New York, 12 April 1967

Typed letter to Marianne Ihlen, [New York] 12 April [postmarked 1967].

One page, 280 x 215mm; with transmittal envelope addressed to “Kiria Marianne Ihlen Cohen.”

“I don’t think I ever wrote a tune, I just found some tunes that were already there”: a stream of consciousness missive that sounds like song lyrics. He considers “changing the steel strings back to the old softer ones,” and comments “It’s good to be at my desk so early in the day with you and words on my mind.” He riffs on his own loneliness—“the empty world inside of me that I want so much to live in, that is now so desolate and intranquil, with what do you furnish this desert, the candles and chrysanthemums don’t help during the minutes of the Days of Judgment in which I find myself so much of the time, there nothing lives but my greed and imperfections.”

On his work he reports a second printing of 75,000 copies of Beautiful Losers. He closes, “Something about the thought of you is so sweet, even our old battle cries seem like bells.”

By descent from Marianne Ihlen.