Bookstories 5: Ed Baker’s The City

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Notes: January 10, 2007

I sent my first book (The City) to Cid Corman in 1974. Two copies of it turned up in a package of “stuff” that I bought off of the internet, about 3 months after Cid died, from the William Reese Company (via abebooks) for $175. I asked “abe” “How the hell did you get MY stuff?” They replied—after, I suppose, running my query by Wm Reese—”Corman gave a box of things to his brother to sell.” . . . And, dig this, honest Abe Books dropped my cost down to $125. Then Reese emailed me and said “had you come to us directly, we would have given it to you for what we paid for it.”

Also in the package were 10 letters from me to Cid re: my book Restoration Poems (and the original ms) that I sent Cid. See letters as Cid replied to me in Restoration Letters, published by tel-let, 2003.

Pauline (Chin) changed her name to Fay Chin. My ‘original muse’.

In 2000 I sent a copy to (another Manhattanite/poet) Carl Rakosi.

Scott Watson published a subsequent edition of The City in his Bongos of the Lord 15.

BOTL15 and Fay Chin’s and my Wild Orchid are hosted on tel-let and linked to on my website.

Cheers!