be able to
communicate something to an Indian about encroachments on the beauty of
mans 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 poets 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 formthat 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.
Wordsworths spontaneous overflow lends itself to both kinds of poem. You
canborrowing from Joycecall 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?
# Ugandas Amin
slaughtering Christians
for a Moslem
Good is
Richard Nixon
underneath the skin

From PERSON, PLACE, AND THING

# 41 Walking the brown and gold
October swamp
in search of a stray he
stirs the curiosity
of a pastured bull
and come back laden
with orange ferns
and from a ruined wall
a lichened rock

suitably flat for one

more stepping stone
across the incipient lawn
#42 Deep in the swamp
maple and tamarack
birch and pine
give way to feathered ferns
above the glittering stream
speaks to no ear
year after year
till now
I come and stay
a moment
and as softly go
Person, Place, and Thing is only in progress, not published. Therefore, I cannot now
send it to 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
Prims travel. After that I went to Buffalo to talk to a graduate class in literary
criticism where 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 13 th 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
Catholicism or 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 couldnt 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 symbolismthat basic instrument of language spreads from
culture to culture. The stanzas on Mevlana and ems i Tebrizi were taken straight
from the article: The climax of Mevlanas mystic poetry didnt 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 Mevlanas 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.
ems left Konya just as quietly as he had appeared in Mevlanas life because of the
rumors spread about town about their infatuation with each other. Mevlanas most
touching poetry was written after ems 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 leftism wiped 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 ems 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. Pandeyas
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 mans
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-stream without 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 beingI 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 ownmeaning 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 homeI do not mean a ceremonial visit. I dont 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 todaymy 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 sisters 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 chefs 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 fatherbrother. I became a teacher in an elementary school, then for two years in a
boys 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 Wordsworths 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont 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:
Theres Fatesomething your engineer so perfectly that theres 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 mothers 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 steps to the temple are made of stones

The dome of the temple is made 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 donn) 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 personsI 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-stream as 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 bodiesperhaps 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 achievesince 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 impossibleat the same time a benevolent

system and 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. Dont 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
didnt 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 Ive 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
Indonesian child
is pure and innocent
as if she were resting
in her fathers arms,
yet the distant viewers,
suppliers of weapons,
do not cradle
the supple frail body
or kiss the petulant mouth,
they are like the Old Testament
Jehovah who took the firstborn

of Egypt for his lawful fee,

and unlike the Hebrews
who as beneficiaries
were bereaved in sharing
the common doom of mankind
the American watchers
see the young face fade from their channel
and do not mind going to dinner
hungry, in fact, as hell

11.
May 6, 1974
Dear friend R.K. Singh,
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.
Dont be too disturbed over your problem with the C. Rosetti poem. Part of
what is involved is the conventional ambiguity of poetry, isnt 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 poems
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 persons fortunate fortitude, and the living
persons irritation that leads to writing the poem about how nice it will be
when the pangs of lover are over. Im not by any means confident that Im
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, dont be discouraged if she doesnt 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
Nissim Ezekiel, 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 frightens him is
that after three years
he is so torturously alive
#50 Istanbul, Mar 6
Last night greeting with Guzin
erased their years
in a moment,
once he had been humble
to know that this woman
knew his dark secret;
now there is no need
for humility, love
is taken for granted;
they kiss and he does not see
the fading of her beauty,
and she remarks
not on his thinning
but on his ungreyed hair
#59 Istanbul, Mar 12
Can he possibly
return to Vermont
or should he get a divorce
at his age and
live in Bangkok

or Delhi or Istanbul
renting a room
on his pension
and somewhere in a few years
be found in a gutter
knocked out by some
freak irked
at the pittance
in the old fools pocket?

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 havent 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. Amys 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 a greek shepherd boy
in her blue tunic and

long trousers with a

chased silver belt about
her hips, she walks into
my room and my heart
leaps because I guess
how clever she is with the
clever intuition of love
matching my cleverness, for
I know I have entered
her heart by pretending
to be invulnerable
to a woman,I have made
her so curious, so eager
that in spite of impropriety
and the warnings of pride
which would not risk
offending family and good
neighbors, she is entering
my room now in her blue
tunic to level me with her
gaze and strip me of defences
while my fingers tease off
her linked silver chain
(from TRAGIC AMERICA 1974
Amsterdam, Mar 22)
Acres of crocuses
--purple, yellow, and white
erections gently
stroked by the 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 nave 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 seem entirely 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 givem y good wishes to your family, and convey again my
disappointment that I spent so little time in Varanasi that I couldnt 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 dont 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. Its 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
scholarsF.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
Acres of crocuses
purple and yellow and white
gently stroked
by the sun

Yrs.
Lyle G

LETTERS : 1976 : 15-16

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 havent located it on a map, but I gather
it is somewhere about 100 miles from Gaya towards Calcutta. Im 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 William Carlos Williams as your kind of poet,

and Ive asked my bookstore to order his selected poems and in about two
weeks when it comes, Ill send the book on to youregretfully, perhaps, for I
dont have a copy myself. But your needs are prior to mine, for Id 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 considerationthe Savitriseems 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 doesnt 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 Dantes , pulses with human being.
Satan, gargantuan vision, is all too much a man, and behind the creation of
Satan is Miltons 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 mysticism and ignore every social
gangrenous sore that cries out for redemption.
Please forgive me.
Your good friend,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1978: 18 21

18.

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
funa 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 themfeeding them with the bottle by night or day,
changing their diapers, washing their shitty bottom I hope my language
wont 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 Aurobindos 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 elses. 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 dont 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 students 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, 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 dont 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. Glaziers 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
dont 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 yearsuntil I could finish graduate schoolbefore having a child.
Then almost immediately Amy became pregnant, and Laura was born within
the first year. It was difficult for us, but Ive 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

19.
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 womans 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 Masters 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.
Dont 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 wouldnt use the poetic word
swainnot even lightlybecause the rest of the poem is very direct and
immediate, and I cant believe that the word really conveys a current
impression of Indian young men on the street.
5/26/78
After midnight
across far meadows
a fragrance of apple trees
punctures the windless air
leaking from an old orchard
this year over blown

Love to you both,

Lyle G.

20.
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 bachelors 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

21.
Sept 7 78
Dear friend R.K. Singh,

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.
Im writing Mr. Henson to tell him that he may have some poems from you.
Dont 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 : 22 28

22.
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 Im 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 seem
always 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 Sanaa 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 dont know whether or not I will ever visit Sanaa again.
I am invited.
We have had a hard time because of my wifes arthritis, and last year she
had four operations for cataract. Her vision is better with new glasses,
otherwise Id not have been able to leave her for two months.
I am enclosing the lyrics on Sanaa 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
Sanaa
When night abruptly stabs
into the crater
of this extinct volcano
windows of ancient houses
shudder with primary lesions
blue, green, yellow
clotted red

A visitor from the West

plots the lie of the land, explores
thoroughfares two days perhaps, then dares
strike into dust-deep alleys
across from Sam City Hotel, enters
a lane trusting it leads to souks
Standing in shadow encounters
crazy layers of housefrounts
handcrafted, four/six/eight storied
Babylonian skyscrapers corniced
off plumb, a rattled cubism designed
by whim just right for the eye
Eyes accustomed to dark
in a streetlevel well
he makes outdoorknobs handforged
and latches handhammered, above
him warpjointed windows embroidered
fantastically in mortar over blocks
of handtooled granite or brick
The stranger imagines entering
a ground floor, windowslitted
for storage and stalls
donkeys, a camel? goats
imagines climbing stairs
to a dark door opening
on stained glass
prisoning light
to splash on a tiled floor

23.
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 didnt 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 tunefor a trifle,
maybesharpens 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 wonderfulalmost a miraclewhen 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 arent you simply drawing
on a clich 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 season confers
through soft grey clouds
a growing freshness on naked trees

Not good, but perhaps I make my point.

I like your including the paragraph about the fourth year of your marriage,
and your wifes 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 werent 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 Sanaa I renewed my friendship with Dr.
S.M.Pandeya, whom I regard as one of my best friends anywhere. We seem
to 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 Jamess Daisy Miller and Melvilles 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 Sanaa 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
dont know how old you are. I am sure that financially and intellectually my
situation in Buffalo was probably better than yoursin 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 ruinednot 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 Ive 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
shouldnt have said so much. I hope I havent been indiscreet. I submitted
the book the day before I left for Sanaa October 22and 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

24.
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 dont 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 isnt 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 failureself-generatedtakes
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
doesnt 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 helpswriting poetrybecause no matter
what the trauma, there is some help in comprehending what it means to be
humanand mortal, and your Greeks believed, for to them only the gods
were immortal.
When I saw Dr. Pandeya in Sanaa 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 Spencers 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 doesnt 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 hadnt 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
Cid Corman, Editor
87 Dartmouth Street
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 Yorkall 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 professionalism with 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

25.
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 Ill 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
yourselfchronological order of creation, if you will, but you should make the
decision. Above all, I would say, dont arrange the poems by common
elements of content. Every poetWordsworth, Whitman, to name twowho
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 havent 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 dont 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. Pandeyas 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 Sanaa, like most places in the Middle East requires a
doctorate in hand, and in addition, Sanaa 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
uncles and aunts 50th wedding anniversary.
Affectionate greetings to you and your wife,
Lyle Glazier

No word from my book sent 10/22/80

26.
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 wont 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 sure will 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 Spensers 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.
Hankins SOURCE AND MEANING IN SPENSERS 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 Sanaa
last November, at the first class I told the students that we must find some
way for them to be activeit 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 opentempting the student
always to come back to the poem? I like to let the students take the initiative
with a comment on one elementa word, an image, a formal construction,
an allusion to another poemjust anything that gives evidence that the
students 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 Universitya 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 comes into a clearing

strips and sprawls in the sun
curves fingers
cannot control
the freshening
the leap
the out-thrust
calls his dog
reaches under
both streaming
the dog (hind legs spread) continuing
a long time squirting
on leaves
the boy watching
watched by the eye of the sun
tries to cram into its sheath
the tough nut above the shudder
failing, hides in trees
the dog joins him
they run in a team through the woods

27.

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 Engels 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 dont 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. Dont 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)

28.
Dear R.K. Singh,

November 9 81

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. Dont 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 didnt wish to cut out
any of the earlier ones. In spite of my warning not to print too many poems,
theres no reason why you shouldnt 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, theres 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 dont 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: 29 31

29.
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
chairmans 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 seem to 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 telephone pole

knees define
boneshift past prime
Day tips to dark
year to freeze
road tips from climb
Next year I
will drift with
snow on that
saddle beyond the
saphouse, it doesnt matter
who owns the 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 fathers brother. Erwin, my grandfathers 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

30.

January 28 82
My dear friend,
Thank you for the salutation, which removes a load of undeserved false
distinction. Among the waysin spite of your disclaimerthat young man
catches up with the an old oneis that as he masters his mtier, he
becomes the older mans peer; as he superlatively masters his mtier, he
can surpass his elder.
I enjoyed so much your open conversation about Bikku and Bulli. You know
that it is a great honor to have an Indian confide his wifes name. I recall my
thrilling astonishment when Pandeya invited me to his house, where, after he
and I lunched alone, he called his wife from the kitchen and made us known
to each other. That kind of distinction is prized because it can be conferred,
never merely earned. I like to believe that if I came to your house, you
would confer the same honor, and Bulli would be happy to have it so. And
that, as when I visited G. Nageswara Rao in Tirupathi, your son might climb
in my lap and win the heart of the visitor as Raos smallest son conferred
that pleasure.
It is not important that we meet again in the flesh. Our meeting through
letters is closer than many friends get.

I hope that indeed, as I triggered your doctorate, I may have triggered your
readership. I can partly conceive of your suffering at the hands of your
chairman, who is obviously a jealous man. For years at Buffalo, I felt the
animus of my chairman, after having for a half dozen years basked in the
affection of an earlier chairman who admired me. Survival requires holding a
job until we have another. This becomes more critical for a man with wife
and child. As Ben Jonson remarked, He who has a wife and child has given
hostages to fortune. Ive just had occasion to review my years from 1942 to
1947, at 31 years until 36, when we were living in Boston, and I taught at
Tufts University, then moved to Harvard for fulltime graduate work and
teaching freshman English. We brought with us a small daughter of 2, and
my wife during 5 years was pregnant three times, once ending in miscarriage
and twice brought to term, so that in Buffalo in fall 47, we had our full family
of three daughters. I had finished my Harvard courses, and my language
examinations in Latin, French, and German, but I had not passed my oral
examination till May 48, and didnt begin to write my dissertation till early
summer of 49, getting my degree in May 50. Looking back now in fiction
and poetry, I try to master those experiences.
I enclose a review of the poems of Genet, a result of considerable labor,
because as I read the two translations, I discovered that neither was getting
near the full import of the French text, so I had to make my own translation
in order to make a judgment. I have read several other reviews, all
ecstatically praising the translators, and I wonder if any of the reviewers
know French.
Cordially to all,
Lyle Glazier

Thank you for explaining eisonophillic, for me an unknown word, and even
more confiding the intimate context, a context I comprehend from situations
that were similar in their difference.

31.
December 9, 1982
My dear Singh,
I havent heard from you in a long time and fear that you are in a blue mood,
something that I understand very well from my own frequent melancholia.
You have been an active presence here during the visits of some poet
friends, who have admired your book on my poems. What you said is very
discerning.
I am trying to make a difficult decision. A young, and very intelligent scholar
in Buffalo, has been working for some time on what he calls a critical
biography drawn from my poems. Next year he intends to be on sabbatical
for the whole year. The rather famous Poetry Room in the library of the State
University of Buffalo has agreed to accept my books and papers for their
archives, so that they will be where this young mana good friend of the
curator of the collectioncan have access to them.
In some ways I am glad about this, because it means that my writings will
have a safe haven, but I do fear I will miss themand among them your
cherished thesiswhich has consoled me many times when my spirits have
been depressed. I have had your work prominently laid on a small console at
the door of my study, and many people notice it when they enter. Most of
the other books and papers have been set up on the third shelf of my
bookcase, conveniently at my elbow when I work at the typewriter. I can
reach from my chair and pull out whatever book or magazine or offprint I
need.
But if they go to Buffalo, I will be lacking them. For example, yesterday I was
preparing a group of 10 poems to enter in a contest for a chapbook, and I
could lean over to the shelf and find the magazine that had published the
poems.
On the other hand, at my age of 71, I must begin to think of a final resting
place for these papers. I may not have such a good chance again to place
them in a library. They could conceivably be burned someday to get them
out of the way. At the Poetry Room they will be cared for. I think I have made
my decision. I have taken them down and stacked them ready for putting

into boxes. There are many more of them than I thought. Standing up on the
shelf, they make nearly a yard of occupied shelfspace. The most recent is a
festschrift THE LAUREL BOUGH, published at S.V. University in honor of the
retiring chairman of the English department, who has become Vice
Chancellor. My contribution is the first passus of Langlands PIERS PLOWMAN
translated. Dr. Sarma was a Milton scholar, and the Middle English PIERS
PLOWMAN has a passage on the fall of Lucifer and his legions. One line in it
can be literally translated Nine days they fell, as in PARADISE LOST VI, 871,
so my translation could be a tribute to the Milton scholar.
That book of essays was published in Tirupathi in August. Also just come is a
review of James Baldwins last novel JUST ABOVE MY HEAD, printed in the
datalog of Giovannis Room Bookstore. And there are my this years poems in
ORIGIN and COUNTRY JOURNAL. If I send all this stuff I may have no
convenient copy of some of it.
You see the problem. When you receive an honor, it can turn into a hardship
as well. So, when you were invited to Birmingham, the invitation was an
honor, but you were lonely without your son and your wife, and the seminars
or lectures turned out to be of small merit. In your letter describing your visit
to England, what seems to have given you most pleasure was your stopover
in Amsterdam. Even there, you were thinking, How much happier for me if
my darling Bulli were with me.
Please forgive me if I have already sent you copies of the three lyrics, my
most recent publications, in a magazine called THE COUNTRY JOURNAL,
September, 1982, where the poetry editor is famousDonald Hall.
The Shanties (1916-1918)
1
West window looks to the river
beyond houses
strung on the valley road
east window looks to the mountain
We hear the drag of the saw
a long time before
we see the dustcloud
A team is unloading in the bay
Perry snags logs with a canthook
Maurice is sawing

Pop brings Mayflowers in April

swamp pinks in June
wild honeysuckle in July
2
Schoolnights early to bed
from the upper bunk
we boys hear voices
above the ping of horsehoes:
Keep your eyes on this one, Harry,
my ringer will slip
between the legs of your leaner
without touching a hair
3
Dead level
under apple boughs
April to June is muddy,
Mel & I carry lard pails
to the spring box,
the slope
spongy with bluets

A shanty is a one-room shack, like the one I lived in when I was 5, 6, 7.

A canthook is a pole with a hinged hook for catching hold of a log.
The bay is the area in a sawmill where logs are piled before sawing.
Horsehoes are used for playing quoits, throwing them at a stake. If one of
them surrounds the stake, it becomes a ringer, worth 5 points. If it leans
against the stake so that you can get three ringers between the top and the
ground, it becomes a leaner, worth 3 points. If a new player slips a ringer
between the legs of a leaner without knocking it down, he gets the sum of
the points, or 8.
The spring box is a wooden box set into the ground where there is a spring of
water gushing.
Bluets are tiny blue flowers with white centers. They grow in dense clusters,
very fragile, close to the ground.
Love to you three dear friends,

Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1983: 32 - 36

32.
January 28, 1983
Dear R.K. Singh,
I have not done justice to your September letter in which you announce your
wifes second pregnancy, and now I have the January letter telling me that
Bulli and your son have gone to your mother in Patna, where they will stay till
the baby is born. I am not sure of your age, but these letters carry me back
to the 40s when we were having our children, and I was beginning my
graduate work, first at the Bread Loaf School of English in the summer of
1941, and then from 1942 to 1950 at Harvard, when I went up to teach at
Tufts College in Somerville (greater Boston) and was only five miles from
Cambridge, where I went to teach in 1945.
I was 29 years old in 1940 when Laura was born in Lewiston, Maine, where I
was teaching at a small college, and where Amy came after two years in
1939. We had planned not to have children till I finished paying my college
bills, which had remained unpaid, partly because from 1933when both of
my parents committed suicide (my father having lost his job in the
Depression) and from then on I had the care and support of my youngest
brother, 13 in 1933, who came then to live with me. He was with me for a
year in Middlebury, where I had stayed after graduation from college, and
was janitor of a community house. In 1934-5, he went with me to Northfield,
Massachusetts, where I was principal of a grammar school in my home town.
Then, in the fall of 1935, I went across the river to become housemaster in
Mount Hermon School for Boys, and Larry came with me and got tuition free
because I was a teacher. He remained there another year and I went to teach
at Bates College in Lewiston, then he went to Middlebury, where I helped pay

his tuition. He was drafted into the air force in 1942, and when he came
back from the Pacific war against Japan, he had saved most of his pay for 3
years (no place to spend it in the islands) and also had the G.I. Bill funds for
veterans to pay for his college.
I hadnt intended to go in to all that about Larry, but it had to do with our
marriage and feelings about the first baby, because it explains why we were
so determined not to have children for a few years. But in spite of the advice
of a pediatrician, Amys protection against pregnancy didnt work, and very
soon after our marriage she was pregnant. She was very unhappy about it,
and tried by pounding herself to abort, but fetuses are hard to dislodge. I
suppose I was grudgingly glad to know I would become a father. By 1943-4,
when Laura was 3/4 we were well enough settled in Boston to decide
consciously to have a second child and set out to have one. Susan was born
in April 1944. Three years later in Buffalo, where we had just moved from
Boston, and still 3 years before I got my degree, we had the third daughter
Alice. I was 29, 33, and 36 when our daughters were born, and 39 when I got
my degree.
In one way we differed from you. Amy did not go from home to her mothers
for any of the births, but remained always with me to the end. Even so, it
was before the days of father participation in childbirth, so I was firmly
excluded from seeing the child born or having to do with it till we got it
home.
I had had a good deal of experience helping with babies at home, and taking
care of small cousins, so as soon as the baby came home, I helped with its
care, able to do more because Amy never had milk enough to feed the child,
so it was put on formula from the start. I could even get up for night
feedings.
From all this you see why your last two letters about Bullis pregnancy were
especially interesting for me. Please, if you dont mind, tell me in your next
letter how old you are, and how old you were when your son was born. And
please, if you dont mind, instead of writing my son, always when writing to
me, mention his name. I want to have you print his name on my mind
through your letters, and your wifes name, and the name in timeof the
new baby. They must not remain abstract.
I read your three new poems with interest (996, 991, 990). In 991, did it
occur to you to say is within me? That would be simpler and more direct,
less poetic in the wrong sense of what poetry ought to be. #990 is

altogether perfect, very transparently simple and therefore profound. One

small thought: You could even leave out the word through in the second
line.
This moment
visits the dark
alleys of my body
as a guest sleeps

Beautiful, and the two lines about your son make exactly the right turn.
I work here in the basement study nearly every day and usually find
something to work on. I am still working on short stories, also working once
more on the novel, this time having decided to go back to the original six
chapters that I had with me when we met in New Delhi in 1974. This means
that the five chapters set in between each of the other pairs can be revised
as short stories. One of my friends, a professional editor for scholarly
criticism, has objected because, he says that I have tried to combine two
elements that wont coalesce. In his fieldSpanish literaturethere are
domestic novels (about family life, of course) and picaresque novels
(rebellious and neurotic), and I made the mistake, he said, of trying to
include both in one book. He could show me how to make two novels, two
successful novelsone domestic, one picaresque-- out of my one failure. I
tell him that the story of a married homosexual who truly loves his wife and
children, yet is driven by compulsive homosexuality, is exactly the
combination of domestic and picaresque, and I would rather fail with my
ground than succeed with his simplified texts. My hero engages in neurotic
homosexuality, then returns home to feed the baby and have sex with his
wife. Nobody, I think, has yet published such a novel, yet it doesnt mean
that there are no married homosexuals.
Yrs,
Lyle Glazier

33.

March 25 83
Dear R.K. Singh,
When your letter came, I went to the typewriter to answer, but something
interfered ( Ive forgotten what) and it is delayed far too long.
Your mothers death makes me think how inevitable death is for all of us. I
have been anticipating mine without grief in the thought. It is merely an
inevitable Passover as I think of itfrom life as a human being to life as
part of the larger world , no longer conscious of myself, but in the great
stream of nature. Perhaps I sent you my poem written when I thought about
my death:
Stopping in woods
Next year I
will drift with
snow on that
saddle beyond the
saphouse, it doesnt matter
who owns the woods

A saphouse is a house for boiling down sap from maple trees to make maple
syrup, the sweet syrup North American Indians taught Europeans how to
make. We have such a house in the pasture and behind it a woods with a
road winding through it, and along that road is a place where Mayflowers
grow in early spring. This is where Amy and I have instructed our family to
scatter our ashes after we have been cremated. There will be no burial rites,
but if sometimes later, the family wants to meet for a loving memorial
service, we are happy to tell them now that the thought pleases us.
The title of my poem comes from the title of a well known poem by Robert
Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:
Whose woods there are I think I know
his house is in the village, though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

Unfortunately I do not have a picture of myself to send Bulli at the moment,

but perhaps I will have one by the next letter.

By now I suppose you may have another son or daughter. I recall so well the
strain of childcarrying and childbirth when you are young and poor, as we
were when Laura was born. Amy had planned not to have a child till I was
through graduate school. Then we had Laura the first year, and Amy had to
stop teaching in order to bear her. It was difficult for Amy, but as for me I
was happy in a way to have a baby. All fathers, perhaps, are glad to know
they are fertile.
I think when you have the baby home with you, you will be happy to have
(him/her). Babies are so enchanting it they are well. They make us forget
our anxieties for ourselves and transfer the anxieties into love and planning
and hoping for the happier life for the baby. Bikku will like to have a young
brother or sister, if he is not jealous. Even if he is, he will learn. Jealousy is
natural for the first child when the second comes. Please tell me whether
Bikku is a formal name or a nickname. It sounds loving and intimate.
I cannot suggest a name for you. Ours are so different from yours. Our
youngest daughter Alice, changed her name to Alis when were in Turkey in
1961-2, because that was the way Turks spelled it, and with an accent on the
second syllable, where the British/American accent is on the first.
I like your two poems about the train moving until the thief steals the tracks,
and now that will it do? Also the one about the monkey with snakes in the
lining of his coat.
I will copy you one of my recent ones:
Saw River Bottom
Bare under overalls
my cousin and I
are skipping stones
in the shallows beyond the coalkiln.
You have a better
arm, your muscle is
better. Let me feel
your muscle.
The trick is the stone,
find a flat one,
lay it flat, it ought
to kiss the water.
Kiss, kiss, kiss.
Let the stone kiss
the water. Lookit,
like this.
Like this?

lips parted. Lookit.

My flat stone is skipping,
skipping

Affectionate greetings to you all.

Your friend
Lyle Glazier

34.

May 7
83
Dear R.K. Singh,
If there is a book on revising a thesis for publication, I dont know it. The
most important hurdle is to get a publisher to accept the script and to find
somebody to pay the bill, and you have achieved these goals.
Congratulations. I never was able to change my Spenser thesis enough to
get it published, though two chapters did get published, revised. My revisions
for those chapters involved absorbing as many footnotes as possible into the
text, and omitting some others that would not be needed by a general
reader. That is probably the chief change that can be madeto adapt a
scholarly book for a general audience. The bibliography at the end can
provide the scholarly look. I dont think that you will need to make major
changes. The object should probably be to make the book more readable,
less a compendium for scholars to consult. Not having had your success in
finding a publisher, I am not the one to advise you. A short time ago I
received from K.S. Misra his TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH POETIC DRAMA,
Vikas, New Delhi, 1981. It is quite heavily footnoted, and I doubt if there
were many changes from thesis to book. If you are planning to omit one
chapter, you are already making a major change which may be sufficient to
persuade your publisher that you have done your publishing homework.

I have been reading about pirated publications in Indiahow some

publishers reprint foreign books changing only the name of the author. Does
much of that go on? K.S. Misra asked me to send him a script of my
unpublished GREAT DAY COMINGon Black American experience in books by
both Black and White authorsand I sent the script two years ago, but have
never heard it has been published. My script was accepted by a reader at
the Univ. of Massachusetts Press but then turned down by a faculty
committee as controversial, then at Yale University Press, it was liked by
the editor but turned down by a scholar, who felt it was publishable but not
at that time at Yale. Hacettepe University Press in Turkey would have
published it in 1971, but I never submitted it there.
So much for academese.
I loved your letter with all its talk about little Winny and Bikku and Bulli, and I
like to have your formal names, and your won nickname even if I never use
them. The story about Bikkus jealousy at the thought of a brother and
delight to have a sisterhow charming it is, and so humanly universal. I like
to hear about the children, about Bikkus starting to go to school. What a
cycle we families go through. I read about Bikku going to school and I
remember my first day in school, when I was five years old. At recess I
walked down the road with other children, feeling very grown up. When I
passed a small playmate, in his dooryard, not yet old enough to be a
scholar (our word for school children), I patted him on the head. One of
the older girls ran back and told the teacher that I had struck Kenneth Leach,
a I was afraid and ran over the hills toward the shanty (the loggers hut)
where we were then living while my father worked in a travelling sawmill.
One of the big Polish boys followed me and brought me back on his
shoulders. The teacher understood that the big girl was a tattler, and I was
not punished until I got home, where older brother Melvin (two years older)
who had not seen the incident but only heard the tale-bearer, told my
mother who told my father how cruel I had been to the little boy. When my
father came home, I was spanked even though I was crying already, I didnt
do it! I didnt do it! Melvin was jealous of me, the second boy, in the same
way Bikku would have been jealous of a little brother. Melvin would all my
childhood treat me like a slave. Last month I wrote a poem about it:
Baseball practice for Mel
from the time I was five
catching without a mitt
chasing wild pitches
down the dirt road

to the culvert
and expected, on the way back
to throw out my arm

I was Mels adoring slave until we went to Middlebury College as freshman

classmates and roommates in 1929. There we lived on the third floor in a
stone dormitory built in 1800. The shower was in the basement. If Mel forgot
to bring up his towel, he would say, Lyle, I left my shower towel downstairs,
and I would go get it. One day he said, Lyle, I left my towel downstairs. I
was studying and paid no attention. Lyle, my towel is still in the basement.
I didnt raise my eyes. Lyle, Ive already told you twice! I left my towel in the
basement! I dont recall what I said if I said anything, but at eighteen years
old that was my declaration of independence. Mel punished me for his
jealousy by making me his all too willing slave.
Your story about Winny at night She keeps us awake, for she wants
someone to talk tois exactly what we had with Alice, our third daughter,
who was born in Buffalo in 1947. We were living in a tiny house with two
small bedrooms, in one of which Laura (then 7) and Susan 3 slept. Alice had
to sleep in a crib crowded close to our bed and every night she would wake
after midnight and start talking and laughing and singing, until finally we
would get up and carry our bedclothes to the living room couch. After two
years, when I knew I had tenure, we bought a house in the suburbsa very
large house with an upstairs which had a large hall and four bedrooms one
for each daughter and one for us. It was a lovely place for children, an acre
of ground, with a good garden and flowers and trees, so different from the
shanty I lived in when a child and the rickety house we then moved into
though as for that, although we were poor and my clothes were ragged, we
lived in wonderful mountainous country, with troutstreams and a river a half
mile awaythe ideal world for a small boy. I was a good boy when I was
watched, and a hedonist when I was not. As for that, I am sure my mother
saw more than she mentioned, living by the rule, have em, love em, and
leave em be. She was a little woman, small enough to stand under my
shoulder:
Running home for lunch
crossing the little bridge
beyond Frank Howes
visualizing, on the rise,
Moms eyes at the windowjog
facing northeast along the barn door
so short shed be looking under

the double middle joint

between top bottom sashes

Im writing on back of a Xeroxed copy of a childhood poem, the Xerox made

so the inmates would have a copy when I gave a poetry workshop last month
at Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Alice, that little
girl now 35 years old, is conducting classes to help inmates pass high school
equivalency examinations for high school diplomas. I was there on Good
Friday in April, and about 15 young men came to my workshop. I was
apprehensive, never before having read poems to prisoners, but they were
very well behaved, attentive and interested (asked good questions, as
intelligent as any good high school or college freshmen class). Of course,
they knew that if they misbehaved they would be locked in their cellblock.
Most of them were in jail for petty crimes like Driving while Drunk, or
possession of Marijuana, or perhaps violence in the family. All of them, Im
sure, thought they were guiltless and blamed society for arresting them.
Anti-Establishment, myself, I could identify with them more than they
realized.
Last week I drove two hundred miles to read from my new book AZUBAH NYE
at the Bellevue Press in Binghamton, New York, near the Pennsylvania line,
southwest of Albany. There I began with a first draft and a final draft of Saw
Mill River Bottom, that poem about skipping stones. It is supposed to be a
happy poem. The younger boy is admiring his older cousin. When he hears,
Kiss the water, he begins to come emotionally alive and thinks Kiss, kiss,
kiss as if reflecting Girls, girls, girls. I think something like that is happening.
You ask me to send the full poem Stopping in Woods You have it all. I
enclose the poetry postcard that was sent for an invitation to guests asked to
come to my reading.
I was much interested to read how your wife went home to her mother to
have the baby. So different from here. When Laura was born in 1940, we
were living in Lewiston, Maine, 300 miles from Amys home in Bennington,
Vermont. Amy went to the hospital in Lewiston on a hot day in mid July, and
there Laura was born in late night July 31. I brought them home after three
days, and after a week Amys mother came for a visit. Susan was born on
April 15, 1944 in the Boston Lying In Hospital, when I was teaching at
Harvard, and Alice was born on October 31 in Buffalo in mid afternoon. A
neighbor had come in to sit with Amy, and I had gone to my afternoon class.
Toward the end of the hour, the department secretary knocked on the door,

and whispered that I had a new daughter. I went to the blackboard and with
chalk wrote in tiny letters, too small for them to read, I have just become a
father. Then I collected my books and papers, and left, while behind me the
students gathered to read my message.
If the children were born today, I would be welcome in the delivery room,
invited to watch the birth. But thirty years ago, I was not welcome. In
Lewiston, in 1940, I was allowed to sit by Amys bed while she tried to drop
off to sleep. The nurse didnt think a father had a right to be there. She kept
coming in to check on me. Amy had just said, I think if only you would lie
on the edge of the bed and hold me, I could drop off to sleep, when the
nurse burst in like a hornet and ordered me off the bed and out of the room,
And I dont want to see your face again till after the baby is born! She
thought I had designs on my wife.
Affectionate greetings to you allyou, my friend & Bulli,
Bikku, & Winny
Lyle G

35.
June 29, 1983
My dear R.K. Singh:
Im sorry I got off my letter of June 24 before reading your SAVITRI: An
Overview and a Summing Up as it appeared THE CALL BEYOND. Your
Conclusion is so well written and such a good summary of Aurobindos
intentions and techniques (insofar as I comprehend them) that you make me
wonder why you need an occidental commentator to intrude with ill-digested
observations about a work, which, as you say, has brought to bear the
whole course of Vedic and Upanishadic mythology as well as the Eastern and
Western classical learning on the appreciation of its dense spiritual
texture.
Do you really comprehend how good that is, and how nearly impossible for
an American to do justice to it?

I have felt all along from my reading that your chapters are both descriptive
and informative, and that an Indian publisher ought to be alert to the
extraordinary merit of your thesis.
What you say about the plan of the epic, and its cogent execution is, in my
opinion, just right, and if what I am now saying can be of any service to you,
by all means make use of this letter.
All along, my criticism of Savitri has had to do with its poetic texture of
rhythm, imagery, and language, where, I feel, Aurobindo fails to persuade
me that he has mastered English idiom. Along with his effects of grandeur,
Milton (Aurobindos professed master) never forgotwhat he said in his essay
OF EDUCATION (written when he was 36) that poetry ought to be simple,
sensuous, and passionate. Those virtues are not SAVITRIs; yet, accepting
its dedication to the OVERMIND (or OVERHEAD), no one, I think, could do
fuller justice to the epic than you have.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier
Professor Emeritus (English)
State University of New York at Buffalo

36.
August 1, 1983
Dear R.K. Singh, my good friend,
Having received your letter of July 9, after you got mine of June 24, I waited
to hear whether the letter of June 29 reached you, because it was written
after I received the Conclusion of your book and wrote you how impressive I
found it. In that letter I hoped you would find an expression of admiration
that might help you negotiate with a publisher.
In many ways, your experience with SAVITRI matches mine with Spensers
FAERIE QUEENE. I needed a subject for a thesis, and had one started in
earlier papers on Spenser, andprompted by a remark of John Crowe
Ransom to get on with the doctorate no matter what you choose for a thesis

it doesnt matterjust get it over with so that you can have the degree
and go on to what you become interested in.
That is pretty much what happened to me. I had no sooner finished the
thesis and had a couple of articles from it published, than I got into American
Literature, and Spenser seemed a long way off. Furthermore, I had no
interest in writing any more about him, having exhausted what I had to say.
It was only years later that to my surprisemy thesis was rediscovered and
cited as a germinal study of Spensers treatment of the war between good
and evil for control over the human spirit in SOURCE AND MEANING IN
SPENSERS ALLEGORY by J.E. Hankins, Oxford U. Press, 1972.
With your interest in writing lyrics, I doubt if you will devote your scholarly
activities to becoming a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. I think you are too much
concerned with the day to day life in India to be diverted to that kind of elitist
propaganda for letting problems be solved by the Overhead. At the same
time, as a study of SAVITRI yours is excellent and deserves publication, and I
hope it will be published. What I tried to say in my last letter was that as
someone on the outside I could not pose as sharing the admiration for
Aurobindos poetics, that quite naturally in the course of your study, you
were indeed to promote. In the same way my chapter on Spensers
centripetal Imagery (published as an essay in Modern Language Quarterly
in Dec. 1955) is more flattering toward Spensers technique than I probably
could be today; it is something I would not even want to reconsider. And I
expect that you, too, having achieved a distinction with your thesis beyond
anything I achieved with mine, will someday look back on it as a stepping
stone toward achievements in other areas of research, and creative
expression. You would no more write a SAVITRI than I would write a FAERIE
QUEENE.
I am glad you included a lyric woodening housewhich I think is a good
sign, even though I dont think that this one is one your best, and I say that
realizing how, if you are like me, it is not easy to have some one say that the
last poem you written is not your best. I go through spells of weeks and
months when I hardly write anything worth salvaging, jotting down finger
exercises, hoping they may be better than I think they are. It is part of the
writing craft to turn out such practice pieces. But you have done much better
poems. The phrase tenebrous void is poetic in the worst sense. It doesnt
sound like something you would say to your wife or your friend, and poetry
has to come from the real language of talk between people. I think there is a
poem behind Woodening House that doesnt get written.

I doubt if you have suffered a great loss in not having Menke Katz for a
sponsor. Partly because I wished to do anything possible to support your
relationship with him, I sent him not a poem as a submission, but my book
TWO CONTINENTS, that I once sent you. In his note to me, he suggested
that we exchange publications, but I have not heard from him since, and
assume that he did not appreciate my kind of poetry. No more do I
appreciate his rather grandiose pose of being a seer or a Prophetic Voice. I
would have liked very much to have seen his poems about his childhood in
Lithuania if he had sent me a copy.

Recess
Scholars at Number Four schoolhouse
streaming into the road
scratching three lines in gravel
for pom pom pullaway
darting to cheat the jailor
faking to help a friend
big boys are last ones caught
At noontime boys gulp sandwiches
link hands, wheel in a line,
crack the whip on the endman
for ever thrown end
over end, girls
eat lunch with Miss Dalton
At half past twelve
everybody plays hide and seek
anybody hanging around my goal will be It!
Last minute activity behind outhouses
under brushpiles, on the top stairs
of the fire escape
Move over!
Find your own place!
Hes in there with a girl!
Miss Dalton rings the handbell
Gobble gobble in free!
Come on Frank, Elizabeth!
I know where you are!

Yours most cordially,

Lyle G

LETTERS: 1984: 37-40

37.
January 27, 1984
Dear R.K. Singh,
After several days delay and considerable thought, I decided to take your
suggestion to write Dr. V. Rai about my black literature manuscript. I would
have no objection, in fact would welcome it, if Dr Misra is able to have my
book published at Allied Publishers. My only frustration, as I told you, was
having so much time pass with no report on his negotiations. I am writing Dr.
Rai today telling him this. I would not do anything to interfere with a bona
fide offer for publication, if Misra is able to get one.
You had every right, after reading the last paragraph of my last letter, to
intercede in my behalf, yet on reflection, I realize that to withdraw the
manuscriptif Misra does succeed in getting a favorable receptionwould
cancel out my own effort to have the manuscript Xeroxed and sent to Misra
in the first place. If he can get a publisher for it, that is what I intended.
Please do not continue to press me to review your book. I will be happy to
have a copy if you send it, but I cannot review it. Reviewing is an art that
should be practiced from strength, and I have no strength as a reviewer. Nor
any prestige or claim to authority when it comes to judging Sri Aurobindo. I
realize this more and more as I read what you write about him.
I never had reviews for my books except rarelyone for ORCHARD PARK AND
ISTANBUL in the Buffalo newspaper, and another in a review at the
University; none at all for YOU TOO, VD, and THE DERVISHES; and two for
TWO CONTINENTS. None in influential publications. My feeling is that if
ever my work achieves sufficient substance to merit wide recognition, it may
get it. Or may not. There is a lot of luck in such matters. But my main job is
to promote my writing by writing. Let the reviews come as they may from
people who have enough interest to do the reviewing without prompting
from me. I have been surprised, always, and of course delighted to get

recognition, like your thesis, which came as a great surprise when I heard
what you were engaged in. I was flattered and pleased, but I would never
have suggested to Pandeya that he encourage one of his graduate students
to write a thesis on my poetry.
Speaking of Dr. Pandeya, you havent mentioned him in your letter. Was he
there when you visited Varanasi? The last you wrote me was disturbing, how
his students had repudiated him and his chairmanship was in danger of
being revoked. That seems such a miscarriage of justice, for from all that I
know of him, he is one of the best teachers and most thorough scholars I met
when I was in India. And I considered him my good friend. Yet, except for
your unhappy news, I have heard nothing from him in three years.
I continue to write anti-Reagan, and hope there is chance that he will not
succeed in being re-elected, but many Americans like him for his militarism,
believing that he is making the US strong and respected as a great Power.
After being an Independent for 50 years, I am now on the Bennington County
Democratic Committee, working to defeat Reagan, but I do not
underestimate his cleverness and the greed and skill of his cronies.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier

38.

April 16, 1984

Dear R.K. Singh,
I have had a letter from your publisher that
two copies of your book are
being sent me. I will read them with interest, and if there is somewhere I can
review, I will. I have just renewed my subscription to BOSTON REVIEW,
thinking that perhaps that magazine would be interested in your work. I
have no doubt of the excellence of your interpretation. If the copies come by
overseas nonairmail it may be some time before I see them. It is a good
book. You must be happy at the thought of its being in print. I hope your
reviews will reflect your long and serious efforts, giving you the credit you
deserve. And, as I say, I will do what I can for you here.
As for your own reviewing, I think you are doing just right. You learn by
reviewing, particularly as a young scholar this is important. Only old fogeys

like me can reach a point where they can afford to be choosy, not wishing to
get up another new subject in order to review it. But in your case, I do feel
different, because, for one thing, you have been educating me on SAVITRI for
a long time, and took the trouble to send me a copy of the epic.
I become more and more disturbed at the thought of what may have
happened to Dr. Pandeya, an intelligent and humane scholar if ever I knew
one. I cannot comprehend what has happened. I do not ever hear from him
now, although I have written to him a number of times, only last February to
recommend a colleague of mine who was traveling from Buffalo to Banaras
to read poetry there. He wrote that he was unable to find Dr. Pandeya. Let
me ask you this. When I was at Sanaa University teaching American
literature, Dr. Pandeya attended my classes. I illustrated the American
imperical method of teaching, insisting that my students read the poems and
stories we were discussing. Every day I began with their criticisms before
branching out from what they said to what I myself had to say. Dr. Pandeya
seemed much struck with the method. Do you think there is a chance he
tried to introduce that method at BHU and his students revolted? I know
that in Turkey it was new for my students to have to read what was being
lectured on. I carried enough books so that everybody had a copy.
I am sure that at ISM you have the same problem scholars have all over
India, especially at the smaller institutions. There may be only one library in
all India, where, say all the novels of Thomas Hardy can be found. So the
director of a thesis, for example, may have to travel to that library if he
wishes to keep up with his student. Your choice of Aurobindo and of your
method proved to be excellent, because your chief resource was the epic
itself. Not that you didnt work hard to cover secondary research. But like
me, your interest was chiefly in your own first hand examination of a text. I
doubt if research of that kind will ever go out of style.
Yes, I am strongly anti-Reagan, for I think he believes that the rest of the
world ought to bow down and worship American business enterprise, and
that American ought chiefly to protect their own interests. He has no idea
that Hindus are people, or Moslems people, or Central Americans are people
in their own right, and deserving of their own privileges without the
assistance of US military force. Right now I am organizing supporters of Jesse
Jackson for our Vermont Caucus. Jackson is interested in people, people of all
ethnic backgrounds, all nationalities, rich and poor, particularly poor and
underprivileged. The US is not at the mercy of Republicans only.
Too
many Democrats support the upper class privileges. We are far from being

democracy except in our political structure, which has the trapping of

democracy without always having the spirit of sharing.
I always enjoy your poems, and enjoy the two in your last letter.
I understand #1941 without agreeing with it, except possibly with your
privilege of describing a particular homosexual couple, and understanding
that not all homosexual unions need be sterile. Though they will not have
children, homosexual lovers may be creative, as, for example, the union of
Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle was creative if it produced some of the
beautiful love poems of Whitman. I myself am critical of exclusive
homosexuals when they are only dilettantes, when they produce nothing.
But I would notas you domeasure them on whether they will get to
heaven. I have never yet read a description of Heaven (Christian, Moslem,
Buddhist, Hindu) that makes me want to go to such an exclusive, prestigious
gathering. I like better the thought of melting back into the soil and
becoming part of it.

What I remember
of the teenager
who seduced the
five year old
in the double bed
of the little chamber
at Grams
--eager,
and afterwards tyrannical
Dont you tell your Gram!
Was fear for himself only?
next spring
he was gone to his mother,
I spent hours
traveling roads
into woods
hoping to find anybody
anybody like him
ten years
until I was a teenager,
mind full of his phallos,
lept at the thought of him
readying for him

Yrs.

Lyle G

39.

July 5, 1984
Dear friend, R.K. Singh,
I apologize for not writing sooner. You cant imagine how busy Ive been. I
excused myself with the poor excuse that I had not received the copies of
your book promised in a letter from Prakash Book Depot, dated 3.4.84, and
returned to them for more postage. I begin to think they must have sent the
package by sea mail, and that can take forever.
I got involved in the Jesse Jackson campaign in the presidential election, and
finally became the author of a proposal by which Vermont became the first
state to grant him the delegates he has earned for the national convention at
San Francisco next week. Last summer Mondale and his supporters, knowing
they were the only candidate to have an organization in every state,
persuaded the Democratic National Rules Committee to pass a rule that a
candidate must receive at least 20% of the votes in a state primary in order
to win delegates to the national convention. I circulated a petition for a rules
change in Vermont, writing to every prominent democrat in the state, and
then making a speech at our state convention, resulting in our changing the
rule so that Jackson got 3 out of 17 delegates. A lot of other people worked
for it, so I dont deserve too much credit, but I am happy with the outcome of
my first year as a Party member, after 50 years of being an Independent. Its
not that I think Jackson should be President, he has given up hope for that,
but I want him to have firm support for influencing the Convention to a more
liberal stand on platform issues, and for his excursions into international
diplomacy. He is doing well. For the first time I begin to hope that there is a
chance Reagan can be defeated.
The second thing that has taken my time has been trying to work on my
poem AZUBAH NYE, which will now appear in ORIGIN magazine in early fall. I
will try to send you a copy. I gave a reading last June 21 at the little
schoolhouse in Massachusetts, where the events of the poem took place. All
my relatives were present as well as other friends I hadnt seen in 50 years.

Right now Im getting prepared to go back to teaching next fallto teach a

course in Richard Wright, the great Black American novelist, who spent his
last years in Paris. In organizing Bennington delegates for Jackson, I got
acquainted with students at a small college here, and learned that there
were no course sin Black authors at their school, and offered to give one,
and perhaps finish the book on Wright and Melville I started when I taught a
graduate course in those two authors in Buffalo in summer 1974.
On May 1, our youngest daughter Alis came back from Jamaica, West Indies,
where she had been teaching since December, and stayed with us while
preparing the introduction to her thesis on problems of teaching English to
Creole-speaking Jamaican children. On last Sunday she left to return for a
year.
Shes 35 years old, still very beautiful, intelligent, but lonely. She wants to
find a good man to marry. Men take advantage of her. Im afraid she will
take chances with one of the handsome dark skinned men who will make
trouble for her. You know, that dark skin does not trouble me, but poverty
can drive a man to take chances in order to get money from a woman, and
loneliness can make a good woman his prey. Neither at fault.
I was really pleased to have a copy of POETRY TIME with my translation of
Baudelaires invocation to the Reader for his book Les Fleurs du Mal. The
editor of a small magazine here has also written about his interest in having
these translations but I am happy to have the sign of an interest there, also.
It was a special pleasure to share space in the issue where your good poem
appeared, so that we are collaborators in the magazine.
By now your news in your April letter is so far back that you will have
covered it over with better news, I hope. It was painful to read how you had
to go through that arduous time of forced abortion. I hope that Bulli has fully
recovered, and that the children are both now in good health. I know what it
is to have an unexpected pregnancy, for besides out three daughters, Amy
carried one child to term (born dead) and another into several months before
miscarriage. Such things are difficult to endure.
This morning is the first I have had to begin to clear up a large backlog of
letters that have piled up since April. Yours is one of the first.
If your book does not arrive soon, I have thought of looking back over the
chapters you sent me to see whether there is enough there to furnish a clue.

I would rather see the whole, of course, before deciding whether I know
enough to review it.
Not one word from Dr. Pandeya. I fear he has suffered a great blow. I
respect him more than any other professor I met in India in the time I was
there (1970, 71). I cannot imagine what happened.
Cordial greetings,
Lyle Glazier

40.
August 30, 1984
Dear friend R.K. Singh,
After wracking my brains for a long time I have come up with a review of
sorts, thanks to your thesis, which for the first time made it possible for me
to follow the thread of the narrative and the theme. I am afraid that you will
find my review very simple and innocent of insights. I am not satisfied, but
rather surprised that I was able to get this much done.
I have sent a copy under separate cover, mailed this morning. As you will
see, I felt that Americans would need a double review of both the epic (and
the letters on the epic) and your thesis. I hope that you wont be
disappointed and that for you my admiration of your work will come through.
Yesterday I had an acceptance from a very good critic Donald Hall for the
Country Journal, which liked the lyric Sugaring off. Also Ive been invited
to State University of New York at Buffalo on October 2 to read my folk epic
(as I call it) Azubah Nye. They pay air flight & $200, not great but good.
Donald Halls magazine pays $50, enough for me to rent a car while in
Buffalo.
Please write me what you think about the review.
Yrs.
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1985: 41 - 42

41.
January 31, 1985

Dear R.K. Singh,

I am so glad to have your poems MY SILENCE. They seem as fresh and pure
as if I never saw them before. You give me far too much credit, for the
poems are fully yours. Even the title is in the poems, repeated several times.
I your friend Krishna Srinivas wrote a fine preface, and Im so glad he found a
way to incorporate my single sentence, which I had forgotten till I see it
again. How clever of somebody to have noticed that by rearranging it could
become a lyric. I am proud to appear on your back cover.
I have been silent so long because I wanted to send word that I have placed
my review of SAVITRI, but so far no such acceptance. I sent it first to
BOSTON REVIEW, from where it came back with a printed rejection, then to
AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, where after two months it came back with a
generous letter that although they admired it, it seemed on final judgement
to be too specialized for them. It is now at U. Michigans JOURNAL OF
SOUTHEAST ASIAN LITERATURE, a suggestion of yours. It has been there
more than a month. Competition is fierce in the US; nothing moves fast.
By now you should have ORIGIN magazine Fifth Series #4, sent you at last 6
weeks ago airmail, with my narrative poem AZUBAH NYE (26 pages). There
are also 25 prefatory lyrics to the narrative, most of which have appeared in
earlier issues of ORIGIN, some in COUNTRY JOURNAL, one more in the
JOURNAL for March 85, arriving in yesterdays mail. A publisher/editor in
Brattleboro, Vermont40 miles from herehas written for permission to
print all these lyrics in a small booklet. The whole poemnarrative plus
lyricshas been sent at the suggestion of Cid Corman (editor of ORIGIN) to
his friend Allan Kornblum, publisher/editor of Coffee House Press, a very good
place. I wait for his decision.
Also a novel dealing with some of the material is being read by the publisher
of Millers River Press, with headquarters near the scene of action, the locality

where I grew up. And my short novel STILLS FROM A MOVING PICTURE is
being read by another publisher/editor, who is interested in it but not sure if
he can handle it.
Most of my time this past year was devoted to anti-Reagan campaign, and
lately to a Bennington squabble to get rid of a corrupt superintendent of
public schoolsmany letters to the BENNINGTON BANNER, and some very
bad feeling stirred up between those who attack and those who support the
superintendent, a lot of spent emotion, and I at the center of controversy,
which seems on the way of settlement, because just this week the man has
resigned as of June 30 next.
One more thing: It can remain a secret between us that the quotation from
your published thesis as quoted in K.S.s last paragraph, came from my
essay in STRAIT magazine. I spotted it when I first read the thesis.
Congratulations on your honorary title
Yrs. cordially,
Lyle Glazier

42.

May 8, 1985

Dear R.K. Singh:

Will write a short letter rather than wait for time to write a long one. Very
glad to have yours with your news, the last one from Vienna, where Amy and
I were for a week in early summer 1969. Im glad you can travel even to a
conference that does not wholly please you.
Thank you for several letters and all your news. Its so good to know you will
have a second book. Im happy for you.

My spring has been very busy. Teaching 4 tutorial students has taken time,
all four reading a different trackfeminist literature, classic novels of
American 19th century, Black authors, and Dantes INFERNO. The last,
especially has been a lot of work. I insisted on a bilingual edition with notes,
so that we could follow the Italian even though it is a language neither had
studied. But the prose translation close enough so that it was possible to
follow the original.
Thank you for finding a publication for my Baudelaire poem. I may have told
you that a publisher near here in Brattleboro will bring out my 25 prefatory
lyrics to AZUBAH NYE next January. Then I will hope to have a publisher for
the whole book, the narrative and the preface. Also, I go to Greenfield,
Massachusetts next week for a conference with another publisher who would
like to bring out my novel SUMMER WITH JOEY on the summer of an eleven
year old boy, 1920. I am not sure he can find funding.

Letter
Li Wang Chen to a Widow
Let us comfort
each other. I
believe you: My
husband would not
let me touch him,
I would lie awake
wanting to touch him.
Please write me.
My dear,
ten years ago
my wife dole me
Thats enough,
time to put
a stop to it.
How could I tell her
I cried because
I am grateful? Since,
all night I
lie wanting her
to touch me, I
lock the door like
a boy hiding what
he does from

his mother.
Write soon.

Best wishes to all.

I do hope that your many publications will soon help you find a university
more to your liking.
Yrs.
Lyle G.

LETTERS: 1986: 43 - 44
43.
April 7, 1986
Dear friend Singh,
Your letter of December 16 contained much of especial interest. At that time
you had no definite word from Nigeria but were having misgivings about the
advisibility of going there. As I wrote you, my Bennington friends spent two
years there in an outlying bush school and were miserable and came back no
richer than when they went. Furthermore, they were able to beg funding for
coming back only by pretending it would be a furlough, after which they
would return.
I deeply sympathize with your anti-Establishment attitude. I feel that the
Reagan administration is moving us faster and faster toward a world split
between Rich and Poor even more than in the past, and that to safeguard his
friends he has risked a military buildup that guarantees anti-Americanism
throughout the world, and will likely bring on the World War we have all been
fearing.

To write poetry has become a luxury that I can hardly afford. For two years,
Ive devoted most of my energies to exposing our Bennington grassroots
corruption. At my own expense I printed a 60-page booklet BENNINGTON
POLITICS AND THE SCHOOLS bringing the story up to December 7, 1985,
and this week will come out a 10page postscript. I sell the books at cost
through a local bookstore. Even so, I dont get back all I put in.
I enclose a Xerox of a letter from Raaj Prakashan that reached me in
February. Though I wrote back asking for a copy of my book, Ive not got
one. I was supposed to have gone to North Yemen this month to sit on a
committee for their first graduate school candidates in English, but I had to
withdraw my acceptance of their invitation when Amy had three slight
strokes beginning December 7. I would not wish to be away from her so
long.
If you know anything about Raaj Prakashan, and have any way of finding out
whether my book is actually issued, Id be grateful for information.
Our youngest daughter now in Jamaica, West Indies, has just married a
Jamaican (very black, she tells us). We have not seen him. She is having
trouble now persuading the American Embassy to issue a permit for him to
enter the U.S. He would like to become a citizen.
Our April weather has turned cold again after two weeks of summer weather.
Now we are back in March. Yesterday a blanket of snow. The birds coming
north were baffled. I threw out handfuls of corn.
I hope to have your news.
Your friend,
Lyle Glazier

44.
August 12, 1986
Dear friend R.K. Singh,
Your letter of April 21 has been reread and often in my mind. The two
photographs of your children and you and your wife are scotchtaped on my

study wall where I can always see them as I sit at my typewriter. I wish I
could have you for a visitor. After all my years of travel, I sit now here and
travel sometimes in my mind, or my dreamsas last night I was back in
Instanbul visiting friends, and for some reason making an elaborate play for
them to have a memorial dinner for me after I left to come home. Why
would I dream that? Has it become time to dream of memorials? I hope I
have some time left for traveling in my mind. As Thoreau said about his life a
hundred miles east of here, I do most of my traveling in Concord. I do
most of my traveling in Bennington, particularly the past two years when I
have devoted so much energy to the local scandal, which is a small capsule
condensation of the political scandals throughout the world. President
Reagan has had too much influence. I suppose he thinks of himself as a
Messiah sent to deliver the world from Communism. His deliverance is
terrorism, both domestic and foreign, for he has changed the United States
from a upward mobility society to a society where the masses of people are
worse and worse off. He has no sympathy for farmers who lose their farms
that have been in the family for years, for steel workers whose jobs are lost
because the owners want money more than production and merge with
some company making computers or farm out the raw ore to companies in
Asia, where common labor can be hired for $.50 an hour, instead of the $12
to $14 that our steelmakers used to enjoy. He has destroyed the labor
unions beyond the havoc they wreaked on themselves with their bosses who
became mobsters. And of all this Bennington is a microcosm.
My criticism has not been written without priceboth the effort required for
holding in my mind all the small events and going back to what happened
two years ago in order to comprehend what happened yesterday,-- both that
effort and the tension that comes from knowing that several times there has
been an effort to trap me. Enough people know about my bisexualism so
that there were two or perhaps three elaborate attempts to catch me in an
incriminating situation that could have been flaunted in the BANNER: Lyle
Glazier arrested at the corner of Bradford Extension and County Road and
accused of offering to commit an obscene act. There would have been no
chance for establishing innocence. By the time the case reached out, trial by
newspaper would have persuaded most readers of my guilt. Each time I saw
there the plot and outwitted it.
I sympathize with your desperation over being sentenced to teach there is
Dhanbad. I wish you could have some of the freedom I had from traveling to
Turkey and India and Yemen. I doubt if you are more miserable than I was for
years at Buffalo.

Meanwhile your children are growing up. They do. Mine, all three girls were
here two weeks ago. They are now 46 (Laura), 42 (Susan) and 39 (Alice).
Laura couldnt make a living from music, and is a computer programmer for
the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street, feeling herself a drone in one of
those heartless corporations. Susan, married, has a farm in the country, and
looms for weaving. Alis is an assistant next year in the Education
Department of the U. Massachusetts, trying to find work for her new
Jamaican husband, a shy man, gentle. They will be visiting us Saturday and
Sunday.
Over for a letter from a publisher about my novel SUMMER FOR JOEY.
All best wishes,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1987: 45 49

45.

August 22, 1987

Dear friend R.K. Singh,

I am glad to have your letter with the news that you got my novel SUMMER
FOR JOEY and that word has come of a review copy of GREAT DAY COMING
having been sent you.
My publisher made the mistake, against my instructions, to send your copy
of the novel by slow mail when I had specified airmail. Im sorry it was
delayed.
About GREAT DAY COMING, I cannot say much about the book until I have a
copy in hand. There have been so many delays. Please send my thanks to

your friend and publisher for his care in speeding the process by his frequent
phone calls.
I cannot at this time mail you an article. I would like, if you think it
appropriate, in due time, to write a short essay on GREAT DAY COMING as
historical criticism, written at the height of our civil rights militancy and
reflecting optimism that at that time there was a chance that we would have
a true revolution for Blacks and that such a turnabout might be an influence
on the entire social/economic structure of the US, promoting sympathy for
underprivileged minorities. But the aftermath of the rebellion has led, if
anything, to backlash and digging in to entrench reactionary pogroms. This
is shown by both Nixon and Reagan administrations, both moving toward
dictatorship by the corporate/Military bodies that use government for
beachheads.
My book, if it has merit, gets its force from being something reflecting the
hopefulness of a ferment for change that led to even greater repression, not
only against Blacks but against minorities in general and against the whole
laboring force, including the lower middle class Whites who have lost their
status and, with their children, are being pushed down and exploited for
greater profits for corporations and politicians and leisure-class investors in
stocks and bonds. I see little hope for improvement and could not today
muster the hope-for-the-future that sparked that book. What I am saying
you will not hear from the American diplomatic family in India, which has
always used its power to persuade foreign governments and citizens that the
US is much more democratic than it is. My lectures in India during my US
tour in summer 1971 were against the falsehoods being promoted by the
USIS that paid for my tour, expecting me to say what they wanted me to
say, as so many US lecturers abroad are glad to do in order to enjoy the
money and power that comes from their toeing the US party line.
I look forward to reading anything you write on either book.
Yrs.
Lyle G

46.

September 15,
1987
Dear friend Singh,
I have in succession your two letters of August 18 and September 2. No
copy of the book has yet reached me. I cant tell whether my whole text was
printed and whether the original preface and the 1981 Foreword are both
there.
I am glad you approve of my thesis. I trust it is clear that it is not simply my
idea but an idea drawn from the documents I have reviewed, and
legitimately so. The date of writing (1968-9) was during the Civil Rights
rebellion for Blacks. I had just returned to Buffalo from teaching during the
summer at Miles College, a Black college on the outskirts of Birmingham,
Alabama. The program was established by John Monro, former dean of
students at Harvard, who left the University and moved to Miles College, to
set up a course of studies that could help Black students overcome the
handicap caused by their having attended inferior separate but equal
elementary schools established by White folks for Blacks.
As I read and studied with those students, there was no doubt of their
intelligence and sensitivity and initiative. They were students of promise
who had suffered from schools that denied fulfillment of their potential.
Monros aim was to help overcome this handicap.
Back in Buffalo for the school year 1967-8, I started reading the books
mentioned in GREAT DAY COMING with a class of high school teachers in
downtown Buffalo, where a majority of students were Black. My class was
made up of both White teachers and Blacks. At first the Whites dominated
class discussion, as they always had, but at a certain point the Blacks woke
up to the fact that the material in this course was themselves and their
history, and they began to speak out. I learned from them, and so did their
colleagues, the White teachers. I had intended a one-semester class, but at
the end of the semester they asked to go on with more readings. Their
ideas, more than mine, dictated what I put into my book.
I cant write an article on Black literature since 1968. I visited Turkey and
India in 1968 through 1971, first as Fulbright professor at Hacettepe
University (1968-9), then as visiting professor there in spring terms 1970 and
1971, at which time I spent the month of May each year teaching American

literature to teachers from different campuses of the University of Madras.

During the fall terms, I returned to Buffalo and taught Black Literature at
SUNY-Buffalo, from where I retired in June 1972, at which time my wife and I
moved to Bennington, Vermont, my wifes birthplace. Since then Ive not
kept up with Black Literature but have devoted myself to writing fiction and
poetry and local politics.
You notice that in this letter I use the descriptive word Black and not
Negro, whereas in my book the word is more often Negro. I wrote my
book just at the watershed when Negro became offensive to Black
Americans because it conveyed to them all the demeaning connotations of
White supremacy concentrated in the epithet White people had coined. To
the extent that I have used Negro in my book, the language is obsolete,
and is bound to offend US Black readers. I am sorry for this but when I
learned of the possibility that the book would be published in India, I did not
wish at such a distance to undertake revising the vocabulary.
My dear friend, if you believe that any of the above paragraphs shed light on
my book, you have my permission to print them in any article, or as another
foreword to your review.
I welcome the thought of your reviewing my novel SUMMER FOR JOEY, which
continues to sell well. I have given many readings and continue.
I believe I sent you a copy of my book of poems RECALLS (Winter, 1986, Bob
and Susan Arnold, Green River, Vermont).
This is a limited edition for poets and libraries, and if you wish you have my
permission to reprint, mentioning indebtedness to the Arnolds. The lyrics in
this book are a preface for my narrative poem AZUBAH NYE (on my
grandfathers great grandmother and on family history). Azubah Nye was
featured in Cid Cormans ORIGIN magazine, Fifth Series #4, Fall 1984. Both
the narrative poem and the lyrics will be printed together for the first time by
White Pine Press, Dennis Maloney, Editor, Fredonia, New York, scheduled for
Fall 1988.
I enclose an editorial from the BANNER, summarizing the editors thought on
the present condition of American Blacks.
Also an announcement of my appointment to a Selectmens commission, my
first official recognition by the Bennington political establishment. This will
keep me busy for the next 15 months, till December 1988.

Yours,
Lyle Glazier

47.
October 10,
1987
Dear friend Singh,
It is impossible for me to write for you an essay on recent Black literature, for
since 1968-9 when I wrote GREAT DAY COMING, I have gone on to different
work. It will be up to young Black authors to write the sort of essay you have
in mind. My student Dr. Jerome E. Thornton of Afro-American Institute at
State University of New York at Albany is now engaged in that sort of writing,
and inside the Black experience, as I could not be, he will achieve immensely
more valuable results than my novice book of nearly two decades ago.
In 1985, I did rewrite some fragments of GREAT DAY COMING, bringing them
more up to date, and under second cover I am mailing you a piece on Zora
Neale Hurston revising that essay in the book. You are welcome to use it.
I enclose also the poems called RECALLS. If you use them, I hope you will
acknowledge indebtedness to prior publication by LONGHOUSE (Bob Arnold,
Editor, Green River, Vermont) in a limited edition for poets and libraries.
These prefatory lyrics to my three-part narrative AZUBAH NYE are scheduled
for publication along with the narrative: Dennis Maloney, White Pine Press,
Fredonia, New York, September 1988.
If anything, I am flattered that my New Delhi publisher thinks I am Black, for
my interpretation coincides with the new evaluations now being made by
Jerome Thornton, and by the recent best-selling novel BELOVED by Toni
Morrison, who is vividly recapturing the spirit of books by Jean Tommer, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka that proclaimed that Black writers should
not be persuaded to meld into White society as tokens but should continue
the struggle of Black folk to remain true to their heritage, and in so doing
(incidentally) they might perhaps redeem US materialistic society and
contribute to our achieving true Democracy.

As you asked, I am sending Teresinka Pereira $15 in your name for your entry
in her Directory.
Your many activities reflect a mind and spirit intensely alive.
Congratulations on your ability to flourish creatively even in the sterile
atmosphere where you dwell.
Yours,
Lyle G

48.

October 19, 1987

Dear friend Singh,
I have your remarkable review. Only two suggestions for you to consider. (1) I
meant not to be quite so hard on Dr. King, whose nonviolent direct action
was meant to bring out the covert violence in White society, so in his way he
was strong against the White supremacists, who hated him and made him
pay. In a sense he used the Christian middle class ethic to attack the
materialistic emphasis of White Christians who wanted both money and the
name of piety. (2) Your interpretation of my last chapter misses the irony.
The only ones who love a ghetto are money changers who profit from it.
Those who live there do not love it no matter how hard they struggle to make
a haven of love inside a nest of exploitation by moneychangers. The seeds
that are sucked up into the network of skyscrapers are the lifeblood of the
ghetto inhabitants who are being made to expend heart and soul (and the
blood of their children) for profit of landlords.
Otherwise your article is superb. I like very much, too, the way you put your
finger on the pulsebeat where my novel and Black literature book cross
fibers. Ive had seven or eight published review of SUMMER FOR JOEY, all of
them flattering, but nobody but you has pointed out the irony of the incident
where the boy watches in horrified glee as the darkies teeth are crammed
down his throat. That is good reading and good reporting on your part, and I
thank you.

Unfortunately, I sent the letter to the DIRECTORY CHECK ENCLOSED as soon

as I got your earlier letter. I hope they go through on granting you the
recognition they promised you.
I learn so late, also, that the price of GREAT DAY COMING probably exceeds
the amount in my check. Can you possibly get your Delhi friend to ask the
publisher if he can have a copy to mail me airmail if you will pay the postage
out of that fifteen dollars. I know nothing about the marketing arrangements
made for the book. Does somebody get paid for writing it or delivering it to
the publisher? I get nothing. Arrangements were made and then I was
informed. So it does seem that at least I should get a copy.
Hope my article on Zora Neale Hurston is worth something for you as worth
considering for your magazine. It shows how without changing major
promises, I would, if I were writing the book today, change details of my
criticism.
Yours,
Lyle G

49.

November 21, 1987

Dear friend Singh,
I have your letter of Nov 9.
I did not submit my manuscript to RAAJ PRAKASHAN. It was submitted with
my permission by Dr. K S Misra, but I did not know where until I was
informed. I am happy to see the book in print.
The enclosed article from BENNINGTON BANNER will tell you a bit more about
my part in the publication.
I am glad to know that you intend to publish the article on Zora Neale
Hurston which will show one example of how the book might be revised
today, if I were to take on the task of revision as I do not intend to do. Since I

wrote the book in 1968-9, a wealth of books by Black authors have flooded
the US market. After retirement from Buffalo in 1972, I have been chiefly
engaged in writing fiction and poetry or engaging in politics in Bennington.
At my age, I have no reason to go back and catch up with what has
happened in a cultural phenomenon that was for a short time my concern.
This does not mean that I am no longer interested in the failure of US society
to accept Blacks into full partnership. As a writer, whether of poetry, fiction,
literary criticism, or Black experience, I have been most concerned with
looking at US society, its people and politics, to determine and record
scholarly or lyrical impressions of our failures and successes in realizing the
ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights,
and repeated in such documents as Lincolns Gettysburg Addressfor all the
people and from all the people, a government guaranteeing life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.
How far we fall short! How, in spite of discouragements, we should continue
the struggle!

Yours,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1988: 50

50.

January 3, 1988

Dear Friend Singh,

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 12.
The BANNER doesnt publish reviews these days, especially reviews of books
by local authors. Six months ago I called to ask if they would look at a

review by a Vermont poet who is quite well known, and the editor wouldnt
even consider it. My book never had an official BANNER review but did get a
good one by a librarian reporting on new books at Bennington Free Library.
Even though Reagan is on the way out, his policies are still active. It will take
years to pay back the deficit caused by his military buildup, and there has
been so much progress on his Star Wars initiativeso many contracts have
been let to corporations all over the US that it will be hard to ease offtoo
many jobs would be lost, too many executives already counting on that
money, too much research in progress at universities.
My book of poems AZUBAH NYE and its prefatory lyrics will be published by a
small press next April, and Im invited to read by an important cultural group
the Charles Burchfield (hes a Buffalo painter) Society in Buffalo on April
17. Youve probably seen both the narrative as it appeared in ORIGIN
magazine, and the lyrics I think I sent you not long ago.
My political life keeps me on edge and very active. Ill be glad when the
charter for Bennington has been reviewed, revised, and released to the
Selectmen for their approval and the approval of the voters.
Christmas was both difficult and lucky for us; our second daughter Susan had
surgery the morning of the 25, early, for a tubular pregnancythe egg and
sperm having met in the tube rather than in the womb. It was a narrow
escape for her. We are grateful to have her back home and recovering.
Yrs.
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1989: 51 54

51.

January 21, 1989

Dear friend Singh,

Thank you for your Christmas greeting, with good wishes for me and my
family. I saw all three daughterstraveling by train to Ohio to visit Alis, the
youngest and her husband, where she is for the first time teaching in a small
college; stopping over in New York to visit Laura (the eldest) and her
husband; and Susan (the middle one) and her husband drove here to see me
and Olive, Amys sister, who is living now at the farmhouse just down the
road from my house. We meet every evening for dinner, then watch the
news on TV and play a few hands of pitch. I am still busy on the political
committee to rewrite the charter of Bennington. My papers including your
important letters will be sent to the Poetry/Rare Books archives at the State
University of Buffalo to become part of my record. For me it has been a
rewarding experience to have known you over the years during which life has
changed much for us both.

Yrs.
Lyle G.

52.

February 20, 1989

Dear Friend Singh,
Thank you for publishing my Hurston article in Creative Forum. I am glad to
see it in print in your magazine. Dr. Thornton has telephoned from Albany to
express his pleasure, also. You went to a lot of trouble for us.
I am much better now than I was and hope to be traveling to see friends as
soon as our cold weather is over. I look out across frozen wetlands to
mountains not yet leafed out; they are called the Green Mountains and will in
a few months be as green as their name.
I am lucky to have my wifes sister living in the next house down the road
from me, in the great farmhouse where the two sisters were born. Olive,
Amys sister, is two years older than I. We have dinner together every night,
either at my house or at hers. Old people alone dont take as good care of

themselves as old people who have somebody else to be with. Our evenings
together are good for us both.
My good wishes to you and your family.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier

53.

July 21, 1989

Dear friend Singh,
I am so glad to hear from you, and thank you for the offprints, mine and Jerry
Thorntons poems. It is good to know that CREATIVE FORUM still flourishes. I
once wrote a book, never published (1960-61) CHAOS AND FORM. Your title
rings for me a similar nuance.
I am finally free from Bennington politics, happily because in the end, the
chapter for the town reflects some of my thoughts: the Preamble: The
people of Bennington reaffirm faith in government of the people, by the
people, for the people, and describe this faith in a charter with provision to
review and amend; The charter of Bennington reflects concern to improve
the quality of life for all residents within limits taxpayers can afford.
This would be only a public relations gambit unless the charter itself reflects
the same commitment. It left the Commission with certain provisions that will
have to be revised by the Selectmen, who seem to be adopting my
suggestions for changes that will place the emphasis on serving all the
people, rich and poor, instead of as US government has been drifting,
nurturing chiefly the welfare of the well-to-do.
I have an invitation to write another series of poems and have started a
work-in-progress called for the moment Poetry is concealment, the first
line from VD #6.

Your friend,
Lyle Glazier

54.

December 29, 1989

Dear friend Singh,
Your August letter has been here on my table, waiting this long. I had a busy
September and October traveling to different places to read my poem
AZUBAH NYE. Not much energy left after preparing for the trips. I enjoy the
actual reading, but the prospectlooking ahead to ithas been taxing. I am
glad that is over.
I planned to be in Washington DC this week at the Modern Language
Association annual meeting, but a bad throat Tuesday night kept me from
going. Now I think I will travel to New York City for overnight tomorrow to
have New Years Eve dinner with my oldest daughter Laura and Roy. My
youngest Alis and Gerry were here for Christmas.
I am supposed to be writing a new book of poems, but dont get on with it. I
am glad as always to read your poems and know you are active and getting
favorable reviews.
Like you, I have news of close friends dying. I lost two very close friends
one in August, one in November. I could not get to Buffalo for the memorial
service for one, the otheronly 50 miles from hereI attended. Both
women, both dear.

My friend and young colleague at SUNY-Buffalo will be traveling throughout

India lecturing on American Literature sometime this spring. I enclose
Howard Wolfs itinerary, and perhaps you can find out from Delhi when he
will come to Banaras if you can manage to go hear him. He asks me to
inform my friends, so someone friendly will greet him, but you are the only
one who still corresponds with me from those days when we met in Banaras
& Delhi.
I send you best wishes for the New Year, and for your wife and children, who,
I realize, are getting less small every year.
Yours,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1990: 55

55.

August 9, 1990
Dear friend Singh,
Your letter with its enclosed article and interview gave me great pleasure. I
cannot tell you how pleased I am to have you trace back to me the
beginnings of your discovery of your own voice in poetry. It is the moment
when we find our own way of speaking when we are truly born as a poet. You
were well on your way before you read my poems, but I can now believe I
helped point you in your definitive direction. For an old man to hear this
from a young man is the highest tribute.
I have spent more than a year writing a poem that is too personal to be
published. Maybe it will be discovered from my papers and printed after my
death. Except for that I have in the offing only a small book of poems you

have already seen. I have asked the publisherCOFFEE HOUSE PRESSto

send you a copy.
Young people inside old
people crying to be
uncaged
With my friendship,
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1992 : 56

56.

January 10, 1992

My dear R.K. Singh,

Congratulations on your becoming Head of the Department of Humanities &
Social Sciences. I suppose it means responsibilities and nuisance chores,
especially committees. I was chairman of American Studies at the University
of Buffalo from 1952 to 1963, a department I created. It did well until the
English Department got jealous. I resigned in June 1963, when I came back
from two years of Chairman of American Studies at the University of
Istanbul. They wanted me to stay there for ever. Looking back, it seems

only a short time between 1963 and 1968 when I returned to Turkey, this
time as Fulbright Lecturer at Hacettepe in Ankara. From there I came to
India in 1970 (May) to teach American Literature to teachers at the
University of Madras, who were planning to teach American literature for the
first time. At the end of the month I went to Srinagar for an all-Asia
conference on American literature with representatives form all over Asia. I
was the representative from Hacettepe. It was there I met Pandeya (who
told me to call him Shiva), I saw him again in August 1971, when I traveled
all over India lecturing, and it was in that visit that I met you in New Delhi.
Our long friendship followed. I have been lucky to have you as my link to
India, and many friends I made there, of whom you are the last from whom I
have letters.
You are kind to send me pp. 69 & 70 of Creative Forum. For me a surprise
and a pleasure to see togetherseparate from the other lyrics printed with
themthose 6 from RECALLS. I enclose for you my latest SEARCHING
FORAMY published only a month agoand another chapbook printing some
of the other Prefatory lyrics. I am sure I sent you my longer book AZUBAH
NYE, where all the prefatory lyrics appeared, those once printed in RECALLS.
Bob & Sue Arnold, printers of RECALLS, also printed SEARCHING FOR AMY.
You will see that I am still plunging into the same mysteries of the human
psyche.
I am now 80, and very unhappy over the state of the worlds political
confusion. The United States seems falling apart, and the last society that
should set itself up for an example for the rest of the world to emulate.
I myself am lucky. I live in a beauty spot looking out over fields I love on the
farm where my wife Amy was born. The farmland is about to be sold to the
farmer who has been tilling the land twenty-five years since the death of
Amys father. Amys sister Olive, who kept the farm, died last year
(November, 1990), and my oldest daughter Laura and her Jamaican husband
Roald Reid, she 51 & he 64, have come to live in the farmhouse down the
road from me. I am teaching them to drive an automobile, because it is
impossible to live here 4 miles from Bennington without having a car to go to
market.
With best wishes from your friend
Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 1993: 57-59

57.
May 26, 1993
My dear Singh,
I am glad to have your letter. I missed having news of your family. Your
children must be teenagers, at least the oldest of them. How many do you
have?
.
.
Since my wife died in 1987, my sister-in-law, a widow and former
distinguished teacher (President of the International Reading Association)
came to live in the farmhouse, and died there of a stroke two years ago. We
took care of each other. I live by myself with 2 cats, continuing to write,
deeply involved in local politics, a career I have just put a stop to in order, I
hope, to get back to writing confessional poetry, fiction, and autobiography.
I was grateful for your effort to have me included in a British-published
Dictionary of International Biography, buthaving twenty years ago retired
from professional academic life, I did not choose to become listed, even
though appreciative of your effort.
A few of my poems, set to music by a Bennington composer were performed
recently. Also I have a short piece of fiction coming out soon in a book called
VERMONT VOICES, nothing important. I have been working on a 5-part book

of poems called SEARCHING FOR AMY, three of whose parts have been
printed.
Perhaps I have written so much about myself because I have been puzzled
how to give you any useful advice on your proposed book on the forms and
processes of anger. There is a lot of anger including irony, sarcasm, and
direct attackin my writing against Elitism in American Politics, but I have no
idea how to help you, beyond saying that I think the topic is a fine one & it
seems to me your letter to me shows you are organizing a number of subject
matter and stylistic categories that can provide useful focuses for collecting
examples. I would think that the business of collecting around such headings
would lead to further classifications. All I can advise is to start somewhere,
begin to collect material, and see where the topic takes you.
I cant refer you to any book or article that deals with this subject, but that
doesnt mean there may not be several or many. Satirists like Pope and Swift
might well have inspired critics to document their devices and satirical
categories. The Middle Ages was rich in curses. From what you write, I
assume you are aiming at contemporary writers of Indian English. I am
sure you are already far ahead of any random suggestions I can take off the
top of my head. In British Literature, the writings of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, the
later Byron, Oscar Wilde are rich in satire. In Ireland, Shaw, Joyce, Becket. In
America, Melville and Mark Twain. Far afield from your intended emphasis in
Indian writers, I stray and do not help you.
I have recently passed my eight-second birthday. I think of next fall taking a
course in computer word processing because it is no longer possible here to
buy good typewriter ribbons.
I think of writing an autobiographical memoir on a title taken from a Melville
letter to Hawthorne after he had finished MOBY DICK: I have written a
wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.
Saturday, three days from now, I plan to drive to Middlebury for the 60th
reunion of my college class. After that, I hope to lead a quiet life, divorced
from local politics, and devoted to taking care of my house and plot of land,
and getting back to my own writing.
I think of you often and am very happy to have had your letter.

Your friend,

Lyle Glazier

58.
July 8, 1993
Dear friend Singh,
Has it indeed been more than 20 years we have been writing to each other,
since you began to write your MA thesis on my poems? You and my other
Indian friend Dr. Shiva Pandeya (who told me to address him as Shiva, and he
would address me as Lyle) have been in my thoughts so much, and now
Shiva is dead, who invited me to Sanaa, North Yemen, to teach, and
suddenly you gave me word he has gone.
I am so glad you wrote me your personal letter with news of Bikku (Vikram)
now 13 as I find it almost impossible to believe, and your little (as I
think) daughter Winny has by some magic sleight of hand of passing Time
become a young lady of 10. I have always prized news of your family.
What you say about your wife: Ever since I married (1978) I have not been
able to sleep in peace without my wife beside how that rings true. Amy
and I slept naked in that close confidential intimacy of the double bed (the
great boon to marriage). I think of my older friend Ben Amidon, who once
visited Amy and me in Buffalo, and talking about his wife Julia, dead 10
years, remarked, I still wake in the night and reach for her.

I enclose Part II of a poem I am writing. Have I sent any of it before? Part I

and V have been published by small presses. Amy has now been dead 6
years after a painful death from rheumatoid arthritis. She died in our
hospital, where during her last month of suffering, I was able to sleep on a
cot at her side and hurry to the nurses station to order morphine without
which she couldnt endure the pain. It was morphine, in the end, that carried
her away. I used to try to help her to let go and accept the final passing from
that great pain, centered in her brain at the last.
I cannot change what I was, what I became in early childhood, nothing to be
done about the moulding when I was molested at 6, or perhaps I was born
homosexual, but I needed a wife and children, and to devote much of my life
to trying to improve the quality of life for all people, especially the poor, the
racially oppressed, and the elderly, of whom I am not one but refuse to be
silenced not heroicly but stubbornly, as if my life depends on telling my
story and pleading the cause of people suffering unjustly, for handicaps over
which they have no control.
You are one of the few who comprehends and shares fully what I am trying to
sayin your poems enclosed in your letteryour white shirt black with the
coal dust from laborers bearing their deaths on their shoulders; & flickers of
peacelove in nudity (not afraid to proclaim it); and Love waves rise and
fallthe ultimate communication of lovers, drinking each others sea.
You continue to be unashamed of natures great gift to all who can receive it
without fear, without moral squeamishness. An old man perhaps can be
forgiven his jealousy of the young friend who still has his wife with him, and
his children still growing toward their own liberation. When I was 18, I left
my home forever when I went to college. When I was 22, I lost my father and
mother, and had to learn to live with that absolute taking away.
With love to you, your wife, and your children,
Lyle Glazier

I can no longer buy good cotton ribbons, so I placed a carbon paper on back
to make the print darker if you hold the page to the light.

59.

August 15, 1993

Dear Friend Singh,
Thank you for the heartwarming July 28 letter, with enclosed photograph of
your family, making you all seem close. You speak of aging as
degeneration but in the photo you look no older than when I last saw you
in 1971 in New Delhi when you were working for the Press, and I was
traveling for U.S.I.S., delivering throughout India a different opinion about the
United States corporate colonialism than my sponsors expected. It was an
important month in my life.
I remember in Delhi arriving at the radio station, where I had been invited to
give a talk on LeRoy Jones, the militant African-American poet (who has since
changed his name to Baraka). The Manager of the Radio Station met me in
the foyer and demanded to see my script. I showed him a few words jotted
on scrap paper, and he protested, Thats no script! We have to see a
written transcript of your speech, with everything moving along from
sentence to sentence with an introduction and a development and a
conclusion. I said, Dont worry. When I start talking it will move along just
as you describe it. You will be surprised how smoothly it goes. He still wasnt
satisfied, We cant let you go on the air like this! And I said, Well, I guess
youre going to. You just listen how I will piece it together. So he threw up
his hands and let me have a shot at it. In the booth listening with him was
my friend, a young American Black intern at U.S.I.S., and he told me
afterwards how the manager was muttering to himself when I began, and
how amazed he was to see how it all hung together.
A couple of weeks later, when I had travelled from Madras to Trivandrum,
back to Madras, then to Tirupathi, Madras again, Bombay, Nagpur, and
arrived at Calcutta, I found the baggage of that same young American Black
already in my hotel room. Unknown to me, we were to be roommates. I told
him our room was probably bugged so wed better be careful of our speech.
This was the height of Bangla Desh & US was valued way down on the scale.
The cultural affairs officer told me not to expect many to show up for my
talk on the Decline of the American Frontier (actually how we had used up
our Western frontier, and were now through imperialism trying to dominate
the world). But I had a good turnout, even a few poets, who got the Librarian

of the American Library in Calcutta to give a party for me. A young guru at
the party asked me why in my ignorance I had come to Calcutta to give such
speeches, and I said, I didnt come to give speeches. I came to visit again a
few Indian friends I made last year in Madras & Srinagar at an All-India
Conference of teachers of American Literature. Giving these speeches is
only my excuse for getting here again. They invited me and my Black friend
to join them at their bar where Calcutta poets hung out, but the American
Librarian begged us not to go because he was afraid we would be
Shanghaied. Against our will we agreed not to. But a couple of nights later
the Consul gave a party for me, and some of those new friends showed up,
among them a poet who ran all the way barefoot because he had vowed not
to travel by any kind of transport so long as so many Indians were so poor.
When I left a couple of days later, riding in the front seat of a U.S.I.S. car with
the driver, we were waylayed in a great square, where people spotted the
official car, and began to come at us from all sides, surrounding us. I was
excitedly trying to get my camera to take the picture. The driver gunned the
car and made our getaway through the crowd. You can probably tell me the
nameis it gherao or something like that where a crowd encircles a victim
as a protest, nonviolently opposing his political beliefs. I cant find the word
in a dictionary.
My love to you & your wife & son & daughter,
Lyle

LETTERS: 1994: 60

60.
September 3, 1994
Dear Friend R.K. Singh,
Im calling for help. After completing Book I of WICKEDand Spotless as
the Lamb, I learn from my friend Arthur Efron (who agreed to read the whole
manuscript) that after about 20 of the 40 chapters, my device of using first

tense for immediacy of impression becomes dreamy and cloudy as if I have

wandered into a sort of temporal void. Something to do with the readers
feeing hes being coerced into accepting the fiction that the viewpoint of the
author and the viewpoint of the younger person involved in the experience
are one and the same whereas certain giveaways in the incidents proclaim
that the overview of the author cannot successfully be ruled out. This may
be why the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly at a recent meeting of League of
Vermont Writers advised writers to steer clear of present tense for
autobiography. The Atlantic, he said, no longer reads such a manuscript, but
stuffs it into the enclosed SASE with a printed rejection. However, Arthur
also said that Dostoyevskys original Russian text of Crime and Punishment
shifts back and forth from past to present.
This reminded me that in writing my first chapter, in my first draft of the first
incident I began with past tense in the first sentence and in the second
shifted to present, as if trying to combine omniscient past and relative
present: I was sitting in the kitchen in Grampa Briggsslap, being rocked in
his rocker. Uncle Forrest is a big boy. He goes to the woodshed. He is
rummaging a barrel. He brought me back an animal cracker. Uncle Forrest
says, Eat. I thought I had to change it all into either past or present to
create the illusion of moving through a unified world.
At the same time, I have long thought content and form ought to reflect each
other, so why notin a book with a dense texture of ambiguity in political
and social climatetry to reflect such density by using a shifting tense,
creating the illusion of the past, yet shifting to the present when the interior
monologue becomes urgent?
I enclose one chapter of my book, where the child is being confronted with a
complex value system in his social life, learn some values he will have to
unlearn, and being so disturbed by this that in later life he will not be able to
erase the memory of these experiences but carry them with him through life.
If you can spare the time, will you read this excerpt, and jot down your
reaction whether or not the combination of past tense and present tense
works for you. In other words, if I hadnt drawn your attention to it, would
you be able to read this chapter almost without noticing the shift in tense?
I am writing a sort of family saga, supposedly reflecting attitudes toward
social behavior that will build the childs character while some times
disturbing him enough for him to have to abandon them in later life.

Yours in deep friendship,

Lyle Glazier

LETTERS: 2000 : 61 - 63

61.
January 31, 2000
Dear Friend Singh,
Your poems and letter dated January 3, 2000 have reached me. You have
taken a great leap forward in the two poems:
TIME TO BREAK OFF
WOES OF COLLAPSE
Not only is there great emotional depth but the rhythm and language seem

richer and purer. I wonder how you account for it. Its as if you have grown
into a new person with a much more sophisticated vision, but a language
that flows more naturally. Have you taken my suggestion and started reading
Walt Whitmans Song of Myself? I like these two poems more than anything
you have sent me over the years. Its as if the years have shaken you out of
an obsolete view of yourself and your world. I think you have the making of
a much greater poet.
I should congratulate you, also on the haiku
Shell-shocked or frozen
he stands in tears on a hilltop
craving nirvana

It is well deserving a Peace Museum Award in the 33rd A-Bomb Memorial Day
Haiku Meeting in Kyoto, which, as you know, is a southern city of great

dignity and learning. I am proud of you. I have no objection to an occasional

haiku as good as this one; even if wholesale books full of Haiku may seem
cut and dried, an occasional superb haiku like this one and the one of yours
that gave a title to one of the books you sent me may justify an occasional
venture into the form.
You are so much younger than I am that I can only praise this new vision of
yours. I look forward to more and greater poems in your new vein.
You would not like the deep snow that covers Vermont landscape this month.
This morning I got up at 6:30 and for two hours used my heavy duty new
snow remover to clear my driveway and then pushed it 300 yards down the
country road to my oldest daughters to clear the front dooryard so that
Laura and Roald can move their car into the roadway. This is a world you can
scarcely imagine. I and all three of my daughters and their husbands must
have an automobile to carry us to stores and libraries and banks and the
post office. We would be helpless without our car.
I wish it were possible for you to find a guided missile taking off from
Dhanbad and landing in front of my house. I have just spent a lot of money
having a Steinway piano reconditioned so that it will be of some good for my
youngest daughter who will have it when I am gone. To my surprise, I am
finding I enjoy sitting on the bench and trying to recover one small bit
of the skill I had many years ago. I will never play well, but music is
becoming important to me again. I am busy also writing my long book on
the computer, and will never reach the end of that story Im telling in
WICKEDand Spotless as the Lamb.
Yours,
Lyle G

62.

June 3, 2000

Dear Friend Singh,

I know well that feeling of ennui when Ive felt there was nothing to live for.
My first published book ORCHARD PARK AND ISTANBUL is full of those poems
where I express a depression so great that the only excuse for such poems is
that they may possibly be finger exercises for happier poems if I can ever
become happy. I was never more depressed than in the sonnet on page 15,
that was given the title Peeled in the Table of Contents:
Suddenly he was old: at forty-two
his bones pushed out through tissue and skin
(i.e. scared hollow) batted fear out of you
from their particular hell, what light shone through
from under the knotted eyebrows was too thin
to warm a friend; his eyeglance was an invitation to a dense macabre. Yet its not true
to say he was undone; hed had been undone
all through the latter yearsfrom sixteen on
he felt the skull bone lying there under the skin,
giving the lie to the skin, the set of bone
haggard under the childpink cheeks; now then
it was out, all out, no child, a terrible man.

My forty-second year would have been 1953, three years after I got my
Harvard doctorate. We had been living in Buffalo for six years, and in the
suburb of Orchard Park for three. I had become the chairman of an
independent program in American Studies that I created in 1952. On June 2
of that year I had been summoned before the UnAmerican Activities of the U
S Senate in Washington, and had turned the tables on the Communisthunting Senators by telling them I thought we were under great danger from
Communism. And when Senator Jenner, Chairman, jumped to his feet and
praised me, I repeated, I think we are under great danger from Communism.
We have little to fear from the American Communist Party, which is declining
under the efforts of committees like yours. What we have to fear is that well
meaning patriots like the members of this Committee will destroy us by
using the totalitarian methods of Stalinist Communism in order, as they think
to ferret out Communist membership where there is none.
Senator Jenner jumped to his feet, and shouted to clerk Strike it out! Strike
it out! We dont want that recorded in the minutes of this Committee!
I couldnt have been so brash, if I hadnt known they had no record of me as
a member of a Communist Cell, for, although I was a grassroots American

Socialists, I had already made a statement at the beginning that I was not a
Communist, had never been a member of the Party, and had no sympathy
with the aims and methods of International Communism.
I was, even so, taking a great chance, because I know I had been under
surveillance, and that the Committee had information I was a bisexual, which
they would have used with great joy if they could have found that I had in
the least committed perjury in my testimony.
Actually, when I got back to Buffalo, I learned that the Committee on
Promotions, having learned of my testimony before the Committee, had that
day promoted me from Assistant to Associate Professor.
I realized that my situation was completely different from yours, for I was
teaching at a firstrate university, and was famous for having created and
become chairman of an inventive new program.
However, three years later, under a new chairman, who hated me because
my Program was filtering away the best students from the English
Department under which my program existed, attacked me so openly that
for the first time I admitted my sexual orientation to my whife, who, instead
of helping me, exclaimed, I feel as if Id been cheated, and I went on and
confessed o my best friend faculty husband and wife team, who told the
chairman, and I had my first nervous breakdown, and for three months had
Electric Shock Treatment, and only by escaping into Fulbright grants to
Turkey and then India, did I salvage my life, and eventually was in a situation
to resign my Chair, and become an international traveler, to the envy of
most of my colleagues, who stayed at home and built their miserable
reputations within the moribund but better-paying and highly competitive
machinery of the University.
More than anything else, it was the discipline of Poetry that saved me, but
even there it is only recently that I have begun to have anything like artistic
recognition, for by publishing so many books abroad, I did not gain any
reputation in the New York City poetry establishment, catered to by the great
publishing houses.
I am lucky this year in having had a very successful series of public readings,
and on March 8, a reading of portions of SEARCHING FOR AMY at the
Poetry/Rare Book Abernethy Collection at Middlebury College and a number
of other lucky readings. I never expected to become recognized in this way,
and am not in the least a celebrity, except in the eyes of WHOs WHO in

America and WHOs WHO in the World, and that means nearly nothing to the
US Poetry Establishment. In my 89th years I have had this small triumph, but
Im still nobody worth talking about unless I can get some major publisher to
bring out one of my books.
Actually, although that would be nice, I hardly expect it, and must fall back
on the consolation that it was the actual writing of poems that gave me the
only success worth having.

Always your friend,

Lyle Glazier
A thought: Why not change your format by studying different stanza
patterns (illustrated in Orchard Park and Instanbul) for English and American
poetry & doing some finger exercises maintaining your subject matter, which
is unique?

63.

Seasons Greeting 2000

A Christmas Carol
From Lyle Glazier
After cremation and a long trip
these ashes will be cold
but take off the box top, dip
your finger, it will not be me

but earth, good enough for anybody

From VOICES OF THE DEAD

NY to London
PAN AM in flight
Feb 14 1970