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Rik Lina:

This is one of the many cadavre-exquises Ted made people to do, must be more than thousand...note the small text he wrote in it: "cadavrexquis is not dead." Laura Corsiglia, Ted and I made it 19 June in Amsterdam 2001.

please click on photo to view a much larger image

T.J. Anderson:

Here's a spontaneous poem for the great Ted Joans!!

Riff for Joans

blee blee blee bop bop
blee blee blee bop bop
music has a way
of devouring me
limping up my sleeves with
it's lonely salvages,
transfusing the brown
blunderbuss of my lips,
excavating the jazz juice
that threatens to let loose the line.
yeah, let loose the line,
like you did Ted, still do, my due
oh no baby tell me every-
thing will be alright blee
blee blee
bop bop

We'll sing a song of Ted
blare the blue words
from our beautiful throats.
peace. Ted Lives!

Krzysztof Fijalkowski:

Living in Paris off and on around 1988-90, hungry for surrealism, I'd be lucky enough to see Ted Joans from time to time. His arrival in his favourite café on the Boulevard St Germain always seemed to be that of a rare migratory bird just flown in from the far end of the globe, unexpected and longed for at the same time; but it seemed he was living in a tiny room at the time, so crammed with boxes of beloved books (so he told me) there was barely room for a bed. In his efforts to make just a bit more space, he sold me a book - or, rather, he most insistently refused to exchange money for it, and accompanied me to FNAC instead where I bought him some film for his video camera; a fair swap, only the conversations as we walked from Left Bank to Right were what he'd really traded. What would I have to exchange to get that beautiful day back ?

Richard Krech:

Vision of Ted Joans on the other
side of the Wadi Draa

By the Wadi Draa
at the end of the road
just outside M'Hamid
the sign said "Timbuctu 2000 km"
and beyond it the endless Sahara.
In arabic it means desert.

On that day in the oasis
2000 km away Ted lives.
He walks by the banks of the Niger,
a wind blowing from the north
makes the palm trees bend by its force.
The sounds of this city
much like they have been for
millenia. The university there is
2000 years old. The tea houses
even more ancient.

The cat from America
reads poetry in the desert.
In english it means Sahara.

5/12/03

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TED JOANS LIVES! A Tribute, Page 5