I assumed.) Only recently I learned that he would also address a potato and even an annoying fly buzzing overhead as ‘that gentleman’. Recent information in the Dallas MFA says that the artist wrote admiringly of his sitter: ‘His voice is gentle, his wit keen, and his wisdom enormous. He is not a character, but a very dignified gentleman who might otherwise have gone unrecorded.’

There was no postcard or art print at the time. Back home I located the only book that included it and ordered it from Peter Tafuri, Frost Pocket Farm, Books, Organic Produce and Cold Weather in Pennsylvania. Mr Tafuri replied immediately: ‘The book will be mailed. Since it’s not too heavy, the shipping charge will only be $3. I’ll pay any additional charge; Mozart is playing on the radio, and after giving him to the world, it’s the least I can do for one of his fellow citizens!’ What a gentleman. I wrote a poem for both.

***

To my mind a poet should by nature be an adventuress. One cannot reduce the specific lyric language of a writer down to a language of use. I firmly believe that you don’t have to comprehend the poem the moment you are reading it. It is also interesting how those particles of a poet’s experience fit together. The language of the poems can lead the reader to be interested in the contents.

Not that I would want to undervalue or diminish the communicative function of language. This is not my intention. It has to do with a process that made me concentrate more on the powers within language. Let the lines, words, sentences arrange themselves and watch the peculiar flow they bring to life. No hocus pocus, only the magic of poetic speech. A homage to form nevertheless. For the reader it can be a liberation to detect what is hidden in line after line. I love responses that tell of such moments and the astonishment and wonder they provide for an audience. Words have bodily, visceral qualities, they experience space very sensitively. In my neologisms they often move closely up to each other, in other cases they vehemently protest against their

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