Hyperion - Nietzsche Circle

171 Hyperion—Ready All the Time Like Gunpowder
Q: What was the first
poem of his you set to
music?
A: I don’t remember
but almost everything
he sent me stimulated
a response of some
sort. To make a good
song you must have a
good idea. Eventually,
I was having
performances of the
songs I composed,
which were also being
published. His poems
about the seashore
and happenings at the
sea were wonderful,
and I gathered those
lines and made a
cantata out of them
called “The Sea is Swimming Tonight,” which is the name of one of the poems.
It was a perfect description of water, as you see it at the seashore. It’s swimming.
The waves are overlapping and I thought it was absolutely delightful.
After a number of years—since I wrote the cantata, and after the individual
songs were being performed, Jimmy decided that he would privately publish
a book of the poems that I had been setting to music. So he put together
about 20 of these and entitled it The Running Sun. 28 I introduced him to Paul
Waner, 29 a young friend of mine who was an artist, and he designed and
published the book for James.
Q: Purdy noted the significant impact you had on his writing poetry and said:
“It was Richard Hundley who encouraged me to go on with writing poetry in
the first place, and without his insistence that my verse was in its own way
as important as my fiction and plays, I might have given up writing it.” 30 Aside
from the private editions published in America, which are quite rare and
difficult to locate, the only collected edition of Purdy’s poems was published in
Amsterdam by Purdy’s friend Jan Erik Bouman. 31
A: Well, he had numerous small editions. And there was one in San Francisco
that published—
Q: Black Sparrow.
A: Right! It was quite a wonderful press at that time, publishing very fine