23rd November 2005

Dear Frieda,

Belatedly — very belatedly, I am replying to your letter-poem, your epistle. I am working on a book with the working title First Meetings with Poets, and you’re the subject of one of the chapters. And that got me to thinking about text as the first and truest of meetings, that ‘in-person’ supplements the poems, the emails... increasingly, and not the other way around. But then, whole friendships have been historically conducted through letters — Elizabeth Barrett, though she finally met her close but distant neighbour, Boyd, becoming his scribe... At the moment, for me, it’s all neologisms. Oh, I did draft an earlier letter — god, it would be over two years ago now, not long after receiving yours... ironically, I’d just got back from outside Australia — there’s Australia, and then there’s ‘outside Australia’ — as you know — when a horrendous accident (choppers, numerous police cars, even a crane to remove steel rods that had broken loose from a semi — we later heard it was the local MP’s wife who had been crushed under the vernichteten weight) caused