JDS The Poet

citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Fri, 12 Feb 1999 16:52:23 -0800

I don't know  if this already has gotten alot of broadcast [via Hamilton?
can't check that] but here goes:

From:    What the Woman Lived: The Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, ed.
Ruth Limmer.   Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.     In November of '44, LB
writes to William Maxwell:

 "This poor young man [Sgt. Salinger] has been bombarding me with poems for
a week or so.--It now apppears that he is in France; so everything becomes
more touching.  I have written to him; but in these situations it is better
if you write him too.--There isn't time to send them back to him; so will
you write a note?
P.S.  They came Air Mail."

A note for the young women [and others] out there:  in addition to reviewing
poetry books for The New Yorker for decades, as a poet, she was the real
thing.  Her poems can be found in a  paperback edition put out by Ecco
Press, titled:  The Blue Estuaries:  Poems 1923-1968.  She lived from
1897-1970.

Jesus, I nearly fell off my chair just now.  While running my eye over Ruth
Limmer's intro, I came across this:

Her [LB] name was not a household word, and she did not want it to be:  for
most of her life she lived, wholly apart from literary cliques, on the upper
reaches of Manhattan Island, where the slit beside the bell in her apartment
house read "Holden."

Back to JDS:  A thought:  how many people believe the "loose-leaf notebook
inhabited by a hundred and eighty-four short poems" (written by Seymour
during the last three years of his life) exists?  Or, to put it more
plainly, do you think JDS, in addition to more unpublished Glass Stories,
*also* has been penning poems over these forty years, perhaps the poems of
Seymour Glass?

I vote yes.