To: IRVING LAYTON
August 11, 1957
Dear Irving,
I’m projecting a violent attack on your poetry in the public prints, but have not all the copies of your published books.
If possible, please send me copies of all your published works (except Here and Now and Love the Conqueror Worm) and bill me for same.
The blows will be delivered below the belt—the seat of your uncontested genius—but otherwise the amenities will be observed, within certain limits,
Best regards to you and Betty, and hope to see you soon.
Yours as always,
Buffy Glassco
From The Heart Accepts It All: The Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by Brian Busby
To ROBERT MCALMON
Jamaica Farm
Foster, Quebec
December 1, 1946
The poetry I’m doing now is all of a pattern with ‘The Rural Mail’ and ‘Stud Groom’: loose lines with a definite beat, full of puns, sneers, regional expressions, and gloomy as hell. When the projected volume is finished the whole rural scene will have changed (it’s changing now), and the decayed farms and decayed people will have been replaced by cheery, brisk, mechanised, subsidised, electrified artificial inseminationists, which will probably be an improvement though rather humdrum from a limited point of view… The big problem with getting this part of the country on paper is that the landscape is so beautiful (no other word) that it looks just like the picture-postcards for nine months of the year, and it’s only for a while in the late fall that the country has a third dimension, depth.
From
The Heart Accepts It All: The Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by Brian Busby
