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The writer—a writer wishes to make his sense exact, or why bother? Precise registrations are beautiful, indeed. The popular novelist deals with feathery edges, one gets a "tone." One gets a "feeling." Then there are those who rhyme dialogue, subsidized assassins of the precise. The inane, the poets in constant residence. They demand of the poem that it adjust their very lives, they die fragmented at parties, turn out bands of students armed against ignorance with error. Error sharpened and ready for assault! Give them annual prizes, I beg you. Beware the interested academic. "A" young English instructor . . . ignorant, ignorant.

In New Hampshire, I dug 280 clams in Portsmouth Bay in 45 minutes. The earth’s plenty. My wife made a magnificent clam soup and we had four guests. The children played in the soft night among pines. I was a vacationer. The next day swam in the icy Atlantic, yet knew what I am. From this head—comes beauty. It is the artist who lives the nonartistic life who is most aware of his painfully absurd position. To keep one’s mouth shut. Who the hell does he think he is, anyway? One sees in the letter A a constant: and yet, a continuing rejuvenation.

A continuing rejuvenation? Of flies! Mouches eclatantes. The poet has it that this primal vowel is black. The great alpha, black A. "Black velvet coat of glittering flies." Black, black. The A, sitting quietly on the page, wings folded back over the shining body. A, a fly. AA, two flies. "It is true that most of them breed in decaying organic matter of some kind, but we must remember that disgust is purely a human reaction."

In New Hampshire, a genus of biting fly (Chrysops) was so persistent that it would stay on the flesh until the exact moment one sank beneath the water, and sometimes even went under in its ravenous feeding. In this sentence, eleven instances of sudden blackness. Eleven flies.

            A   A
                 A   AA      A
A
  A                          A
                                    A A

A continuing rejuvenation. Thus it is that one often comes across a line of startling beauty and brilliance in an otherwise putrescent poem or page of prose. Movement of the line, its quantity, the shifting of the vowels, the A’s breeding in decay. One must read with care, searching for precise registrations. The true poet will always have something to offer. In his lines aspects of the persistent, the re-created. So that these precise notations die only when the world dies. The A waits calmly, shadowing the line. Calm.

To keep one’s mouth shut, or, opening it, to see the language in air, inexact somehow. Talking to the young English instructor in his Maryland farmhouse: he is a member of some audience unsuspected, yet he does not understand this language. In the bright kitchen, the following morning, with grapefruit and coffee on the table, I felt an exile, somehow totally out of whatever world I live in, fuzzy and—inexact. On the bookcase, a fly. In the mind, A. Darkness, darkness. Later, another poet would ask me if I had ever met John Crowe Ransom. Poets together. Yet my poets—their secret lines speak to me. A poet. A poet. English instructors and their wives. Depressed.

At such times, one throws up a hasty wall of wit and anecdote, behind which the heart can hide. From its retreat, it listens to the spectacular hyperbole rumbling above it. I board the train for home and am again at the beginning. The fields and towns go by, the soured Jersey flats finally. A.