I went to New York City because in 1959 it wasn't socially acceptable, for a million reasons, for a girl from Newton to live in Boston/ Cambridge rather than in her mother and father's house twenty minutes away. Rather than fight it, Gail Gordon and I moved from Boston to New York. An employment agency (I had typing, no shorthand) got me the job at Grove Press. As secretary to the editors, I began arranging poetry readings for the poets Grove published, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, Joel Oppenheimer, Edward Field. When I moved back to Cambridge, I continued setting up a poetry circuit, calling myself the Paterson Society, after William Carlos Williams' major work, Paterson, and for Allen
Ginsberg, who was born there. This activity, which involved sitting on my bed typing letters to every college in the country, kept me spiritually alive while I had miscellaneous jobs and later, when I
moved to my parents' house in order to get my master's degree in elementary education. I lived for the mail. It was my only contact with life: a card from Corso in Rome, Whalen in San Francisco, Creeley in New Mexico, McClure. On my twenty-fifth birthday, I happened to get a note from Allen Ginsberg in Benares, India, and
the coincidence reassured me for weeks.
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