dbqp: visualizing poetics View RSS

What Dawn Hath Wrought and Twilight Can't Bring 17 Jul 2023 6:03 PM (last year)

Within Sight of the Bloom 4 Jan 2023 8:10 AM (2 years ago)

 

calamity is the whisper of a heart 

still throbbing after all these many forgotten years 

precarious, you might say 

thinking of cavities 

the sweetest being

the wettest 

my monsoon thoughts elapse across perimeters 

kinda like kissing a kat and the consequences thereof 

what is right is whatever it is we ever do 

I sing with the slightest voice so 

you might not hear it 

unless you lean into the breadth of it 

and the whole sense of it 

close enough to inhale 

its slightly putrid breath 

As We Sit Down to Consider the Unthinkable and the Unknowable 4 Jul 2021 9:02 AM (3 years ago)

Philip Guston, "White House" (1971)

In the end, there is no beginning. Everything has always starts long before we realize it.

We have now moved but a week since the day Trump was informally elected President of the United States,* and it seems as if my entire life has occurred since those dark hours. As the realization of the end game congealed in my head, a huge sense of dread permeated my body. Only sleep took it away, and I dream dreams that are mostly nightmares but always rich and interesting. Still, upon awaking that Wednesday morning, it was not my dreams I was awaking from but from the election of such a simply pointless and empty person. The dread returned hard and fastened itself to my consciousness.

Yet, now, the reality has cooled a bit. I'm still aghast at the results of the race, but I have accepted the reality. It is as if I have lost a foot but learned to walk without it, so the loss is not so great anymore. Occasionally, during the day, I am reminded of its absence, but it passes through me as accepted regret. I cannot change it, so I must live with it.

I pay too much attention to politics at the national level, but which I mean I pay the amount of attention anyone should. The federal government affects our freedoms and determines how well or poorly we live to a good degree. The more power a government has, the more it has to use. So my goal is government doing the most good. For that reason, I am a Democrat, sometimes as a partisan, sometimes as a person who has no place else to go, since every other choice is worse.

When this election began brewing (about four years ago), I dreaded it at this point. I did not want an election pitting another Bush against another Clinton. I despise dynasties. As an American and a small-r republican, I despise monarchies and the idea that blood must determine destiny. I hated the idea of another Clinton (even though not by blood) as much as another Bush. The country must grow and extend itself, so it had to allow new voices.

What we had during the interminable election season instead was something richer characters but emptier in fact. The Republicans put forth a parade of people, none of whom I could vote for (maybe Lindsey Graham in a pinch). Trump was such a cartoon, such a moral morass, and such a thoughtless (in all conceptions of the word) person that I never thought the Republicans would elect him. At first. The Democrats put forth the pre-selected Hillary Clinton, the unexpected Bernie Sanders, and two others who lasted until debates began. 

In the end, the two people who vied against each other were both the least and the most prepared to be president. 

Trump was clearly least prepared. He was probably the only major party candidate for president less prepared to be president that I was. His understanding of the basic operations of government was skimpy at best, and his lack of depth--his almost total lack of rational thinking--was breathtaking. Not to say anything about his total lack of respect for the concept of the truth. His character was without equal. I have never voted for a Republican for president, but I was always impressed by the preparedness of most the eventual Republican presidents. G.W. Bush was an exception, but he was immensely prepared compared to Trump. What was worse, though, was his puerile temperament. Here was a man who would attack anyone he didn't like rashly, viciously, vulgarly, and yet he would whine incessantly if anyone criticized any of his stupidities or prevarications.

Clinton (whose Rodham I will always miss) was probably the n
_____

* Informally, because the Electoral College makes the final decision in our strange system. Also, I do realize the election was not called until the next day, but it was essentially a foregone conclusion and all of the voting occurred during this day one week ago.

ecr. l'inf.

What We Heard 4 Jul 2021 9:02 AM (3 years ago)

Stones at the Reception for Robert Grenier's Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970-2013 (Brooklyn, 19 May 2013)

The word comes rough out of the body. A wind. Constriction. Friction makes the sound. We all hate speech because it forces us to believe we are human, because we are forced into the human horde. The only way to control it, to control the word, is to write it. To draw it.

Last night, I attended the opening reception for a retrospective of Robert Grenier's poetry at Southfirst in Brooklyn. The show went by the name "Language Objects, Letters in Space, 1970-2013," and it included everything after his first book of poetry, Dusk Road Games. Poetry, an essay, an edited set of poetry by Larry Eigner, one photograph, a letter, some archival materials (notebooks with poems wrawn into double-page spreads and across the physical gutters of the books)--yet this was an art show.

For many reasons, Grenier is my touchstone poet. In so many ways, he inhabits my interests. (Although, I admit, not in all.) He is a massive minimalist, a maximinimalist, a masculinist maker of micropoems that build into giant works, sometimes works of such massive size that we cannot well understand their extent. And he is a visual poet, one who grew into that state later in life but landed there tenaciously and has set up house, even though he does not wander in visual poetry circles, though his imagination is not that of the main herd of us. He is a worker of an idea all the way. As his namesake Robert Lax, he grew out of sentences into words, but then he grew further, into a realm of spidery letters that formed words if you worked hard enough to read them. If you tried to read them.

He is commonly the poet of four-word poems, always short words, sometimes with words breaking across the line. He is a poet of patience. Maybe not his, but ours, the patience required of us to read his poems. He is the practitioner of slow poetry. He slows us down enough so we can see well enough so we can hear the words that are not spoken, even though only imagined so.

People at the Exhibition

The exhibition consisted of a few vitrines, a number of poems presented as art on the walls, and a few items, mostly the most booklike of Grenier's books, on shelves. The space was raw--exposed beams and supports, rough wood--but surrounded by clean white walls, order, control. The space, but a room, presented to us the poems in ways to allow us to interact with them, to read these often (physically) difficult to read poems.

It was a good space, and it filled with people as I walked through it.

The Man in the Corner

Exhibitions are spaces for showing things, and often the things are people. I watch people as much as I look at art when I'm at a gallery. I'm more of a viewer of than a interactor with people. I take everything in. I slow down. I read. The roughness of the word, of the human being in space, softens. Everything becomes palatable, edible, digestible. I take them all in.

Most people spent most of their time talking, but I spent my time watching, breathing in the words. When I spoke, it was with a kind of reticence born out of a deep shyness, a resistance to people, a writer's desire, maybe an artist's, to be alone.

Still, I broke my silence quickly.

Robert Grenier Holding a copy of "This" # 1 and Showing His Famous Essay, "On Speech" (19 May 2013)

I recognized Robert Grenier immediately upon entering the room, and within a few minutes I'd introduced myself. Grenier knows I exist. I've written about his work enough to gather such attention, so I thought he would know who I was, though he was surprised, as everyone is, to learn that my last name rhymes with "truth."

"Mr Grenier," I said, "my name is Geof Huth." Then I explained a bit about myself, enough to put myself (as a word) in context.

Grenier was simply a New Englander, in his manner, his accent, the way he dressed, the careful way he spoke. There was an enduring simplicity to him--as if he were once of his own poems--a sense that he was merely who he was, a man without trappings. We talked for a while, but others shuttled him away since he was the reason each of us was there, and I ended up in a good conversation with John Batki about Grenier. Batki is a good friend of Grenier's and the one who suggested the spelling of "M'ASS" in BOSTON, M'ASS to Grenier, which was the reason (according to Batki) that the poem is dedicated to him (along with Anselm Hollo).

Batki and I looked at Grenier's poems, sometimes reading them, often discussing them, and discussing Grenier's books, most of which I own. (Since Grenier's books are often quite rare and, thus, quite expensive, collecting Grenier's work is difficult).

105. Breathing 5 May 2021 7:59 PM (3 years ago)

The poem, an isolated fiction, doesn't breathe, but it sings.

One , 1, None (Eleventh Draft) 14 Mar 2021 5:56 PM (4 years ago)

See a seen. A shape inviolate of wonder often has possi bilities unthought. Numbers expressed are an orb extended. Rays recall an orches tral set. The musician can do whatnot, exploring music. To restrict— district—them, a scattered cantata, a tested symbology, two beautiful songbirds are wrapped, caged, & freed, released to extension, allowed room, extrapola ting that value encompass ed via motions, thoughts, a simple cusp, intent of accident, stasis in glorious manifests, englobing, arousing, merged in, entirely one. That becoming, an ocean via duct: to 3, 4—counted, adding reality, intention, removing it, a subtlety. Subtlety moving around, a way, to convince, to see . . . . fisher, finder, what fingers eradicate, and foreskin, just what oceans encompass: beach, reach, tense reaction to it. Was I enraged by seven or seventeen ways? Relative I be, relative were numerals: 9, 8, 7. Forever were these to encroach from 1 to another, a resistant sea, ecstatic sways, to a 1. Waves, waves, waves, undulants, silver that must always be as blackened suns, constant, radiating, cooled, thus penumbral and and opening a carefully formed hole into an expected movement. A signifier extends every motion (motion again). Destitute, our aim must then reveal a or numerous ways (version sings slowly) that meanings be all our febrile reaction feebly creates. Dawdling, and a motion moves on several: I am a dispersed, disturbed, a lost pearl, wrecked, taut, achingly found. Reveal, dispel ponderous or, say, just limpid ore, that sickened, waste & fast depth that can be little, little more tortured by 1 way, our injurious way: curtly. Scented, an orange, or even essential, a same, O, an olfacto ry way, distant, to even fewer memories, serials: blends blonds blands for a sense, hints, devotion, demotion, a hurried time, faceless, heedless, a fever to eradicate, to imbricate scents, to remember, to dismember an often made reversion, a version, a verse for vision, made for simple hungers, handmade, burnished, or piled presently: our motion a 1 for our fewer: our manys have expanded, extended to make twelve timids tame, to 1, and severals made a beam. Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more, & every 1 a sliver. Extension made her how fever severed it, severed. Any person makes money. Altogether, clients beget precision since particles I inanimate tried for centuries as 1 organism, enwholed, beyond a 1, entered, viz. hampered, 9 instances for 11 trials (1, 1), rightly forwarded for 7 races, & 1 constant: faith— thus, everyone (preacher, ward, lady, porter as oaf, servant, performer, purloiner, beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner, actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a- temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed, aware of eighths of twos, reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes (millennia) aft rememory, 9 moments ago: 0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, as encetera’d betwitch ire / air, sylvan symbols, for few relics as this full reason: quiet voices sipped from our oftenest debate or a try, perchance, once privately, once bereft, for ambitions bring, to an able general, all manners o’ barnacled reason to (I surmise) calculate purposes coming, opposedly, from our several or, perhaps, emptied faces, for comforted or a torqued 1 scented system to enumerate our (a) perfect system, perfect means to say whatever acts before perfect take absences. I appeared once hungry, harried, hungry, hungry—obsoleted, torn awake & she, oh, awoke hungry desolate & so intense I swerved & fell into sleep to arouse any ideas beyond trembling, to satiate desires’ absolute needs echoing outward & for days of however. twice, intermi ttently, visions occupied everyone’s intent: heartache. I remembe red nights and desires, O, desires abundant, despair as my 1 hope before everyone bled, died. Resembled I (if in many disguises) every one that was I even babies which tore paintings after sleeping. Every one another 1. Every process vocalized to de termine effluence stated internal sacrament as hopes building furiously to see above this as a furiously dependent organ enters a 1 or a, an, egregious— as I continued— though absently, thoughts arise from an I, therefrom, therefore, these missed (a, o, or I) as completed as I expressly wanted. Neverthe lesses exceed that one art, that word, I expected I would encounter {embraced}, 1 ark, meaning “remove it.” Temporary auction: that blessed blasted I, sin, cacophony, coruscate, damage—cover a sentence therein, or several of a 1.

My Mother's Death in Her Own Words 11 Feb 2021 7:59 PM (4 years ago)

Two days before my mother would leave, she wrote this in her diary:

Mom is so sad besides being in a lot of pain and I don't know whether to leave on Tues. or not. I'll see how tomorrow goes.

Hear[ed] on the news about the accident on Briley PKW we saw on the way home last night. A female, probably drinking, lost control literally flew over the median landing on top of a car going the opposite direction which killed the driver. It wasn't more than 15 min Rick passed that place to get me. The road was clear. If he hadn't been late we could have been the victims[.]

Foreshadowing.

My second sister added this detail to the story:

She [my mother] asked [my third sister] why someone inebriated would survive an accident but a sober person would die in a similar accident. [My third sister] told her an intoxicated person wouldn’t brace for impact.

This second sister of mine told another story from mother tonight: 

She told me a disturbing story about me being stuck in a house on fire. The set up was to ask what I would do if the house was on fire. I was five or six at the time. I said I would find my doll and run. She told me I was too late and died in the fire trying to rescue my doll...

The pattern is not simply that people die, as we must all. My mother's stories often concerned the deaths of young children, maybe because that made the realities and possibilities more painfully real to her, or maybe because these stories scared us the most. I almost believe either is possible.

On the way home from Longhorns, a 5 min drive, I ran into detective Hicks['] funeral[.] He was shot to death aiding [in] a domestic dispute. The ex wife was also killed by the ex husband. It took me an hr. to get home. Too tired to do anything the rest of the day.

Ripped out knitting & reknitted[.]

It began to rain. In the dark I was scared all the way home. Couldn't see. 

The next day, she awakes early and tired, and she cares for herself:

As soon as I got ready & said my prayers I went to the clinic to have my toe checked[.] they [sic] asked me to come back today. Toe is infected so I need antibiotics. It's a good think [thing] I went in.

The Sounds win their game. They alternate, between losing and winning.

It is a good thing, she says.

The first of June is the last entry she writes in her diary. She probably did what diarists often do. They put off writing for a day or so and then catch up. The diary never tells us she retrieved her station wagon, but we know she does, because that car is where she died.

She died because she was scared of Dickerson Pike, and that is the road that killed her. She was afraid of Driving out of Goodlettsville Plaza, watching for traffic on her left and the right, pausing in the two-way middle lane, and moving to the right and turning right onto Shevel Drive at the next corner. I told her, emphatically, this was the safest way to cross the street. But she insisted it was better to exit onto Shevel and cross all three lanes in one movement. I told her that was too dangerous, noting the giant utility pole to her left would obscure her view of the closest oncoming traffic.

So she crossed Dickerson without seeing the car heading right toward her, and the woman driving at my mother didn't see my mother's newly repaired car because she was looking for her phone on the floor of her own car. The Dickerson Pike car T-boned my mother's car right where my mother sat. The woman who killed my mother sued our whole family for damages.

My mother was fragile. She fell once on our lawn in Cedar Beach, Ontario, and broke her arm. That is when I started to cook. 

I know she died instantly. One of the first people on the scene was my third sister, a nurse. She frantically tried to help my mother, but the police officers held her back. My mother was dead anyway. 

I do not love my mother. I never have. Never really had any affection for my parents, except when I was a small child. They didn't know how to care for people. Neither have I wished them death. If my mother had survived, my life would likely be radically different now, because she had an effect on my life even from the distance of one thousand miles I made sure was between us. 

I can only guess what my life might now be if she lived. I can only imagine the slow death my mother would have endured.

ecr. l'inf.

 

We Yearn for Silence because all the Talk We Hear is Yelling 16 Aug 2020 6:22 PM (4 years ago)

  

All day, night waits.

In Response to a Draft of "Twelve American Cities" by Nico Vassilakis 19 Jun 2020 8:07 AM (4 years ago)

The work in twelve parts is an explanation of layers in the context of human churn: 

1. the physical being that is the city performed as a piece of earth representing the dehumanized view of a city as viewed from space; 

2. the physical space of the city inhabited by humanity as represented by the viral off-circles of "never sleeps" (thus, the conjoining of the physical--the landscape of a city as it is--with the human--their processes of moving of constant wakefulness of at least some all the time); and 

3. the slicing away of the city, that physical space, and the representation of humanity as unmoored, afloat in the darkness of space, without grounding or purpose but operating as if the ground that bore them, supported them, was actually meaningless to their sense as human beings in the active process of being alive.

One, 1, None (Tenth Draft) 14 Mar 2020 7:55 PM (5 years ago)

A Great and Tiny Immiracle 4 Nov 2019 3:48 AM (5 years ago)

Mother's Day 12 May 2019 11:59 AM (5 years ago)

Why I Will Not Submit 25 Apr 2019 12:08 PM (5 years ago)

Geof Huth, "sand-wish-" (23 April 2019) The title of this essay is a lie, not because it is untrue but because it is designed to make the reader assume a meaning I do not intend. I am not suggesting here that I will use the force of my will to resist submission to some evil force outside of myself. Though that would be the reader’s likely first thought upon reading the title. Instead, I will explain why I do not (a bit different than “will not,” and also a bit starker) submit my creations for publication. Except for one fact: I don’t completely understand why I do not submit anymore. All I really know is that the process hurts me more than thoughts of my death. This morning, a good friend of mine—meaning someone I have known for a long time and whom I get along with (I have no close friends except my wife)—wrote to ask me to submit some visual poems to a publication he helps run. I responded in a frenetic state over the course of seven minutes (lightly edited hereunder for purposes of clarity and anonymization): I think you told me about this publication before. I almost never submit anywhere. I’ll think about it but then will probably forget. My work will likely not be actually published anymore, except when I do it [which is a kind of making]. I hate the process too much. Way too time-consuming for something I don’t like and which rarely bears fruit.                 I used to send stuff to one publication—so once I year I would submit something—but after the first time one of my pieces wasn’t chosen I stopped submitting anywhere. Every couple of years I submit somewhere, nothing happens, and I remind myself not to submit. A publisher asked me to submit a certain visual poem they had found online. I couldn’t find what they wanted so I sent them something similar and they didn’t want it. That was my submission this year. I’m actually tense now just thinking of submissions. So I’m pretty sure I won’t submit. Misreading my comments a little, my friend asked me to send a dozen of a certain set of visual poems, and told me to relax, in a kind way. My response was likely a surprise to him: All I can do after this conversation is write an essay about why I don’t submit anymore. I’m literally shaking thinking about this. I’m not sure why I changed, why I can’t submit anymore. Maybe the essay will tell me. Might be just the pain of rejection is sharper now. Or that I don’t believe in anything I make. Or that I care only about making. He pulled one answer of my three, which he called “self-doubt,” and said he struggled with this as well. But I hadn’t given him an answer. Instead, I had suggested three answers of possibly concurrent applicability. Truth is I really don’t know. He responded after a few minutes with a simple greeting to have a good morning, to which I replied: Thanks. First time I’ve been in a depressive daze for so long. I can’t shake that bad feeling. Our conversation was the cause. It’s a huge fear-and-flight feeling that fills everything: my body, my mind, my speed concerning everything. I can’t quite think straight through this dull yet painful daze. I’m a very destroyed person but usually keep it in check. Apparently, by avoiding thoughts of submission of poems. Back to dazèdness. He said he could probably help me someday with “submitting anguish.” I replied, You can’t help me with submission “whatever.” Avoiding it is all I can do. That last bit from me reads a little cold to me now, but I intended it only as clear word of my state, then current and forever continuing. I’m certainly not preparing myself for the future process of submission. Instead, I’m taking a different path. I show my work constantly to the world, but always via my own platforms: social media and the occasional blog posting. I don’t even post my work in social media community spaces related to what I do: visual poetry, poetry, mailart, art. Doing so probably seems too much like submitting to me. It has been hours since my friend and I messaged back and forth, yet that feeling of dread and immense weariness suffuses my body. I’m moving slowing, intellectually and physically. I am writing from a grey depressive relapse, out of a dead soul. I just this moment (in the middle of the last sentence) pulled myself out of a dumbfounding brown study, a steady stare through everything and at nothing. Having come here to explain my state (which no-one needs to know or care about), I’m wondering if my plan to write this out of my system, to purge my soul, will work. Why even write this? I do not want suggestions. I’m not asking—that is for sure—for people to ask me to submit anything. I simply want to make and document what I make and show it to a small part of the world. I understand the limitations of my skills. My poetics is, essentially, a balancing act with my skills at one side and my attempt to find additional skills at the other. It is an attempt to make, in the absence of the possibility of making anything good enough—or good enough for long enough. Yet it is mostly a way to entertain myself, and maybe to occupy my mind. I’m a massive maker. Most of the things I create are small, but I make many of them. I call this process maximal minimalism. My making serves as a purging and a filling of myself. Keeping occupied helps me avoid falling into a depressive state. I am sleepwalking through my day. My hands are tingly and numb. My reactions are slow. I have to watch what my feet do. My usual state is hyper-aware and focused. With people, I’m gregarious and a bit loud. I have to be that way so that I am not myself. I have pushed myself, with force of will and heart, into the open world. I don’t usually want to dwell there, but I know that I should, so I have learned how to live there well and happily—but sometimes I am reminded I am not of this place. On Monday, the president of an organization had told me I had been selected for an award recognizing my 29 years of service to the state—or that slender sliver of the state (in terms of population and professional focus) that I have somehow helped in my professional roles. A slight shock hit me at that moment, a small terror. I didn’t know how to respond. I want to be seen (that is part of what my making is about), but I don’t want to be recognized. After considering how to respond, I wrote back with, “Thanks for this surprising bit of news.” I should feel honored—I assume—by this small recognition, but I am literally embarrassed by it. I might be in favor of the idea of recognition, but I’m disturbed, when I am its object, by the reality of it. Later today, I removed mentions of my small number of tiny awards from a document that records them for me. I want to escape. One award I did not ever record there was one given by an association I’m active. I received it for losing an election. Consolation prizes are not really awards. They are more like dirt rubbed into a wound. I should note I expected to lose, and the person I lost to should have won. These are clear facts. I didn’t have the wound until I faced the fact of public cleansing of the wound. But no-one can understand the strange ways in which others operate. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand my reactions in these cases. It’s been over three hours, and my arms are still tingling. I’m only slowly pulling out of it, but I am rising up out of this numbing funk. My real work isn’t my works themselves when I am alive, though, so I don’t need submission. My real work is my archive. For reasons unknown to me, the University at Albany began accessioning my papers in 2006, thirteen years ago. They hold a body of records of mine of unknown size—and also that portion of my personal library that I consider defines who I am and what entrances me. Conceptually, the works I have created fall under the collection “th’archive” (everything I’ve made and kept), and all the published works I’ve collected and kept fall under the collection “alibrary.” Together, they form the umbrella collection of entitled “thislife.” People are meant to know my works after I’m dead, and they are supposed to understand the smallness of it from the tininess of the names of the collections—how they are never capitalized. And they are supposed to see the near-anonymity of their very onymous creator because the titles of the collections are nearly totally generic. The fusedness of their titles, their portmanteauness, demonstrates there was a human of some kind behind them once. Everything must be perfect, but nothing can be perfect, so everything is always wrong, off, askew. I show people mostly my visual works and my tiny textual ones. My work with sound people only occasionally hear, and my poems of more than a few words people almost never see. So my non-submission hides some of my work almost absolutely—except in the form of performance. Why do I perform but not publish? Because I control the presentation when I perform? Because I never ask to perform but am asked to perform? Because sometimes my friend, the poet Mark Lamoureux, sets up readings for us together? Because it is immediate? Palpable? Real? It might be because I am not shy, but I mean to be cloistered. Because I make no sense. Maybe this is the quandary of solipsism, in the philosophical sense. Descartes thought he solved it, but the mind only ever really knows its own self. Yet we believe in the other consciousnesses of the world. Trapped inside ourselves no matter what we do, we realize that too much attention to our own self obliterates the surging hordes of others around us. Wanting to be known, to be seen as a true and separate actual person—and maybe even to be known as a maker of things—seems necessary for the individual human. We need evidence from others that we exist and even that we matter. But to be seen too much, to be recognized too deeply, is to take away the realness of everyone else—to fall into solipsism’s slippery trap. Yet this might not have anything to do with my sickness here. It might be what my friend thought: that I know I can never be good enough. That I can identify what I do wrong, but I can’t identify anything I do right. That to open myself up to review is to cut open my chest to see the blackness of my heart or to crack open my skull to see the desiccation of my brain. I didn’t used to be this way. Maybe I was stronger then, or more foolish. But I would send things off and await a response. If I were rejected, I would be dejected, but not for long. If I were accepted, I would be pleased, though not overly so. But I have changed. Maybe my issue has to do with time. I have only limited time, and I would rather make and show than make and submit and wait and maybe publish and maybe not. Certainly, that is my rational reason not to submit, but it’s not my emotional one. It’s not what has forced me back into an instant panic the minute after I returned to write more of this essay. I suppose, I know I will fail when I submit and the fear of knowing how great that failure actually is is why I avoid ever facing it. I don’t want to reveal my real self to the world because I know the real world will understand my failure. Say what you will about these thoughts, claim they are nonsense, but say this not to me, for I am already shaking from your thoughts. ecr. l’inf.

AMZONE (Newport, NC, 22 November 2018) 22 Nov 2018 6:33 PM (6 years ago)

The Chaos of Grief 28 Oct 2018 9:50 AM (6 years ago)

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 208

I write in the books I read. Always with pencil, and not necessarily neatly. I put a checkmark next to the poems I enjoy. I write responses to the author in nonfiction books. A couple of months ago, I filled a book with comments to the author and then thought my daughter, Erin Mallory Long, might want to read the book as well, so I wrote her a longer personal letter, again in pencil, covering the flyleaves of the book. Sometimes, I circle sentences I particular want to find again. Sometimes, the circle repeats itself in one continuous line, forming a vortex of graphite on the page.

Writing is a response to the world. And my writing in books is a response to each of those books. In the few cases that I do not write in the book, it is as if the book never existed. I forget it.

But I won't forget Jonathan Santlofer's The Widower's Tale, a memoir recounting the unexpected death of his wife and the effects he experienced from that death. It is a book, essentially, concerning grief, but also about anger, love, friendship. Santlofer's is a story about rebuilding a self when one is so deeply connected to another that one's soul is hollowed out by the loss of another.

Such stories interest me, even though I have never experienced quite this level of loss. When my mother died, I was shellshocked for a few months--a surprise, since I wasn't close to her. I've suffered other losses somehow similar to Santlofer's. Life is loss (as I wrote while finishing his book). There is something about a trauma such as this that reveals the self, that cracks open the hard carapace of the normal human and shows the person within.

And I want to see those people.

There is a story to how I came to read this book. My wife, Karen Jamison Trivette, had scheduled us to attend a book signing uptown, the book having something to do with Fred Pomerantz, a dress manufacturer, and an icon of New York's Garment District from the 1920s and '30s. Somehow, the book in question had something to do with the collections Karen oversees at the Fashion Institute of Technology, so I assumed the book was a history of manufacturing or fashion design with some focus on Pomerantz.

Once the author, Andrew Gross, a grandson of Pomerantz, began to talk about his own book, Button Man, I realized my assumption was radically incorrect. The book is a thriller that takes place in New York and concerns the fates of a family, the garment industry, and the Jewish mob. During his opening remarks, Gross noted that "People don't know how much of our history the Jewish mob was." One of the characters in this book is based on that grandfather of his, and he thanked Karen by name in his talk and in his book for help and for giving him to hear his grandfather again, via an oral history, 35 years after his death.

Given the unexpected focus on Karen, I became more interested in the proceedings. I knew why we were there.

During his opening remarks, Gross recognized his family and friends in the room. One introduction he made piqued my interest. He mentioned a friend who had a successful memoir entitled The Widower's Notebook, said a few words about it, and noted the bookstore had copies of it. I didn't catch the friend's name (something beginning with "San"), but I remembered the title. Jonathan Santlofer was sitting angled in his seat so he could see his friend talking, his left arm cocked on the back of the chair, and he waved off the compliments with his right hand. He seemed genuinely a bit embarrassed by the attention during his friend's rightful time in the spotlight. He had a quiet gentleness to him. He seemed, maybe, to continue to carry the weight of his own story.

As soon as the applause ended and the line for book signing began to form, I ran around the store looking for the memoir section. Asked a clerk where it was. Eventually found the section despite the poor directions I had received, only to realize the book was resting almost directly behind where I was sitting, on a shelf facing my back.

I grabbed a copy of the book and joined Karen in line. She was talking to Jonathan Santlofer himself and introduced me as her husband. My response was to show him the book and ask him if he would sign it. He was surprised, but touched, by my gesture but also by Gross's. He noted this was his friend's time for recognition. He also mentioned the book was a big best seller, but he said it without any hint of boastfulness. He said it with an air of humble surprise. I told him that stories of real life interest me the most. What I didn't say is that stories of deep loss have a depth of pain at times that allows people to process their own loss. What I didn't say is that we are all people partially broken by life and trying to move through the world.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Title Page

I started to read the book as soon as Karen and I made it home. I'm a slow reader, so I made it only 75 pages in until I decided, near 1 am, that it was time for sleep.

Only rarely do I write true reviews of books. Instead, I write personal essays, sometimes poetic essays, in response to books. The books themselves guide the response but so does the sight of Governors Island right out the window to my left, the clean blue of the sky half-filled with clouds, the dissipation of dozens of white wakes crossing the water of New York harbor.

Only a few minutes into Santlofer's book, I felt the pull of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. In both cases, there is a married couple, a man and a woman, living in Manhattan, both writers (though Santlofer is also an artist), with separate offices to do their work, and one of the spouses dying suddenly at home. Santlofer even writes, somewhere in the book, "In grandiose moments I could imagine we were Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman or Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne."

I had read Didion's book only about a month beforehand, having run across a first edition. I love her work but hadn't read this one. In Santlofer's book, when the EMTs rush in I think of the same scene in Didion's book. At first, I imagine for Santlofer the same arrangement of his apartment I imagined for Didion, but that fades as I slip deeper into his world. Santlofer provides more details. I see his apartment as a unique separateness, his book in the same way, the need for both these books as somehow essential to life. I feel a connection to Santlofer, maybe because we lived near him when we lived in Chelsea. When he writes of the Whole Foods near him, I imagine exactly where he walks through that store. Didion always seemed, to me, to live in the clouds.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Pages 68 and 69

Santlofer writes in simple clean prose. His paragraphs are short, sometimes but a line. And he writes in the present tense about most of the past. He writes like the fiction writer he is. He leaves the reader hanging at the end of many chapters. He foreshadows--and sometimes almost tells us--part of the story he will leave till the end to reveal. He creates tension in his storytelling.

But the tension come most deeply via the emotions that arise from within him, even as these change, as he struggles to make sense of a palpable fact so real, so direct, he has insufficient means to deal with it, sometimes even to comprehend it. Emptiness is not merely ineffable--it is incomprehensible.

He cannot always understand what occurs around him.

His wife's name is Joy, a fact that almost stuns. The first chapter of this book begins with "Joy." Life is ironic, death only more so. What we best understand we least expect. This book is much about how we trick ourselves, how we trick ourselves to survive, how we never survive.

Santlofer's memory shuts down in parts. He cannot remember it all. We wonder if the body can persist if the mind remembers it all. He finds himself suddenly as a man without. A piece missing, he cannot always see a way forward. For much of the story, he swirls among his memories and thoughts, keeping but a precarious purchase to the earth.

A central part of the book is a secondary loss, the missing autopsy that might explain how he lost Joy, that might help him make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. We learn early that he will wait two years for those results. The foreshadowing isn't a shadow; it is a rock. He will battle--his verb--the surrogate's court for two years. I work about 40% of my time in that building, so I have become a part of his story, an accessory after the fact. I cannot extricate myself from the story. I read 75 pages a day, until four days later I am released.

But I cannot release the story.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 52

The book somehow represents the acute pain of traumatic loss without being self-pitying. Instead, it seems preternaturally real. I feel, too hard, his loss and struggle--but from the point of entry of other traumas of my life, other losses. The narrative replays itself as Santlofer attempts to bring order to his memory, but also tries to determine how he could have kept this story from happening in the first place. Huge losses lead to interior irrationalizations: "if I had gone in ten minutes earlier I might have saved her."

He cannot save her. He hasn't saved her. He couldn't saved her. We know this from our perch on Mount Olympus, but he can not yet know this from the foot of the mountain, where the ant-sized humans of the world scurry trying to make sense of the world without the benefit of perspective.

Jonathan also draws, literally, his world for us, primarily portraits, and he displays them within the book. These pencil drawings are filled with depth and contours. Most he has based upon photographs, but his realistic drawings don't merely ape the photos. Details are omitted, details added--a drawing is like a story: it is not the actual event, but a review of that event, a rational representation of that event, something we can understand, a life given boundaries so it becomes comprehensible. In a drawing that includes him, I recognize his face. In the words he writes, I recognize the man I have barely met and cannot say I know. I see these as authentic. He has a real voice.

He presents himself as flawed, yet he has something I cannot say I have the capacity for. He demonstrates, after assiduous effort, self-forgiveness, though he had nothing to forgive. And he does something more important: he asserts that "men suffer loss as much as women." Without directly stating it, he allows us to know that society as a whole, not just men themselves, somehow believe men are unemotional (except with regard to anger), that men are also humans who suffer the terrible pain of life and death. He gives men the right to feel, and to accept that they can feel, grief.

He even encourages us--though only briefly, in passing, but also as an important final point to a thought--to ask others for help, to struggle through pressures of life not alone but together, to bind ourselves to humans to make, not keep, our spirits strong.

The book, in the end, is more positive than I can muster, which is a blessing it bestows upon us. He says his mantra for grief is "You are doing the best you can."

This year, as I read the books that meant the most to me, intellectually or artistically or emotionally, I wrote a brief squib on the book, chapter by chapter, or night by night, and tweeted them out copying the author when I had their Twitter handle. When I do this, I feel as if I'm demanding attention from the author when the book is about the author receiving our attention. I do it, though, to show the author that someone is intensely consuming their work, to demonstrate how their thoughts engender others' thoughts and help create and disseminate knowledge and connection.

So when I reached the comment about the best one can do, I sent out into the ether, but copying Santlofer, a mantra of my own, one I have often said to my staff--not to be mean, but to be rational, to put the world in context: "The best we can do might not be good enough." Because it might not. Sometimes, we are not smart enough or good enough or skilled enough. Sometimes, we will fail, and sometimes that failure will hurt us dearly or even permanently. Or hurt others.

For emotional matters, I should likely allow a little more leeway. We trick ourselves so deeply into believing falsehoods about our emotional abilities and our emotions as realities that it may be unfair to hold us to account in such situations. Yet we often hold others to account for their emotional failings, and if we do so we must also hold ourselves to at least the same rules, if not more. We should never be kinder to ourselves than to others. Our positive biases must always be outward facing.

Near the end of the memoir--which is filled with stories of dealing with loss, stories of love and hope, stories of struggle, and none I feel a need to recount because I'm here only to think and feel the book back out to the tiny bit of the world that will read this, not to recreate the book itself for them--Jonathan finds himself at a dinner party where most of the diners are criticizing the book In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief Healing and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi.

The book recounts the sudden death of the author's wife, an event nearly simultaneous with the birth of the wife's and writer's daughter. The diners criticize the book, without having read it, because they believe writing about grief exploits the dead, that the book might have been written merely to make money. Jonathan responds to these people on behalf of "grieving men who are not allowed to openly grieve, yet condemned if they do not grieve enough."

Myself, I would like to respond on behalf of people who write and who cannot always process their emotions without the intense intellectual process of writing. I cannot understand what I feel unless I write about it. I need that focus. I need the requirement to write another sentence, to finish a thought I don't even know the conclusion of yet.

This is how Santlofer writes. This is why he writes this. I can hear his emotion, I can feel his heart as it beats. The emotional is almost entirely intellectual. We just fail to accept that. And emotion is something we must process when it is powerful and negative, when it overwhelms us.

I'm reading Luzzi's book now. The opening of it is so painful my intellect recreated far too clearly the pain of his loss, because we all have stores of loss to pull from. I feel the pain of loss that Santlofer suffered. I can see how he tries to process his grief. We even see when he fails, but we see him trying. Too often an empath, I feel these stories too hard. My body shakes a little and my heart beats too fast, right now, just remembering these stories of emptying loss.

So I ask myself why I read these stories, why I am reading them now, why a small handful of gracious words by Gross about his good friend made me rush through a giant bookstore in search of a bookful of loss. I concluded, about a week ago (I wrote myself a note to remember it), that I read these "to feel something." Not that I don't always, not that emotions don't course through my body frequently. It's merely that we need to feel a little bit of pain occasionally to wipe away the process of going through the necessary and automated motions of life: wake, brush, wash, leave, work, eat, return, cook, eat, watch, read, sleep. We need to break out of the cocoon of activity, of productivity, frequently enough so we can understand we are not merely thinking but also feeling beings.

Even if it takes thinking to make it so.

In another context, Santlofer writes "I think: I am thinking too much."

I hear him, but I can never think too much, not matter how hard I try. I cannot feel without it.

ecr. l'inf.

One, 1, None (Ninth Draft) 14 Mar 2018 2:00 PM (7 years ago)

Geof Huth, "Shapeshifter Text" (13-14 March 2018)

On a Cold Night, We Dream of Darkness 2 Jan 2018 6:44 PM (7 years ago)

I have known, without knowing, Jon Cone for years. I believe he has lived in Iowa for each of those decades. I know he is Canadian. I know the sound of his voice, upon the page.

Yet I have rarely communicated with him directly. Only a single folder of correspondence between him and me exists in my papers,* we've had only six instances of email communications (all between 2006 and 2012), and we occasionally have communicated (sometimes as briefly as a word) over social media. So I don't know him as a person, but I know him as a writer.

I know him without knowing him.

And the poems in this slender and beautiful chapbook are designed to allow new readers to know him in just this way. These sad and quiet poems veer (so far as I can tell) between his real life and the life he makes of words. Certain lines I can confirm as presented fact because I've seen him say as much as those do when he has posted brief lines about his life to Twitter. Others are entirely constructed from his imagination. And, often, such lines are spliced together into a single poem.

We humans, even in our own lives as we live and imagine them, are both real and imagined--something poetry occasionally allows us to realize.

The centerpiece of this volume is the opening poem, which carries the decidedly "upoetic" title, "Pseudo-Goof" (apparently, a reference to the narrator). The poems start out hard and real:

Today, I was told I have prostate cancer
My wife pronounced our marriage a joke for the past ten years
I have 17 dollars and 32 cents in my savings account as of five o'clock pm

I don't know how much of this is factual, but I know Jon has health problems, so I'll assume that part is true. What I like about this opening is not only how raw it is but how unusually usual it is, how it takes the vernacular speech of any Iowan (transplanted or not) and presents the rough outlines of a life.

But this poem goes on, in the same paratactical way: presenting one line of poetry then another, but especially where that other line provides disjunction, where it moves the poem elsewhere. There may be lines in this poem, but they do not form a line, they don't stay within the lines,

they don't even try to draw a line in the sand. Instead the poem moves on, neither clarifying an issue raised or solving a problem for the reader, who feels compelled to read on,

and it's not just for the painful personal revelations (or inventions). It's for the beauty of these disjunctions:

Vallejo wanted to die on a Thursday afternoon
Staring out a window, I tremble like sea foam in a boot

It reads a bit like Evan S. Connell's booklength poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (or its followup of sorts, Points for a Compass Rose, which came out but a year later). But Jon's poem isn't weighed down by the huge historical detail in either of these paratactic poems. His is closer to home, leaning a little more personal, hurting the readers through their own empathetic response, yet

the references to artists or their work slip the poem into brief meditations on the lives of others. Maybe we learn something from these, maybe we don't, but

we learn to feel the greater presence of the bigger world around this poem--and we even feel how the poem aches, how it might ache for us. As in the poems of Pascoli,

the poem references Kenneth Koch's poem "Sleeping with Women" only two lines before he sings us almost the massively repeated refrain of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died." In between comes a line of the poem as it aches for a "you" whom we take to be the narrator of the poem, whom we take to be the poet himself.

Koch and Carroll are dead. We will all eventually join them in that placelessness.

The line

I sing alone in a house on fire

(which we take to be a bit of poetic license) returns us to two lines a few lines earlier where the poet burns a 100,000-page manuscript (which we take to be an exaggeration), and later the fire repeats elsewhere,

just as the physical ailments repeat and the randomized observations repeat. These become an unusual type of repetition in poems, one that prosody has no set term for, because

these are not repetitions of sounds. These are repetitions of classes of ideas, of types of thoughts. Yet, by its end, the poem itself accepts the challenge of these repetitions and begins to repeat words:

The word "Nothing."

The word "O."

The word, which is the only thing we have before we have not even that to keep.

ecr. l'inf.
_____


Cone, Jon, Cold House (espresso: [Toronto], 2017). US or CAN$14, with shipping.


* Cone, John, Correspondence, Box 2, Folder 57, Geof Huth Papers 1960-2006 [actually now to 2017] (MSS-137). M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York (hereafter referred to as the Geof Huth Papers).

Year of Movement and Wonder 31 Dec 2017 12:45 PM (7 years ago)

Geof Huth, Document Dust 31 (6 October 2017)

Geof Huth, Document Dust 44.5 (30 December 2017)

Geof Huth, Stoen 10 (30 December 2017)

Westward South 24 Dec 2017 12:19 PM (7 years ago)

Red Risotto 11 Feb 2017 4:48 PM (8 years ago)

Three Mushrooms: Shiitake, White, and Oyster

I Will Arrive Half an Hour Ago 14 Nov 2016 6:08 PM (8 years ago)

Geof Huth, "TEERTS" (12 November 2016)

Language wants to be poetry.

It wants to do more than tell. A story, it realizes, has some magic in it, but it isn't of magic. A story repeats an event (real or imagined). A poem is the event.

The actuality of a poem coursing through the human body—to the brain, the heart, the lungs—is a happening within us. The sound of language that means without telling hits us the hardest.

The play of language off the tongue and its flicking in the ear (even language that comes from the hand, chasing into the eye) is not a thing but a state of the briefest ecstasy, the smallest rush. 

Of blood, of breath, of brimming.

Once a pun slips into those streams of words over words, there is a little electricity in the air. The language tells us, "I am not real. I do things real things don't." 

We hear in the voice of the speaking something that tells us nothing because of how it tells us everything: how we make everything out of nothing, how a tongue can entertain in cacophonies and symphonies, how the smallest word out of order or twisted is a bit of frisson against the skin.

The word is the world.

Nothing else contains itself and evaporates through itself. Nothing else is open and closed simultaneously—always requiring the key to the code, when there are billions of keys and each opens up just a little piece of the language. 

We cannot know the whole language; we just made more of it today.

If I tell you, "I will arrive half an hour ago," you will know I will have already had left, even though I am still there with you, waiting for your breath to whisper me a word.

ecr. l'inf.

Dreamslip 3 Nov 2016 6:52 PM (8 years ago)

Coming in over it, the world (as it is, so small and distinct beneath me) resembles imagination more than fact. Under a grey sky, even Kentuckian November seems a muddy green—the houyhnhnms running, invisible, beneath me, the only evidence of them the silent pounding of the hooves hitting the green sod.

I might've dreamed it all—I might've thought—except that I know my dreams too well. Shapeshifters, they have no contours. They drag me through and under, but never over or on. They change in an instant, irrational as the rain that poured the evening sky dark down onto us tonight. There is no forward to them (not to this muddy earth, either); there is no sense to their music. From each of them, I try to escape, for each of them is the practice of attempted murder onto my violable and sleeping self.

And this drowned world tonight, bejeweled by mid-autumn green, is almost that nightmare of my dreaming. So I tread no ground but pavement. I search for solid surface. I avoid the grassmud glade. I know what awaits me there.

I dare not sleep. For sleep is dreaming, and dreaming is the breathing of mud.

ecr. l’inf.

My Only Poem is One of Broken Words 1 Nov 2016 5:02 PM (8 years ago)

My Only Poem is One of Broken Words (1 November 2016)

My only poem is one of broken words. It eats your heart and leaves a hole for bleeding. It steals a breath from every breath you take.

My only poem is open strands of meaning. It leaves a ringing in your ears you might believe is music. It rises out of muck to cry a call to chase.

My only poem is wanting over having. It is a grasp—as firm as steel—of air. It aches for aching and hates to ache for hate.

My only poem is all you're ever losing. It opens like a yawning sinkhole's sinking. It reaches for your slender wrists and plummets.

My only poem is what I'll never haven't. It takes away whatever hope you need. It slits the throat of thoughts of pretty flowers.

ecr. l'inf.

The Light on Star Island 14 Oct 2015 7:11 PM (9 years ago)

Montauk Yacht Club Resort and Marina, Room 124, Star Island, Montauk, New York

I arrived here today, on Star Island, in Lake Montauk, itself a bay almost completely separated from
the Long Island Sound (and, thus, the Atlantic Ocean), all of it within Montauk, New York, when the sun floated in the clearest blue sky at just such an angle as to cause the light to cast itself upon the surface of everything around me with a pure clarity.

My bed for the night is a few yards from the edge of the lake, so I walked through the sunlight, over miles of wooden piers, my shoes clacking on the boards, my eyes watching for everything: grass being mowed; cormorants, gulls, and crows; yachts. At one point, I saw a rope coiled on a pier, and I decided it was a poem:
 

Geof Huth, "Found and Aleatoric Poem # unknown: ofness" (Star Island, Montauk, New York, 14 October 2015)

I began the walk with the goal of ending it at the beach, so I did. It was a tiny beach, a private beach for the hotel, and maybe only 12 couches wide. It slipped into the shallow near waters of the bay, and it was such a protected beach in such an isolated bay, that there was not much to beachcomb from its narrow sands. Still I found enough marine detritus and time to put together a small sculpture upon a rock placed at the edge of the beach. I made this little temporary sculpture as something to leave to be washed away, but I made it to be an extravagant, and stylized, letter, one with growths extending from its sides, and I called it a poem:

I

Geof Huth, "I, Sea" (Star Island, Montauk, New York, 14 October 2015)

In the shallow, and usually pebbly, sand, I scratched a few words. Occasionally, I enhanced these words with a tiny dead crab or something else I found. I call poems that I make in this manner sandglyphs, though usually I make them next to the throbbing waves of the sea, so that they disappear seconds after being created. This time, I left them to be covered and washed away by the tide.

Geof Huth, "ofteN" (Star Island, Montauk, New York, 14 October 2015)

After dinner, I went out into the night, to walk the piers into the darkness. As I turned left at the end of one pier to walk down another, I heard a sound, then I saw a large body of just-waking seagulls moving slowly as one, huddled together and moving left and right as if confused as to how to avoid me, and they started crying quietly as if muttering to themselves. Only a few flew away. It was a spooky moment, to wake these sleeping birds (and only a minute after wondering where the gulls slept). As I moved slowly away from, they starting to cry more loudly. Some of their cries sounded like the barking of seals.

ecr. l'inf.

The Final Final Mathemaku 11 Oct 2015 6:54 PM (9 years ago)

Bob Grumman, "Homage to Gomringer" (23 March 2015)

On the second of April of this year, Bob Grumman, an old friend of mine, died in a hospital near his home in Port Charlotte, Florida. The reason for his death is not certain to me, but his death is one that haunts me for a number of reasons. For instance, ten days before his death he emailed me, explaining that his doctor thought Bob had a good chance of making it to ninety years of age. The day before he died (when Bob was already in the hospital), I responded to an email message from him asking me when I would return to poetry. I explained that I'd never quite left.

At the point I sent that message, I thought I might be talking to a dead man. People had begun to notice Bob's absence. I had been looking for Bob, calling his house, checking the local obituaries for any about a retired substitute teacher. I kept working my job, paying more attention to my profession than my poetry and the world of poetry, but I was preparing for what I expected was going to be my next challenge: taking on my job of being Bob's literary executor.

Once I received confirmation of Bob's death, I reached out to his niece who had announced, on April 3rd, of Bob's death the day before. Then I began to make plans to fly to Florida to work on Bob's papers. I communicated with the family, made arrangements, canceled them because Bob's house would not be ready, changed my plans again, made new arrangements, flew down there, worked like a maniac going through every record and book of Bob's that I could find (even his three CPU towers), packed everything up, sent the material out to the Ohio State University's Avant Writing Collection, and flew back home.

I left behind much, a number of great books, and many copies of books published by Bob's press, The Runaway Spoon Press. That was a loss, since I know people would have liked to have saved those copies, but time, complication, and expense made it impossible for me to do anything else.

While I was down there, I had one dinner with a friend from one of my high schools (the American School of Tangier) and I had the other dinner with two friends of his. I had a great time at both dinners (good food, good conversation, good fun), but I learned the most at the second dinner, which occurred after I'd spent the entire day at Bob's not very clean house. These two people, a man and a woman, had both been friends of Bob's for years, and both have helped them in many ways. But they didn't know each other, they'd never met, though they had heard of each other.

I thought they had long been fast friends, but they were brought together by the suddenness of Bob's death, and by the fact that they had so many years of overlapping knowledge of Bob and his quirks. The stories they had of Bob were the same stories, the same events, the same Bobbic personality, just presenting themselves at different times, in different settings, to different people.

And just as I hadn't known these people, or even of them, I also had similar stories, so we learned about the man together by learning what we already knew, but this time through others' eyes.

By the time I made it home, I was already working on the editing of a book of Bob's mathemaku, The Complete Mathemaku. And that has occupied my time some nights. I've so far encountered 134 mathemaku by Bob, though the counting of his mathemaku is complicated by many factors: Bob numbered some but not all the mathemaku, some mathemaku have two different numbers to them, many mathemaku appear in very different published versions, and some mathemaku come in multiple frames (as Bob referred to them).

This is a huge editing project for me, one that will require many more hours of research and writing. But the research so far has pushed me to read through Bob's daily blog, Poeticks, where he expounded on his poetics, his theory of knowlecular psychology, and the fact that mainstreamers didn't understand his or our work. This quirky blog is Bob incarnate, and it ends on March 25th of this year (eight days before his death).

What interests me more, however is the entry entitled,  "Entry 1761 — The Final Final & Other Stuff," which he followed with two other entries that day, both about his health.

The "Final Final" refers to the final draft of his mathemaku in progress, though it is also one of his last blog entries. And the mathemaku is beautiful, doing all kinds of things. Bob's handwriting--sometimes in cursive and sometimes in curly printing--is expressive and important in this poem, just as is the reference to Eugen Gomringer's "silence" (or "silencio"), the haiku about Bob's childhood, and the cryptographiku Bob slips into the poem.

The poem is all Bob: he was always a lyric poet, never strayed from that even as his made visual poetry, and the poem is a lyric poem; he always wrote about the joy about mathematical poems (poems that work via metaphoric mathematical operations), and this long division poem is just that; he is all about memories of his childhood, and this poem is filled with that, including a reference to boy's play with cryptograms.

So Bob has slipped the cryptogram "gbfsfbjuz" into the poem, one so obvious that I almost immediately recognized it as a word he used often in the last years of his poemmaking: "fareality." I could explain this poem. But Bob liked doing that, and his blog entry can give you some help with that if you want.

I just want you to read it, to decrypt it if you want, then to encrypt it in a way so it means something to you. You can do that for my friend Bob, too.

ecr. l'inf.