The Course

On July 2, 2015, Ted and I started on a collaboration, which we continued until June 11, 2016, just six days before Ted died. Ted and I exchanged lines back and forth over email, sometimes multiple times in a day and never less than every few days. After a while neither of us could fully separate what each had done, we were blowing together, back and forth, in a duet of, and as, time, bouncing off the moment as if it were a trampoline, tripping out into the eternity of the company, from dark to delight. There was no sense of unnecessary limit, no register we couldn’ t play. The experience was of freedom within the constraints we made up intuitively for each poem.– — Charles Bernstein