playing chess with duchamp

a found poem

scored by lines
of laughter and loss

[he] underwent
a long and strange
psychoanalysis

in shorter and longer fictions
sought to free himself
to find his own voice

soon infiltrated
he fled Paris

played chess with Marcel Duchamp
(he beat Beckett badly)

took up residence
in a small village
where no one spoke English

and he had nothing in English to read


Found in the Boston Globe »

All the words shown here appear in the same sequence that they appeared in the Globe article; I took liberties and deleted select words in between. The one addition is shown in [brackets]. With apologies to Leland de la Durantaye, the author of the original piece.