ONCE LOST, BUT FOUND AGAIN
On February 22, 2018, I got an email from the poet Zoltan Farkas, someone I hadn’t heard from in more than 40 years. Here’s what he wrote:
Dear Terry...
I've been remembering the wild days in DC in the 70's.
Thought I would try to re-establish contact. Let me know if you get this email?
Now in my 80s, I've begun writing again... miraculous, when you think of it.
Zoltan Farkas (once lost, but found again)
80 Mt. Desert Street, apt. 54
Bar Harbor, Maine 04609
A few minutes later, I replied:
Zoltan! Welcome back. I often wondered what became of you.
I also wonder what became of my copy of The Baltimore Poems, which I really dug.
I'm glad you've started writing again. I still write, play music, etc. I have a 28-yr-old son
named Michael who is a far better musician than I could ever be. And so forth.
yrs,
Terence
I never heard another word from him, and I’m sorry to say that I never followed up beyond my initial response to his email.
THE BALTIMORE POEMS
A few weeks ago, my friend and fellow poet David Beaudouin paid me a visit, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Zoltan and his chapbook, David being a Baltimore native and an authority on his beloved city. He said, no, he hadn’t. I immediately went to my computer and searched for Zoltan’s book, while David did the same thing on his phone. I got there first, ordering what seems to have been the last available copy of The Baltimore Poems, $10 from an Amazon seller.
It arrived in the mail a week or so later. It’s a beautiful little work, published in 1967 by Goliard Press in the U.K. Anselm Hollo (1934--2013) brought the book to the attention of the press’s founder, my old friend Tom Raworth (1938--2017), the acclaimed avant-garde poet. [below, left: Tom Raworth, photo by Allen Ginsberg; right: Anselm Hollo, 10 June 1965]

Here’s a sample from the book:
10. Sonnet
Making the lonely passages. Lips
stitched shut. A hollow ocean.
Destroyer. Stretches past
meat and bone. Fire
in the poem does not consume
anything but paper. The shores
night shores vanish into it
like something wished for. Real fire
burns, water chokes a waning man.
But I've been thankful for the rain
to cool my face and help me home.
His work is taut and mysterious, his use of language seeming to anticipate in some ways the work of the Language School, which became a significant force in the literary world in the 1970s and later.
From no. 8:
You can imagine a cliff
somewhere in every poem, opens
down. Pronouns confuse
everything.
I made a PDF of the book and asked my friend Charles Bernstein, the great poet/scholar, if he could add it to the EPC Digital Library, which he kindly did. So, after almost 60 years, the BAP blog is making The Baltimore Poems available again—just click right here.

ONCE FOUND, BUT LOST AGAIN
A week or two ago, I went back to the 2018 email exchange and sent Zoltan a message inquiring after his well-being, but he has not replied. I assume that if he was in his 80s in 2018, he is somewhere around 90 now, if he is still alive.
That’s what I haven’t been able to determine. In fact, after searching extensively online, I have not been able to find either a photo, a short bio, an obituary, or anything about him except for scattered references to the 1967 chapbook and a single mention of him in a poem of mine called “Three Addresses.” Otherwise, he seems to have left no footprint whatsoever over the past 50 years. Using the Maine address he provided in the 2018 email, I stumbled on what looked like a possible phone number for him, but when I called, a voice declared it was disconnected. Online, you will come upon several other Zoltan Farkases, but not the Zoltan I once knew.
With the help of Google Maps I drilled down a bit more. The address in Bar Harbor, Maine, that Zoltan included in his 2018 email turns out to be part of a low-income senior living housing site called the Malvern-Belmont Estates. I tried several phone numbers associated with this place, but with no luck. I found a contact form on one website that seemed connected to the umbrella organization in charge of Malvern-Belmont, and I tried to send an email inquiring about Zoltan, but when I hit "submit," a message in red repeatedly appears announcing "Cannot access Server."
I then called the Mount Desert Islander, the local newspaper, leaving a message on their voicemail and also sending an email requesting any information they might have. A staffer at the paper emailed me back the next day with this: “Thank you for your email and voicemail. After taking a look through our archives, I only come up with one hit, and that is where Zoltan Farkas was listed in the obituary of Sharon Riley in the Mount Desert Islander in the January 23, 2020 edition.” So it seems Zoltan was still alive in 2020. I tried finding out more about Sharon Riley, thinking that maybe one of her connections might know something, but I struck out there as well.
I then searched for evidence of Zoltan in Tom Raworth’s and Anselm Hollo’s archives, both of which did include something from Zoltan, but this material is not digitized. I will try eventually to contact those institutions to see if they can supply the Farkas material.
A SURPRISING LETTER FROM 1976
Then it dawned on me that I should search my own archive at Boston College, and sure enough, there was something from Zoltan in there. I asked BC’s Christian Dupont if they could scan whatever it was I included from Zoltan, which I had no memory or copy of, and they graciously did.
I was kind of shocked at what I got back from them—a warm, appreciative, neatly typed letter concerning a reading I apparently arranged in early 1976:

My shock derives from how personal and intimate Zoltan’s tone is, to the point of his even signing off with “you have my love.” I don’t remember being close with him at all. We were next-door neighbors in my apartment building in D.C. for a while, but I don’t recall ever hanging out with him. In his 2018 email he mentions “the wild days in DC in the 70’s.” Yes, indeed: there were many wild days back then but I can’t picture any in my mind with me and him in the same frame. I also didn’t remember the reading he discusses, but I quickly figured that the “Simon” he mentions had to be Simon Schuchat, a very young poet back then, but already impressively accomplished. And the excellent sound had to be the contribution of my brother Jesse, who was the master of our band’s (The Fast Flying Vestibule) audio equipment in that era.
After roaming the globe for many decades, Simon is back living in D.C. I emailed him to ask if he remembered this reading from a half century ago. He replied, “I remember the name & I know of a flyer announcing a reading he & I gave at Folio in 1976 or so, but that is the sum total of my recollections.” The Folio readings, a legendary series invented and run by my late dear friend Doug Lang, took place at the Folio Bookstore in D.C.’s Dupont Circle. In some ways, Doug’s series was inspired by a similar one started earlier by my best friend Michael Lally at the Pyramid Gallery, just down the block from Folio.
Then I wondered if my own journal, like my archive, might yield some clues. I’ve kept a journal very erratically over the course of my life, so it’s always an uncertain source of information. I wasn’t optimistic. 
My 1976 journal contains only contains only 10 or so pages of writing, but right there at the start I found this: “I’m running a reading at the Pyramid Friday night—Zoltan Farkas & Simon Schuchat. It should be good.” And that’s it. No later report on the reading itself. When Michael Lally left D.C. for New York in 1975, much to my dismay, I dimly remember taking over the Pyramid Gallery reading series, though what else I presented besides the Farkas-Schuchat reading is lost to me at this stage. But at least this brief entry offers another little crumb of information.
AI STRIKES OUT TOO
Finally, I thought maybe AI could do a better job dredging up information from cyberspace. So I plugged the few bits of data I had into Bing’s CoPilot, and this is what came back:
I wasn't able to locate any definitive online bio, photo, or detailed information for a poet named Zoltan Farkas born in the mid‑1930s who was still alive as of 2018. The search results returned several individuals with that name—from an academic profile at Georgia Southern University (which clearly refers to someone born much earlier and who passed away in 2002) to a musician associated with the Hungarian metal band Ektomorf 2. None of these profiles match the description of a poet fitting your criteria. It’s quite possible that if a poet by that name exists, his work hasn’t received a broad digital footprint in mainstream English‑language sources.
…MIRACULOUS, WHEN YOU THINK OF IT
One of my special interests in writing for the BAP blog has been to bring back to public attention the work and lives of poets I have known or am familiar with but who have slipped from view, among them Lee Lally, Diane Burns, and Jamie MacInnis. These poets published very little in their lifetimes, but their work is unique and valuable. Zoltan Farkas is the most elusive of them all. I am very glad to have re-discovered his sole chapbook and the letter he wrote me in 1976. My hope is that this post will help bring forth more information on him and his writing. That would be a small miracle.