Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001
Subject: HOAX: DEBROT/ASHBERY INTERVIEW ON READ.ME

Has this "deceit" been publicly acknowledged? Have you 'fessed up? (On the List, etc. I'm a little bit Rip van Winkel-ish in having missed about a year and a half while underground. The thing to be in doubt about now is: the existence of Jacques Debrot. "Jacques Debrot" is the name of the cultural minister of Antilles.) The poems are very masterfully done. I suspected that they were forgeries, too, mainly because they combine chronologically different styles of John Ashbery's. The interview too does a very good job of reproducing certain speech patterns from other interviews of his,--- but, of course, there are then things there that John would never in a thousand years allow his name to be attached to.