Men (or women) of letters?

The Beat writers were committed to energetic correspondences and poet David Cope’s written exchanges with Allen Ginsberg remind us of a golden age

I’VE JUST been delving in and enjoying a recent publication by the US poet David Cope who developed a 20-year friendship with Allen Ginsberg, one charted so richly and entertainingly in a two-decade correspondence between the two men, initially novice and master, now presented between soft covers.

Cope is not only a poet and academic, an editor and publisher – he pulled together the remarkable Big Scream for 60 issues between 1974 and the current year– but he is also a huge rock fan, a massive Stones follower and someone who conversed with me in recent days about the loss of Charlie Watts, a master craftsman of the sticks whom he particularly mourned.

He also helped me, some years ago, with some insightful contributions to the chapter I was writing on Patti Smith – what was her relationship to music and poetry and her Beat predecessors? – for the 2013 book Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll.

Cope’s frequent, informative and engaging chats with Ginsberg via the mail between 1976 and 1996, make me wonder whether there have been any important similar exchanges – published or otherwise – between popular musicians. Did Guthrie or Gillespie or Seeger or Baez or Dylan or Cooke or Lennon or Mitchell or Crosby or Bowie create a body of letters that we might see one day?

I know my reference above is to poets and to the Beats – inveterate conversationalists of the pen and the page – but it would be nice to think that some such paper trail exists in the rock or folk or soul or jazz sphere. I can’t presently think of one and would enjoy some suggestions.

Obviously, we live in an age where there has never been more interchange between human beings – through social media, mobile phones and web interactions – but that all feels very transient, somehow insubstantial, almost invariably lost to the trashcan of the ether virtually instantly. The Cope-Ginsberg association, these to-ing and fro-ings, is, rather, vividly revived and permanently retained in an almost forgotten format, this nearly lost art.

We will never live in an age again where letters are that marvellous form of sparky and contemplative, spontaneous and informal, personal and private, chatter. The Beats and their lives could hardly have been fully known without the missives that Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and Cassady and others posted to each other for the half-century from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s.

Perhaps my plea for an equivalence in the world of rock‘n’roll will prove fruitless. But I’m throwing it out there nonetheless. If you know of any chains of musical letters, do please advise!

Notes: The Correspondence of David Cope & Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996 (2020) is published by Giant Steps Press, Freeport, NY

What David Cope describes as ‘the final issue’ of Big Scream, Issue No. 60, was published earlier this year