I was searching for a photograph and found this intriguing bit from “In the Subtropics with Amy Clampitt” by Katherine Jackson.

Jackson writes about a residency she had with Amy Clampitt at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in northern Florida. At the end of the residency, Clampitt invited the composers to join the poets, and this is what one of the composers said:

At one point, Zygmunt Krause, the Master Composer, who had flown over from his native Warsaw for the three week session, queried why poets don’t notate their poetry as musicians do their music. “It’s impossible to read most poetry,” he commented, his quiet, philosophical air contrasting oddly with his provocative observation. “One doesn’t know how a poem should sound; how long to pause at the end of a line, for example. The poet might have quite a definite conception of this, but the reader never knows what it is. I would find it very disturbing that no one is reading my poems the way I hear them. It would be so simple to include a system of notation that would tell how ones poems should be read. Why don’t poets do this?”