poets – Little Bristling Soul

re. OSIP MANDELSTAM

In a 1970 letter to Brainard, James

Schuyler explains:
As soon as I got here I started to make you a trash book out of
an address book I had never used. I thought it would take about
an hour, but who would guess that an address book, such a
little itty bitty address book, could have so many pages? Or that
one’s trash runs out so soon? A trash book, in case you’re wondering,
is something like a scrap book, only, well, you put trash
in it. Which is not the same as garbage. That you put in boxes,
like a candy box, and call it a Garbage Box. Garbage Boxes are
not quite so nice as Trash Books. (Just the Thing 298)

Just back from Sheridan Square cigar store, where a spacedout
young man was laying it on the line for unwary customers—the
man just ahead of me got, “Ten billion years older
than the oldest living maggot on earth.” My sentence was a
little lighter: “Take the garbage with you.” Walking up Seventh
Avenue and passing Tony Holland, who was looking very
well, staircase wit made me wish I’d said, “Baby, I am the garbage—”

—James Schuyler, Diary 113-14)