(Kochs cirkus)

Man kan finde et langt, skønt digt af (ligesom Silverstein amerikanske) Kenneth Kock om at skrive et digt ved navn "The Cirkus",, men man kan ikke finde selve digtet "The Circus" (hvis man ikke har hans samlede digte, hvilket man selvfølgelig burde) - digtet om digtet begynder sådan her (forsættelsen kan læses HER):

I remember when I wrote The Circus

I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris

Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum

Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else?

Fernand Léger lived in our building

Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in

Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise

So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall

Of our apartment I don’t know why there was a hole there

Shut up! And the voice came back to me saying something

I don’t know what. Once I saw Léger walk out of the building

I think. Stanley Kunitz came to dinner. I wrote The Circus

In two tries, the first getting most of the first stanza;

That fall I also wrote an opera libretto called Louisa or Matilda.

Jean-Claude came to dinner. He said (about “cocktail sauce”)

It should be good on something but not on these (oysters).

By that time I think I had already written The Circus

When I came back, having been annoyed to have to go

I forget what I went there about

You were back in the apartment what a dump actually we liked it

I think with your hair and your writing and the pans

Moving strummingly about the kitchen and I wrote The Circus

It was a summer night no it was an autumn one summer when

I remember it but actually no autumn that black dusk toward the post office

And I wrote many other poems then but The Circus was the best

Maybe not by far the best Geography was also wonderful

And the Airplane Betty poems (inspired by you) but The Circus was the best.

Sometimes I feel I actually am the person

Who did this, who wrote that, including that poem The Circus

But sometimes on the other hand I don’t.

There are so many factors engaging our attention!

At every moment the happiness of others, the health of those we know and our own!

And the millions upon millions of people we don’t know and their well-being to think about

So it seems strange I found time to write The Circus

And even spent two evenings on it, and that I have also the time

To remember that I did it, and remember you and me then, and write this poem about it

At the beginning of The Circus

The Circus girls are rushing through the night

In the circus wagons and tulips and other flowers will be picked

A long time from now this poem wants to get off on its own

Someplace like a painting not held to a depiction of composing The Circus.