To Steve McCaffery from Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins to Steve McCaffery, April 17, 1976: 

“Dear Steve McCaffery, 

Curious as to what you do. I hear your name from people and places I respect - and would like to know the work. 

Separately, I'm sending some of my writings: hope you will enjoy them. If you could send me something of yours, I would be very interested. 

So few sound poets on this continent! I’m in touch with some of the European ones, but besides Nichol I don’t like any in North America. Seems to [sic] often to affect a false naivity [sic] (Bissett, Lurie, the Harlemans, etc.).

Seems I'll be teaching at Milwaukee next spring: will surely cover sound poetry. 

Very bests, 

Dick Higgins”

This letter seems like quintessential Dick Higgins: curious and candid (note the dig at Bill Bissett, who surely would've moved in the same circles as McCaffery at the time). I used to correspond with Higgins and he often offered blunt assessment of the work of his fellow Fluxus artists. The letters were all marked "not for publication" at the top and bottom of the page. 

For more correspondence with Steve McCaffery, visit the archive at Granary Books, here.