Kent Johnson

I once met the kind and tremendous poet Cralan Kelder. This was in Amsterdam. Let's go have a drink, said Cralan; OK, I said. We had some drinks at a bar, and then we went to a smaller bar and had some more.

After this, we went to a bar that was even smaller yet, and we kept on drinking, and thus the night continued, in progressively smaller bars, until at some fantastical hour we sat there, facing one another, in a kind of tiny dark bar-closet that smelled of hashish, our knees pressing up against each others', our faces nearly touching. I felt by this time a bit disoriented and numb, but Cralan held forth, a true gentleman, laughing uproariously and discoursing brilliantly about Olson, Dutch poetry of the 17th century, dike technology, and whatnot.

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