from #48 - Summer 2015
Bill Freedman
“I started writing poetry 60 years ago exactly, at 16, a poem to Jean Seberg—Breathless, Joan of Arc: ‘When men seduce, be not obtuse, for thou art too acute.’ Still the best thing I’ve ever written. Geometry, love, sex—Donne and Marvell would have loved it. Jean didn’t, almost certainly because I didn’t send it to her, but that was the idea: to make her fall in love with me. That it didn’t work was both our losses. Anyway, that’s probably always the idea, or part of it. To make ‘them’ fall in love with me. And if not them, maybe myself, on those rare occasions when I really like what I’ve written. In the almost invariable absence of both, like Auden, I learn what I’m thinking when I see what I’ve said. It has to do.”