“Go to where you are—I’ll wait for you there.”

Norway’s leading poet, Jan Erik Vold was born in 1939 in Oslo. Known for his urbane lyricism—fingering the ivory petals of poetry and jazz—Vold intoned the sixties—“laughing with one eye, crying with the other.”

For starters—Vold cut Briskeby Blues with Jan Garbarek’s quartet and Telemark Blue with Chet Baker in Paris. A remarkable roulette—“cashing in the chips—where the real work begins.”

A poet of nature—lashed to the birth of the cool—Vold doesn’t bother to put on a new roof. “I like the bark of the tree, its lack of pattern—the roads tried out—and those that remained.”

Vold’s work includes: between mirror and mirror, the glance, from room to room SAD & CRAZY, BusterR burning, Moose, A Circle of Ice, Twelve Meditations, Poems Pointing at the World, and Great White Book to Ponder—as well as translations of Bob Dylan, Frank O’Hara, Robert Creeley, Samuel Beckett, and Tomas Tranströmer.

Jan Erik Vold lives in Stockholm.