CLOUD PIECE

Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.

1963 spring

*

I first read this book in 1980 in furtive little snippets standing in one of the many bookshops lining Charing Cross Road. At sixteen I didn't have that much money to spend on books and I remember this strangely squat volume seemed unusually pricey. (And I probably thought that you didn't get many words to a page so that wasn't 'good value').

Older and (a bit) wiser, I regret not buying it. Cage ... free jazz ... the New York poets (O'Hara, Berrigan, Meyer, Saroyan) ... Fluxus ... Conceptual Art ... Feldman ... Laurie Anderson ... they're all here (or implied) in these pages. But I was too dim or young or sixth form arrogant or narrow-minded or simply out of time and place to see it. She was John Lennon's wife (and all the rubbish that surrounded that statement) until the December of that year and the whole John-Yoko thing changed.

So now I have my own copy - only thirty years late.