Voodoo, 1976, oil on linen, 21×16”.

I liked Bill Jensen’s paintings the moment I saw them. They were mysterious and impolite, and had a sting to them. Over the years, he kept changing his work, and never settled into a style or signature image. He never seemed to quite fit in, and he didn’t accommodate himself to the taste of the moment. These are just some of the things that he does and, just as importantly, doesn’t do.

Jensen’s paintings reinforced my feeling that, as a poet, I didn’t have to fit in or belong to any group. Being an artist or a poet didn’t mean that you joined a club; the time for that had long passed. After we became friends, now nearly 20 years ago, I learned a lot about writing from talking to him about painting. Once, when my wife Eve Aschheim and I stayed with him and his wife Margrit Lewczuk in Italy, I lent him a book of Medardo Rosso’s drawings while we drove off to see the paintings of Piero della Francesca. When we returned a few days later, he showed us a group of drawings that had been inspired by the drawings in the book. They didn’t look like anything that Rosso had done, nor were they like anything that Bill had done before. That openness is at the crux of what Bill does, and it is with that in mind that I began this interview.

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Issue 99 Spring 2007