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FOR ALEKSANDER WAT

Wat is a poet but what
is a poem? A silly
joke, but
there's a point to it,
for the poems I am holding in my hand
that were a thought
have become a thing, just as
the poem you are holding in your hand
(right now) is a thing - but not
just any old thing. It was
me. Now its you.
But is that not true
of anything anyone
might write - a government
report, for example. We like to imagine
that the poem is more me
than any old thing, and so
the transformation from the living
thing in me to the thing
in your hand to the
living thing in your head, if
that's what we can call it, is
somehow more mysterious and meaningful than, say,
a child's exercise given to a teacher. But what
could be more mysterious than that?

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