Mark Twain's Letter to William Bowen: Buffalo, February 6, 1870 Book

Poetry is by its nature elevated language. No matter how we try to drag it down to earth with flarf or cutups, Dada Bestiality or computer-generated randomness, by framing it with a page we exalt, indeed capture the choices we've made.
And this is what I love about the vanishing art of letter writing. The same choices are made but it's casual and personal--at least in a close relationship. Out of all the beat poets, Ginsberg and Snyder were perhaps the best known and the most politically active. Indeed, these concerns are often expressed in their epistles.
Snyder book the Back Country was the first book of poems I dived into, and I consider Howl as perhaps the greatest single poem of the post-war years, so I have my biases, but most of all I just enjoy the personal touch, the directness and groundedness of these letters.