Poetry/Prose. Translated from the German by Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton, and Rosmarie Waldrop. "An Oskar-Pastior-poem is like life. As soon as you think you've got hold of it, it has already moved you ahead by the fraction of a hair"-Klaus Hensel. "For Pastior, language itself is the stuff of life.He explores it through puns, lists, strings, heaps, fields, dictionaries, alphabets, collage, montage, potpourris-all in orgiastic expansion. The result is 'thought-music as a leaping perspective'-a perspective, in which a successful 'nonsensical' text like 'ur-cur trusts sulfur baths: plush' (p. 90) 'is infinitely more precise than this kind of statement'"-from the Introductory Note by Rosmarie Waldrop.