a dirty hand

<p>From a dirty hand:</p> <p>Words are very powerful. You aren't sure of that? Think of all the things you won't say.</p> <ul> <li>Wonderful remark in a note I had this week from William Carlos Williams. He spoke of the disease of wanting to write poetry; said he had been off poetry for many months and-he said-I feel clean and unhappy.</li> <li>One reason for keeping this kind of notebook: you can put on record the retort you couldn't think of at last night's party.</li> <li>Photographs of Henry James in his middle years should be commented upon. Gone is the shy aesthete of the youthful portrait (by LaFarge?) . This bearded man has a fierce look even a bestial one. Here is perhaps-I don't know-James at his most generative. Again this man disappears in the shaven bald final James the famous James-the Grand Lama.</li> <li>I noticed when Lindsay (thirteen) read aloud a passage from a hunting book the other day he pronounced genital as genteel. I'd love to see a literary history titled The Genital Tradition.</li> <li>Contrast business ethics and the ethics of art. Nobody writes a poem hoping it will wear out in four or five years.</li> </ul> <p>Between 1951 and 1966 the distinguished American poet Winfield Townley Scott kept a series of notebooks in which he set down his thoughts on poetry literature the literary scene and life in general. Shortly before his untimely death in 1968 he made a selection of the entries he thought were best and gave it the title a dirty hand. These perceptive notes some tart some gentle some boisterous some wistful give us a remarkable insight into the workings of his creative mind. George P. Elliott has said of Scott: In a very solid way I think he was as rock-bottom American a poet as we have had since Frost. The introduction is by Scott's good friend Merle Armitage who also designed the original edition of this book.</p>