Jordan Davis and I think someone else recently mentioned Memoir 1960-1963 by Tony Towle (Faux Press 2001), and I've read it! in fact, will bring it to New Jersey for another go. I love memoirs, journals, letters. in a lot of ways, I can prefer such to the fabrications of 'real' art. art is largely hopeful in the sense of the artist having this hope that the artistic glimpse can be tranferred to the work. which it does varyingly. whereas ephermera such as letters and journals work outside such hope. they are more 'direct'.a lot, most, works of art fail. not as process, but in the way the idea gets lost in implementation. I mean, when you're thinking what work of Zukofsky to put in (and leave out) of a Selected, some works make it, some don't. which is not to say everything isn't of interest (Ron Silliman's theortetical quest to cut Z down to size aims at those readers who aren't prepared to take the whole trip. personally, I wouldn't bother). intentions are different between Keats' odes and his letters, I don't mean to blur. his letters can't fail in the way Ode to Indolence fails compared to Nightingale or Grecian Urn. well, as Henry Adams' wife said of H James, I've probably chewed more than I chawed off. in Towle's Memoir, one notes a receiver of anecdotes. or he's a dreamer recounting these strange and wonderful, or just plain ordinary, events. blest that the folks around him are interesting, are in fact O'Hara, Koch et al. I know I am unexciting but I regard this blog as open to that possibility of memoir/journal, of that fleck of something that just occurs, here and in this moment. process. there's a poetics there to be mined, I guess. I wish there were more Memoir to be had.