I blame the men of this age for causing me to be born by the most infamous magical maneuvers into a world I wanted no part of, and for trying by similar magical maneuvers to prevent me from making a hole in this world in order to leave it. I need poetry to live, and I want to see it around me. And I do not accept the fact that the poet who I am was committed to an insane asylum because he wanted to realize his poetry in its natural state.[i]
[Enemies: The Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler is available from Penned in the Margins in the UK, priced £9.99. This introduction was originally published on the Penned in the Margins web site, November 22, 2013. The emphasis on collaboration is a perspective to which I feel a very great affinity. (J.R.)]
David Antin talking while Jerome Rothenberg listens in the background (photo by D.G. Wills)
i guess we all need the mike because the people in the back wont hear it it feels a little weird to me to have it the glasses are a mistake i only use them for reading and i cant see you if i have the glasses on and ive learned in recent years ive learned from the fact that i can no longer see anything clearly sixteen inches from my face that i need glasses
[AUTHOR'S NOTE. Asked by the TNL (Theatre National du Luxembourg) to be author-in-residence for the 2015-2016 season, I proposed as my second and final play, a 3-act drama concerning the death of poet Ingeborg Bachmann. She died — mythically speaking — through fire, falling asleep with a lit cigarette; though what actually caused the 3-week coma from which she wasn’t able to come out, was her addiction to pills.
History is over. In another world you find another young as you, your shadow over his, the two together, sharing hidden sorrows, thoughts of (G. de Nerval) expiation. The world does not forgive.
Poems and poetics