Interview with Nick Piombino

Tom Beckett :Do you think of yourself as a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet?

Nick Piombino: Around the time the L=A poets arrived on the scene, I was busy absorbing and putting to work the many things I had been taught and ideas I had been working on with Bernadette Mayer in and out of her writing workshop, from 1972-1974. Bernadette actively encouraged collaboration among poets and specifically encouraged me to write more prose. I met Charles Bernstein at a party given by Ed Friedman in 1975 (by the way, Friedman, who was a member of Mayer’s previous workshop had invited me to give my first solo reading on the roof of The Kitchen, with Patti Smith, in 1974). This was a “performance party” and I sang a song I had written in my fractured French. At the party, Charles and I started an ongoing conversation about poetry and poetics that has continued to date. These conversations led directly to the articles (I consider them prose poems, or “theoretical objects”) I wrote for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, some of which were republished in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Southern Illinois, 1984), edited by Charles B. and Bruce Andrews. Not long after the Ed Friedman performance party, Charles and I read together at the Poetry Project. Among others present was Ted Berrigan, whose writing workshop I attended in 1967. So my public presence as a poet, and involvement with poetry long preceded the emergence of L=A poetry. I had listened to e.e. cummings and Lewis Warsh read at CCNY in the early 60’s and had been to parties at the apartment of the latter shared with Anne Waldman on St Mark’s place in the mid-sixties. I was an avid reader of The World, Telephone and Angel Hair, I went to lots of readings at the Poetry Project, I was shy, and didn’t try to publish much of anything, other than my high school and college magazines and the early small press magazine American Weave until Berrigan recommended some of my poems to Eileen Myles in the mid-70’s for a magazine she was editing called Dodgems. Possibly my most significant contribution to L=A poetry (in addition to being one of several who recommended naming the magazine “Language”) was to urge, along with Alan Davies, the continued publication of L=A magazine, around 1980 when Charles briefly considered abandoning the project. I had suggested, correctly, that if we continued for awhile longer a book might be created out of the magazine. My work in the L=A book was well responded to. When I complained to one of the L=A poets recently that my name doesn’t appear in the histories of L=A poetry published now, it was explained to me this is probably because I haven’t published many books of poetry. (I appreciated Mark Wallace’s extensive discussion of aspects of the critical reception of my work in his article in Jacket- New Solutions...{click here}.)In fact, I have only published a few books, and of these, only four contain what might be obviously labeled “poetry.” I called one of my books Theoretical Objects (Green Integer, 1999) because some of my work tends to defy classification. While I am very interested in many kinds of writing, including conventional fiction, I seek out, in particular, writing that might be described as unclassifiable. Actually, at this moment I tend to enjoy page-turner fiction, or exciting visual poetry, more than work I experience as tediously derivative or duplications of early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Certainly avant-garde purism has become less exciting to me than it was in the 60’s to the 80’s. So much L=A type poetry has been published since then, it has evolved its own conventions that to me are sometimes unconvincing and uninteresting. Right now, almost any kind of dogmatism seems to annoy me.

The support of the L=A poets, including Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Alan Davies, Michael Gottlieb, Steve Benson, Leslie Scalapino, Douglas Messerli, Rae Armantrout , Lyn Hejinian, James Sherry, Diane Ward, Kit Robinson, Ray DiPalma, Abigail Child, Fiona Templeton (and allied precursors such as David Bromige, Kathleen Fraser, Hannah Weiner and Jackson Mac Low), and in particular, Ron Silliman, has always been greatly valued by me. Ron wrote a letter to me in 1978 concerning a chapbook of my work published by Alan Davies in his series 100 Posters that led directly to my decision to keep writing when I briefly considered leaving the field at the time when I began my formal training as a psychoanalyst . Very early on, you Tom, offered to publish a dialogue between Alan Davies and myself, which was made available some years later. By the way, Ron was one of the two key people who encouraged me to start my weblog,fait accompli, in 2003. The other writer to encourage me get started with fait accompli was Gary Sullivan.

TB: Would you elaborate on your interest in visual poetry?

NP: I made my first collages on an extended visit to Italy and Morocco in 1968. I had constructed a few visual poems earlier, pasting sentences out of newspaper headlines onto sheets of paper. I remember being deeply impressed reading Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-art and later Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets where I first encountered the work of Kurt Schwitters, who was a key influence on my early collage work; I have long admired the work of Tom Philips, as well as the New Realist affichiste artists like Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglés, the photo collages and collage influenced painting of Susan Bee and Toni Simon, Johanna Drucker’s book art, and more recently, visual poetry by such poet/artists as Nico Vassilakis and the conceptual and video art of the collaborative team Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano. In the 60’s I was an avid reader of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s magazine 0-9, through which I learned about the work of the conceptual artists, including Robert Smithson, who I had an opportunity to meet and talk with once. Of course, I was greatly influenced by the cut-up techniques used by Ted Berrigan and William Burroughs in their work, whose writing workshops I had attended in the middle and late 60’s. At Brooklyn Technical High School, in the late 50’s, I had to learn how to do technical drawing and drafting, and though visual work did not come easily to me, I enjoyed the process of making things. One course involved drafting layouts of objects and then cutting out the layouts to create pasted up three dimensional shapes. I remember seeing a TV interview with Duchamp who said the original meaning of art was “to do”. In 1968 I saved up some money- only $1800 (!), and left for Rapallo, Italy. I remained for about a year, including a 4 month stay in Marrakech, Morocco. The friend I was visiting, John Freda, was selling paintings on the Portofino docks. In the 60’s I met the artist Malcolm Morley who briefly came to visit me in Rapallo. He took me to meet the surrealist artist Gilbert Stuart in Rome, whose work I found inspiring. My artist friend who had invited me to Rapallo encouraged me to make my first collages and even made plaster backings for them with undulating curves. I have posted photos of these collages on my weblog fait accompli. When I came back from Europe I found that my visual work had influenced how I wrote my poetry. I wrote a number of poems using found materials. I have always created my collages out of found materials. My books, like Theoretical Objects are constructed like collages, treating my own works as found objects, constructing the whole not chronologically, but to evoke an entirely new series of connections. In the early 70’s, when I attended Bernadette Mayer’s poetry workshop at the Poetry Project, she was doing a conceptual piece involving photography, later published as a book called Memory. For a few months I had a studio in the same building as Susan Rothenberg whose work and conversations were also an inspiration. Michael Lally used to give lots of parties at his Soho loft around that time where I met many poets and artists. In the late 70’s I employed some turn of the century French magazines I had found in my parents’ Bay Ridge house in the 50’s to make some collages (which were first shown in a group show curated by Susan Bee at PS 122 called Wordworks in 1980), titled Le Rêve and Distribution Automatique.(I recently posted a photo of this collage on myweblog . At that point I was working with a photographer who took, under my direction, close-ups of portions of the collages, which I then selected and enlarged into poster sized photos by means of c-prints, or into various sized photo collages. I might compare this process to writing poetry, in that a sequence of thoughts and images is scanned repeatedly, resulting finally in a focus on certain specific words and phrases as more arresting, then juxtaposing these to explore them more closely in order to create or discover relationships. I’ve continued to construct photo collages, and some of these works from the early 80’s, with close-ups newly selected, printed and enlarged (a total of 6 collages were printed in an edition of 7, 5 selected from Le Rêve, plus one printed from a more recent collage). These were shown in a group show called Poetry Plastique curated by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders, and exhibited in February 2001 at the Maryann Boesky Gallery. Most of my recent collages are made from materials found on outside advertising, which I photocopy, and physically cut and paste. Since then I’ve created a 135 page photo collage “novel” titled Free Fall which I will show at the analogous series curated by Tim Peterson in late May in Cambridge, Mass. My visual poetry is also beginning to find a home on my blog ; a few of my recent short poems from my chapbook Hegelian Honeymoon (Chax, 2004) were published in Crag Hill’s visual poetry magazine score; of course, Crag Hill was the first blogger you chose to interview on e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e v-a-l-u-e-s. Some of the collages from Free Fall were recently published in the web magazine eratio, and reviewed by Geof Huth on his blog dbqp. My wife, Toni Simon is an artist who is a constant source of knowledge and inspiration, with whom I have frequently collaborated; our collaboration "The Gentle Instructor "was included in my book Light Street (Zasterle Press (the publisher is Manuel Brito), others were published in John Byrum’s Generator, Cydney Chadwick’s avec and Stephen-Paul Martin and Eve Ensler’s Central Park; Toni’s artwork has appeared on Kathleen Fraser’s however website, and on the covers of my books including Poems (Sun and Moon), The Boundary of Blur (Roof) and my chapbook (from Leave Books) Two Essays as well as on the covers of two books by the poet Laynie Browne. In March my collage 1998 will be exhibited in a group show at the Harvard Dudley House called Infinity.

TB: You mentioned publishing some of your poems from Hegelian Honeymoon in Crag Hill's visual poetry magazine score. While some collage techniques were employed (particularly in the title poem), these aren't what I'd think of as visual poems--they often seem more akin to your aphorisms. Here are the four pieces you published in score 18:

Hegelian Honeymoon

Never
leave
me

I
need
my
space

why
didn't
you
call

I've
got
to
go

--------



Double or Nothing

Luck
is like

a sly
romance

sometimes

you
get ice

sometimes

you get

twice

--------

Night in Shining Armor

Poets
are
expendable

but
so eminently

collectible

--------

Gas Surplus

Warmed over
thoughts

are like
fast food

easy to
swallow

hard
to digest

--------

I'm fond of these shorter poems which you refer to as haiku. Maybe this would be a good point at which to ask you about your working methods, your process of composition. Would you speak in a little more detail about how you write poetry?

NP: Thanks, Tom! These, of course, were not written using found materials, the method employed, for example, to write my poem Lost Horizons back in the 70’s, where I selected phrases from the popular book by James Hilton. This poem was later included in my book Poems published in 1988 by Sun and Moon. The poems from Hegelian Honeymoon started to come to mind not long after going to the Metropolitan Museum to see a show of Japanese calligraphy. My experience reminded me of the film Topsy-Turvy about Gilbert and Sullivan. I had been going through a dry spell and Toni insisted on taking me with her to this museum show, and I was not that interested. But then I loved the show and read all the accompanying poems with great admiration and pleasure. Soon after, on my daily walk along my favorite winding path near the reservoir in Central Park, thoughts in the form pf phrases started to appear in my mind that reminded me, in a strange or funny manner, of haiku. Without writing anything down, working the phrases around in my mind as they came, and as I walked, I started to count syllables. I liked the way the poems sounded like haiku, and I corrected the lines, without writing them down, into 17 syllable sequences. With the title poem “Hegelian Honeymoon” I was thinking about the urgent, passionate, contradictory things lovers say to each other. I laughed out loud thinking about the poem and soon after I started to walk back and forth on that favorite path every day, examining my thoughts and seeing if they could be worked into other haiku. One by one they sort of popped out and I began posting them on the SUNY/Buffalo poetics listserv. To my surprise and delight there were many appreciative responses, including an invitation from Crag Hill to publish the ones above, and one day Charles Alexander wrote to me to say how much he liked them, and, if I would write one more, he might publish them as a Chax chapbook, which he did in 2004. By the way, I’ve consulted various people who know quite a lot about haiku, including Norman Fischer who is a lifetime practitioner of Buddhism and, in particular, Zen Buddhism, and is an acknowledged master with a large following around San Francisco. He is quite confident that these poems may be considered haiku and kind of smiles at the idea that there is this formal set of guidelines among so many writers. So in this, as with everything else, there is the tight, traditional or academic definition and then the actual everyday working definition that is far looser. In writing these poems, as in most of my writing since college days, I wanted to incorporate the actual process of thought as it is experienced every day. Not long after I began writing poetry I learned about Freud’s ideas about free association, the automatic writing among the surrealists and the importance of spontaneity of thought and action among the abstract expressionist school of artists. All this connects, of course, to Chinese and Japanese calligraphic painting and to haiku. It’s absorbing and exciting for me to notice how thoughts can have recognizable features and be likened to visual objects; or to focus on a moment when the shaping of a thought takes place. The words that could later form the basis of a poem might be found between the folds and creases of a thought, often not. Once, when I noticed my thoughts growing weary from one such frustrating and vain search, I went out and found the materials and made my first collage.

TB: I get the feeling that your writing is less and less preoccupied with theory, and has become more meditative, more preoccupied with time and timelessness--as is perhaps best evinced in your passion for aphorisms. Is that a fair characterization?

NP: Yes, it’s true. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the two subjects I am most interested in, poetry and psychoanalysis, have so much to say about and do with time and duration. Poetry’s outstanding literary feature is, or at least was, its ability to withstand the test of time. Psychoanalysis, as a project between two people, can continue for decades. Let’s compare these two forms of expression to advertising, for example, to propose a continuum of values in long range relationships. Very few endeavors in contemporary life can offer similar hopes for continuity over time. In a culture where the ultimate image of success is a smash hit or a cultural splash, along with “tons” of publicity, poetry and psychoanalysis propose to go deeper. But it’s also true that when I was younger I was more astonished or dismayed by such comparisons than I am now. My very early interests - as far back as high school- in both areas- got me thinking about time. I remember that, like so many children, when I was a pre-teen I became preoccupied with Egyptian archeology; with others it might be prehistoric time, like the dinosaurs. This has to do with the budding awareness in children of the fact that the world has long existed before they did, and that people die. My turn to psychoanalysis had partly to do with a revolt against my childhood immersion in Catholicism. I was fortunate to find out about Freud very soon after I discovered sex; I needed something like this because I was so shocked at the rigidity and ignorance about sex encouraged by the Catholic doctrine. I had even considered becoming a priest when I grew up! I appreciated poetry and psychoanalysis because I needed ways to think seriously about life that were not so dogmatic, and so circumscribed by local custom and belief, yet still offered an experience of depth and intensity similar to the soaring, lyrical feelings I had experienced in my religious practices. For a time, during my alter boy days, I had even invented some private forms of devotion. My father was an army officer so my family was constantly in movement from place to place. I had to spend a lot of time alone, so I became a voracious reader. As a person, my mother was on the hysterical side and my father was rather remote and silent so I needed reading for companionship, and as a form of rational communication. Also, due to the traveling and constant change of people in my life, a kind of detachment evolved that led me to thinking a lot about life and people, stepping back and trying to generalize and get a grip. This also led to searching for relationships, ideas, processes that are flexible and last. I wanted to understand many things I found frustrating and contradictory about myself and others; in particular I was interested in the dynamics and causes of superficiality and hypocrisy. For one thing, my mother was Jewish (she converted but never practiced Catholicism) and my father was a non-practicing Catholic. This had the effect on me of seeing through the arbitrary and superficial side of culture. We lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn when I was a teenager and I noticed a lot of anti-Semitism among my friends. One day I simply announced that I was partly Jewish and that was the end of a lot of the friendships. This didn’t bother me much, or for long, because of my tendency to be more interested in exploring authentic connections between people, than in compliance in relationships for its own sake.

Theory offers a way of thinking beyond ones inherited or localized (in time and space) assumptions. Yet it can also show how to hold onto and value worthwhile convictions in the face of resistance from outside and within. My initial knowledge of psychoanalysis was obtained from reading the theory. Early psychoanalytic theory is breathtakingly poetic, so finding out about this at the same time I was discovering poetry and fiction was enthralling. The early practitioners of psychoanalysis remind me of the pre-Socratic philosophers. They were on virgin ground, and they knew it. There’s still a great deal of very rich material to be mined there because, like theory in poetry, the theoretical development of psychoanalysis is not linear as it is in the hard sciences where once a new paradigm is launched most of the initial guiding principles become outmoded. Conceptual work in the arts and in psychoanalysis does not evolve in this manner. This sort of theorizing is not situated primarily in the physical realm, but is experiential, and the rich, complex and over determined emotional life of people functions and changes very differently over time from the physical realm. Like a good, conforming, obedient, doctor and scientist, Freud tried to base psychoanalysis in the physical realm at first, using neurology and biology as the foundation. This didn’t work because, while there is a very crucial relationship between physical reality and the inner life of human beings, our internal life functions very differently from the physical world, even from social and cultural worlds. Maybe this is an aspect of where timelessness comes in. The constant attempt on the part of theorists to understand human psychological functioning on a physical or social analogy is doomed to fail because much of the human spirit remains internal, preserved by remaining partly unsocialized and unsocializable, and so slow to change, that, for the most part, it appears to be unchanging and unchangeable. One of Freud’s key insights is that culture evolves from the sublimation of instincts. And instincts are essentially inherent, like gravity. A key revelation that emerges from the long term practice of psychoanalysis is how long it takes, what intense determination and commitment is involved, for people to change. And that actual, or lasting transformation, results mostly from insight. I never had much use for political models of social change, even when I was younger and really had no basis for realizing or comprehending something like this. It was a guess then, but four decades of practicing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis has taught me that people change very slowly even when they desperately need and desire change. Transformations in political models, governmental, religious or educational models will not change the world as much as people hope they will, or imagine they have. Human manipulativeness, misunderstanding, confusion, poor judgment, cruelty and injustice is so pervasive and ingrained, particularly in group behavior, that it will take an evolution, or perhaps a revolution in social awareness and commitment on the part of society to change this much further. And it won’t happen simply by creating, altering , imposing and enforcing laws or religious convictions. Something else in culture is needed, and all the attempts to create such transformations keep eroding because of the pervasively immature, selfish, sadistic, neglectful and cruel side of culture. Of course, this is particularly noticeable living in an era when there is so much regressive and manipulative social behavior.

My interest in aphorisms certainly stems from my early trust in Catholic doctrine, and my later disenchantment and final disavowal of such beliefs. Also, psychoanalytic interpretations have some qualities similar to aphorisms. To this day, I always have a specific guiding principle I like to remind myself about as often as possible. For many years I have been carrying a couple of aphorisms written on a piece of paper in my wallet. I’ve noticed that when I have finally absorbed the insight into my daily life, I tear it up, throw it away and write another one. The creation and collecting of aphorisms as a literary practice essentially died by 1800. The practice probably dates from an era when publishing was very expensive and a book of aphorisms offered a concentrate of wisdom that was portable and easily memorized. Going from writing poetry to writing poetics and aphorisms as forms of meditation was not so much a leap for me, as my interest in poetry had less to do with public performances and publications and more to do with goals of personal transformation and change. Not that I didn’t want or don’t crave recognition and fame like most other poets, I wanted it but that craving contradicted a large part of my actual practice of and needs from the art. Meeting other poets, in particular, Ted Berrigan, helped me to find a way to introduce my poetry to others without having to submit it for publication. Around the time I met Ted, I also discovered the poetics of Paul Valéry and the journals of Cesare Pavese. I found their books in a bookstore run by Stanley Lewis who was the first publisher of the magazine Parnassus. His bookstore, where I hung out in the mid-sixties, was across the street from the office of my first psychoanalyst, Alan Grossman. The reading and writing of poetics offered me a method of understanding the poetic process and where it might fit in with other aspects of living.

I’ve always struggled with ambivalence about publishing my writing. This ambivalence is partly related to my allergy to literary pretentiousness, which I first encountered as a literary honors student in college. One important way I broke this repugnance came from the advice of Ted Berrigan who encouraged all his students to give readings. This created another conflict because I was intensely shy. So I took some acting lessons for awhile from a very supportive teacher, the late Osvaldo Riofrancos. For a long time I enjoyed giving and going to readings, as they complemented my interest in the meditative and transformative aspect of writing. Eventually, many of my L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry friends, as I mentioned above, helped me overcome my anxieties and reluctance about publishing. Still, the contemporary fashion on the part of poets to get as many poems as quickly as possible into print, while admirable and productive, is strange and in some ways worrisome to me. Maybe it is a healthy reaction and rebellion on the part of poets to the indifference and neglect of culture. At least in this way poets get their work “on the record” and available for others to read. One unfortunate result, it seems to me, could be a dilution of its impact. Paul Celan once compared publishing a poem to throwing a message in a bottle into the sea. But poetry publication, at least for some poets today, is more like trying to empty the sea into bottles.

TB: One last question, what do you find to be most encouraging and most discouraging about the current poetry scene?

NP :As a young poet somehow I got it into my head that I needed to be invited in order to publish. Like any other writer, I hated getting rejection slips, and failed to understand, until I was much older, the value of being persistent with editors I wanted to work with. When I reached a point of gaining the interest of a number of excellent editors and publishers I remained lazy –even defensive- about reaching out, uninvited, to others. A couple of times I was asked to contribute to a publication by small press editors, when there were several editors involved, only to be rejected by one of the other editors. I’m not talking about very many experiences here, only a few, but enough to have –unfortunately- turned me off to submitting my work without an invitation. Needless to say, through all of this, I unconsciously harbored a negative attitude towards self publishing. The scene around the Ear Inn and the Segue Foundation offered me a way to connect with other writers over a period of over 25 years. Once invited to read, I would edit some of my writing and, in that indirect way, prepare it for publication. Twice I ran the series for a couple of months, giving me a chance to work with other writers and this opened up some valued exchanges.

At its outset I was encouraged by Charles Bernstein to post on the SUNY/Buffalo poetics list, but still, I resisted and did so only rarely. After the attacks of 9/11, however, I felt a desperate need to be in frequent, close contact with other writers and to have a place to express my views. This led to an important, and enlightening conversation with Barrett Watten, which was later published in Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman’s magazine Chain. This activity on the listserv, as I mentioned earlier, led to my opening up my weblog fait accompli. Weblogging, of course, is self-publishing. I enjoy online publishing and began early, thanks to Peter Ganick. I like that it’s fast and free, universally available and very accessible due to html linking.
The growing internationalism of blogging is one of its most exciting facets. Recently, one of the articles I posted on fait accompli after the November 2004 presidential election Bush's Cult-ural Capital and the Politics of Paranoia was translated into Spanish by Heriberto Yepez and posted on his Spanish weblog @rchivo h@che.
Recently, it was republished in an exciting new Mexican magazine edited by Rogelio Villarreal in printed and online versions: Replicante.

The most discouraging thing about the poetry scene is the tendency for groups to get into clashes, and for poets to struggle to be the top dog within their own groups. You would think that the fact that poets are generally unpaid would result in more cooperation and mutual support among them. What actually happens, though, is endless ranking and maneuvering for advantage and prestige. Critics play a useful role in helping poets establish academic careers, at the cost of playing off poets against one another. Back in the 60’s, I remember a poet cleverly substituting poets’ names for listings on the stock exchange, and publishing this piece to make an excellent point. Every writer craves and needs recognition and support. What I enjoy about blogging and listservs are the more direct forms of interaction and response, in comparison to the comparatively slow moving critical apparatus connected with academia and print publishing. Although it needs updating, I’ll gladly take this opportunity to plug the fait accompli blogroll, also available at the Electronic Poetry Center.
Another selection of weblogs, online journals and online writing may be found at poetic inhalation.

On the whole, the poetry scene has never been livelier, more productive and exciting than it is now. Online publishing is expanding exponentially. There are reading series springing up all over the place and many excellent poetry book publishers, including: Douglas Messerli’s Green Integer Books, James Sherry’s Roof Press, Charles Alexander’s Chax, Cydney Chadwick’s Avec Books, Steve Clay’s Granary Press, Rod Smith’s Edge, Geoffrey Young’s The Figures, Marsh Hawk Press, Potes and Poets, Softskull Press, Leslie Scalapino’s O Press, Juliana Spahr’s Leave Books and her magazine, edited with Jena Osman, Chain, Krupskaya, the Subpress Collective, Lewis Warsh’s United Artists Books, Coach House Books, James Meetze’s Tougher Disguises , Jack Kimball’s Faux Press, Brenda Iijima’s Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, the Post-Apollo Press, the Waldrops’ Burning Deck, Manuel Brito’s Zasterle Press, Kyle Schlesinger’s Cuneiform, and lately, the dynamo Bob Holman, owner/operator of the Bowery Poetry Club, jumped into the fray with his Bowery Poetry Series, to name just a few. The readings and publishing activities at the Poetry Project, Naropa, the SUNY/Buffalo poetics program, the crucial role of Small Press Distribution, in particular the contribution of Laura Moriarty, Poet’s House, a complete list of crucial ongoing work in contemporary poetry would take months to compile.

To be frank, one of the most encouraging things about the current poetry scene, for me personally, is having been invited by you to do this interview. Thanks for your steady focus and persistence, especially with “the difficulties” and best wishes for all your future projects.

TB: Thank you, Nick.