We have to give up writing, the poet says. No one seems to understand it but him, he says, the need to give up writing. Least of all me, his amanuensis (although he didn't ask for an amanuensis, and not indeed for a Danish amanuensis). 'You don't understand, do you?', he asks me. No.
Our problem is that there's too much writing, too much speaking, too much communication, the poet says. We have to create spaces of non-communication, of non-speech, of non-writing, he says, though he doesn't expect me to understand any of this.
Samuel Beckett, for example, was said to speak very little. Callers wouldn't be surprised to sit with him in silence, he said. Fellow walkers would walk with him in silence. It was a companionable silence, the poet says, but silence nonetheless.
Beckett was able to be silent, the poet says, as he is not. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut, he says. He's a talker, though this is really my fault. He talks too much, but that's because I keep waving my dictaphone in my direction. I'm corrupting him!
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!, he says. No doubt there's something rotten in every Dane. – 'Well, there's certainly something rotten in you'.
But perhaps every poet needs his Dane, he says, his amanuensis. Every poet, every ex-poet, because that's what he is, an ex-poet. Or even a non-poet, so long as I understand the 'non-' of this phrase in an expansive and liberating and therefore non-Danish sense, he says.
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