THE DIN OF A TRIBE
WELCH, Lew [ed. ALLEN, Donald]. I Remain Volume One 1949-1960: The Letters of Lew Welch & The Correspondence of His Friends. Bolinas: Grey Fox Press.1980.
8vo. Original publisher’s grey cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine; pp. [xii], 224, [iv]; fine.
Associated with the Beat poets of the 1970s and a close confidante of the poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac based his character Dave Wain in the novelBig Sur (1962) on Lew Welch.
I Remain: The Letters Vol. I: 1949-1960 is a compilation of correspondence between Welch and those closest to him, including William Carlos Williams, which intimately chronicle the events of his tragically short life. Also incorporated are drafts of essays and notes from journals. The title of the book is based off Welch’s explicit desire to have his response letter to an invitation to read at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art returned to him so as to have it contribute to “a book called ‘I Remain’”.
Originally inspired by the language of Gertrude Stein, Welch also interrogated and manipulated grammar in his composition. In his own acclaimed essay “Language is Speech,” Welch encompassed the art of language as “The din of a Tribe doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is. If you want to write you have to want to build things out of language and in order to do that you have to know, really know in your ear and in your tongue and, later, on the page, that language is speech.”
In 1971, Welch disappeared into the Sierra Nevada and never returned, presumed to have committed suicide. In his poem, [I Saw Myself], he wrote;
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
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