11:4 Winter 1958

PHILIP BOOTH

Letter to the Poetry Editor

Philip Booth’s letter followed in the Winter 1958 issue. Booth recently recalled the incident:

Asked, these years later, to comment on a 1957 “Letter to the Poetry Editor,” I had to ask back to Chicago what all this was about. By the time the present editor sent me copies of both Paul Carroll’s “Notes on Some Young Poets” and my published response, I’d found in old notebooks that Carroll had that year published my poem “Mores,” which was one of the earliest poems in what would become my second book (1961), and probably catalyzed “Was a Man.” Both poems now seem to me to have to do with issues that Carroll’s “Notes” and my “Letter” were more or less about.

However thin these slices of the mid-1950s are, they make considerable sense. Whatever the poems of any of us have come to in the long run, Desnos or no, this Chicago Review glance proves one thing absolutely: all of us were nothing if not young.

[DN, 1996]

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