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Unread 04-21-2019, 09:28 AM
Orwn Acra Orwn Acra is online now
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: NYC
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Back and forth I have typed out a sentence and then deleted it; whatever I write sounds stupid, but:

When I moved to London in 2009, I went to Waterstones expecting to find all of John's books. Of course they were not there except for Making Love to Marilyn Monroe, his anthology of sex poems, which I bought. He kindly mailed me all of his works. Up until that point I was mainly interested and wrote conceptual poetry, and still if I had to label myself I would say my work is conceptual and in that tradition. But reading John something clicked. I suddenly knew how to be both conceptual and formalist. John may have said "Poems are made up of words, not ideas, just as paintings are made up of paint, not subjects" but the key was in his poems. Sam Gwynn asked me to speak on a panel about John's poetry at West Chester one year, and I spoke about this side of John's work: the experimental, the conceptual, the leftfield. So I owe him a lot. In 2012, my boyfriend at the time was director of Sarah Lawrence's poetry festival, and I had John flown to New York to read, which was the first time I met him. We paired him to read with Caroline Bergvall on a Saturday night (which, if John died this morning, was exactly seven years ago to the day), a poet with the exact opposite credentials as John's. After the reading, which I think was the most attended one, Bergvall admitted that she had been concerned; John seemed old-fashioned, Victorian, a relic of rhyme--her antipodal force. But during the reading, she understood: they were coming from the same place, which was sound.

I walked him around New York. He wanted to see the "very tall buildings" to see if they really were that tall, so he did and they were. We met a few times at West Chester after this. I hope that a Selected or Collected is printed; he needs one and deserves one and his earliest books are out of print. An interview I did with him can be read here. I was young and would have asked different questions and toned down the puns, but I'm glad I asked them and I like puns.
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