Geof Huth's Blog, page 40

scentimento

The Last Four Years Assessed

Astoria, New York

The donation of one's papers to an institution must be followed, if one desires any tax benefit from that donation, by an appraisal of the cash value of the records. (This is the rarer of the two kinds of appraisal that concern archivists. The common one is appraisal to determine archival value, whether the records have enough value to justify long-term retention.)

This year, I hired the same appraisers I'd hired back in 2007, and they have written another interesting appraisal report, which I enjoy because it brings to my attention what in the 26 boxes of records someone found interesting. (They also told me that they had to remind themselves during the appraisal that they didn't have to look at everything, even if so much of it was interesting to them. That is thanks to the hundreds of people that made something that appears within these papers.) As I did back in 2007, I am presenting here a transcript of the appraisal report itself.

I drove tonight down to Astoria, so I can drive out to JFK International Airport in the morning, so I can fly in the afternoon to San Jose (cheaper than flying to SFO this time), so I can attend a funeral. I'm tired enough to be glad for this easy posting tonight.

We examined the 26 cubic feet of material at SUNY Albany on 11 January 2011. Reference should be made to the appraisal report of the donation of the Huth archive through 2006, and to the listing of the present donation.
Geof Huth, textual artist, donated his considerable collection of mail art, concrete poetry, etc., to SUNY in 2006—wisely choosing an institution where it would be appreciated for study and exhibition. Included were valuable runs of small magazines—or zines—and an interesting record of how many of these ventures had switched to the electronic media.
This donation extends the collection in a vibrant way that is somewhat of a surprise. Instead of completely dying out into the ether (there is, however, a weblog component to the donation), the production of such very small presses that focus on experimental poetry and poetic investigations into language has stimulated international appreciation (noteworthy are "If P then Q" from England; "Bagazine" from San Francisco; "Tuli Ja Savu" from Finland).
Geof Huth's own art (including mail art numbers 124 to 386 of "qdbp" and the output of his micropress "dbqp") is fully recorded, along with drafts (such as "interpenetration of views" with Tom Beckett); as is his poetry (noteworthy is his participation in and documentation of such events as the Text Festival in Bury, England; Avant Writing Symposium in Columbus, Ohio; a Visual Poetry Residency in Finland sponsored by the Saari Foundation; and the "365 hrs" [sic] project of a poem a day for the last 8 months of 2010).
Mr. Huth's reputation as a leader in what are sometimes called the "marginal arts"—importantly paired with his training as an archivist—has produced a valuable correspondence archive from 2006 to 2010 with original pieces (drawings, poems, collages, silkscreens, etc.) from approximately 750 people.
Because the Huth archive at SUNY will also record his life, this donation includes the email and snailmail he received after open heart surgery in 2008—a very interesting snapshot of communication among artist/friends.
Should SUNY have decided to extend the original donation by subscribing to all pertinent publications it would have entailed a considerable outlay of money and time. Huth's contribution adds a trove of unique items given him by text artists of international stature.
In our professional opinion, this archive has a fair market value of: [blank].

[It is my practice to keep the appraised value of my papers secret.]

ecr. l'inf.

Afterwords, the Words Again

Geof Huth, A Large Sheet of Fidgetglyphs (15 January 2010)

I have made it to the seventeenth day of the year without accumulating the bare and bald facts of 2010 to present some crippled précis of what the year was for me, or what I made of it, in terms of the life of poetry I purport to live. This past year has been a busy one, busier than I could manage in many respects, and busy from all corners and in all aspects of my life. If I divide my life, as I do, into three categories (the personal, the professional, and the poetic), I have to admit that all have been busy, and that I sometimes disappear into one of those modes of my life, making the others ostensibly invisible, though the three of them are always in play, always taking up time and space.


Thanks

This review of my year is too long to serve much purpose but to document a life, but let me thank a few people up front.

From the world of blogging, I need to say that I depend most on three people for inspiration and information:

Conrad DiDiodato, who is a traditionalist poet, for his openness to differing ways of making poetry, and for writing with passion about poetry.

Curtis Faville, for his sharp emotionless insights, his unruly jabs at the poetry system, and his ability to be an outsider poet looking out from the inside.

Jonathan Jones, for the range and beauty of his poetic work, for always capturing my imagination, for bringing beauty into the world.

Steve Fama, for his wide-ranging reading and clear thinking, whose his dedication to poetry, and for his shockingly well researched thinking about The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner over the past year.

And thanks to two poetry friends of mine, about the only two whom I see in person more than only occasionally over the course of a decade:

Anne Gorrick, the talented poet, the ingenious curator of the Cadmium Text Reading Series in Kingston, New York, as well as co-editor of the online poetry journal Peep/Show.

Lynn Behrendt, the talented poet, the editor of the online poets' dream journal, Annandale Dream Gazette, as well as co-editor of the online poetry journal Peep/Show.

There are many more people to thank, especially the poets who have surprised me with the power of their works over the past year. (These include Anne and Lynn, who both have new books out.) I don't have the memory or the mettle to remember everyone I should.


Turning 50

I turned fifty this year, which means I achieved an age I never expected to reach. To recognize this event in my life, Nancy orchestrated the creation of gifts for me, created by poet-friends of mine, in which the theme was fives (given the fiveness of my birthday an age: 5/25/1960, 5/25/2010, and 50). She presented these pieces virtually, though most also existed in tactile form, at a blog entitled fives 4 five/two-five. The day I turned fifty, I also began a project that will last one year, and which I'll mention below. It goes by the title 365 ltrs .


Measurement

I have become occupied by counting, so much of this abstract of my year just past is an exercise in counting. This seems appropriate to me because counting is always important in my poetry. It might not seem so at first glance, but I never finished a collection of poems in which the number of poems in the set is somehow significant. And, also, poetry began for most of us with counting, maybe not in a conscious sense, but in a sense that we had to feel the numbers. Since the first poems we really hear are accentual-syllabic nursery rhymes, that sense of counting metric feet, or hearing them at least, is built into our imaginations.

Of course, that last paragraph is just an excuse for the counting that appears below. I know that absolute numbers aren't important. Quality is. But quality lies within the realm of opinion much more firmly than in the realm of fact.


Miscellaneous

I'll begin with the miscellaneous, because that is always the most important—whatever is rare enough to fit nowhere else

This past year I had an essay on evaluating the quality of visual poetry, which appeared, in Finnish, in the wonderful journal Tuli&Savu (Fire&Smoke). I wrote it in English, but it appears nowhere in that language except in my house.

In 2010, I also began categorizing the many chapbooks of full-cover visual poetry put out under the rubric this is visual poetry , a series published by chapbookpublisher.com under the direction of Dan Waber (and maybe Jennifer Hill as well). I categorize them naturally, rather than hierarchically, ordering the terms by method (how the poems are produced), meaning (the kind of meaning used in the poems, from asemic and illegible to syntactic), style (nothing but clean vs dirty), manner (the general means of providing information: conceptual, political, etc.), language (the language or languages used). The chapbooks of this is visual poetry provide a great overview to international visual poetry as it is practiced currently.


Book Covers

By the end of the year, vispoetic designs of my covered two books, but three volumes, of poetry.

The first book was John Bloomberg-Rissman's Flux, Clot & Froth , the first volume of which is the poem itself and the second of which is the Apparatus with the sources on the text in the book itself.

The other book is Karri Kokko's Toisaalta , a book in Finnish, so one I cannot say that much about, except that I wish I could read it.


Publishing

I am supposed to still be a micropublisher, but I rarely bring out any titles.

In 2010, my press pdqb brought out nine little titles focused on poetry in one way or another. All with poems by me and my family since that is the focus of the press.

My ancient and original micropress dbqp (founded in 1987) brought out just a single title, NF Huth's sansound, though two other planned titles have been delayed to this year, because I'm so ridiculously slow at this.


Books Released

I live every year with a strange goal, one I've met the last few years, but one I haven't achieved this year: the release of four books, variously defined, by me. This number can include chapbooks or little bookworks I create, but it cannot include the chapbooks I create as reading handouts for readings I do. (If it did, I would have made my goal this year.

ntst: the collected poems of geof huth , put out by if p then q, was the big publication of the year. This book collected the pwoermds that I had written over the past quarter of a century (save for those mIEKAL aND and I wrote together), so it collects a good portion of my poetry central to my concerns about the plasticity and unreliability of language. Since completing the book, I've found a few poems from before 2010 that I missed and didn't include in this book, and I've written many more. It was a little early for a collected pwoermds, I suppose, so I'll have to have new editions in the (distant) future.

Oscopies: Twelve Fluxus Scores in Two Parts was printed by Keith Buchholz's Fluxpress, of St Louis, Missouri, sometime last month, but I haven't seen a copy of it yet, and I'm not even sure what title Keith used for it. I'm guess, from his note, that he's calling is Oscopy Scores. We'll see when I have a copy.

Beyond these books, I had a little e-book that was due out in February but never came out. It may appear sometime this year. And there was a little book of visual poetry I could have brought out in no time at all, so long as I'd taken the time to bring the visual poems together. I didn't have the time or the will, given everything else going on.


Anthology

I have four poems (all from my manuscript They are as You First Saw Them) in the anthology, La alteración del silencio: poesía norteamericana reciente, edited by Galo Ghigliotto and William Allegrezza, published in Chile. The book includes the work of 56 contemporary North American poets. I don't have a copy yet, but the book came out in Chile in early November. (I'm assuming the books are being shipped here by the cheapest, thus slowest, means possible to save on costs.)


Manuscripts Variously Completed

This past year, I completed the first drafts of three manuscripts:

atwhich, a book on 1500 one-line poems written via Twitter. It is an enjoyable little book to me, one focused on the pun and the sounds of words more than anything else. I have a publisher for it, so it should be out this year or next. I'll just have to re-read and edit it one more time.

He is Beckett, is a sequence of five books of poems to Tom Beckett. Over the course of the year, I had completed the manuscripts of three of these books: Buckets of Rivers, Being and Beckett, and Beckett 4, the last still untitled, thus bearing only a draft title.

This, Thine Earth is a book of 366 poems, one for each day of a leap year, written using scraps from the daily devotionals found in Farrar Year Book: Selections from the Writings of the Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, D.D, as selected by W.M.L. Jay. I was quite rigid in my rules for appropriating texts, not allowing myself to change or add to the scraps of text I pulled out. The editing of this might require me to break this rule.

I also completed an as-yet untitled collection of aphorisms and anti-aphorisms this year. Another book of 366 pieces, I'd meant to write one a day for each day of 2008. Since that didn't work out, I filled in a few gaps in 2009 and the rest (at least half the book) in 2010. I changed the style of these pieces dramatically from 2008 to 2010, so I've no idea what, if anything, will come of this, but it is done.


Writing Projects I Had Planned for this Past Year

I looked over the writing projects I'd envisioned in 2009 for 2010, and I didn't really do any of them.

I did begin to edit The're, a collection of 156 poems, and I did retitle it They are as You First Saw Them.

I did not finish the translation work for Paralipomena, a book I had otherwise finished in the 1990s.

I did barely any editing of A topographicall Description and Admeasurement of the YLAND of BARBADOS in the West INDYAES with the Mrs Names of Seuerall plantacōns, a long poem I wrote in the the 1980s.

I did finish my yearpoem This, Thine Earth.

I did not complete my Catechism of Visual Poetry Doctrine, somehow failing to add even a single line to it!

So I have learned not to plan, and this year I have no plans, no new projects at all. What I will do is whatever I am captivated into doing. I hope to finish editing some manuscripts or type up the two manuscripts I wrote by hand last year. It is much easier for me to write than to edit. But I've no idea if I'll finish another manuscript at all.


Blogging

Blogging was reasonably busy for me in the past year.

dbqp: visualizing poetics, my primary blog, had only 345 postings, so 20 below an average of one a day. I have not been able to keep up with this blog as I'd like to, and too many of the entries this past year have been focused on the presentation of individual pwoermds or other work by me. I improved by the end of the year, so I hope this year includes more wide-ranging content.

365 ltrs has become my focus and is one of the reasons this blog has suffered. 365 ltrs is a book of poems written at the rate of one a day, where each poem is written in the form of a letter to someone I know. Some of these are more like letters than others, but each is meant in the form of address. I've written one a day since May 25th, the day I turned fifty, and I will finish it on May 24th of this year, the last day I am fifty. By the end of the year, I had written 221 poems for this project, but I had created 254 postings. The additional postings include drafts of poems, including incomplete drafts on nights when I didn't finish the poem by the end of the day, notes on my delays, and responses from recipients of the poems.

One Million Footnotes is my blog of daily sentences, but I wrote only 221 of those sentences this year. When I hit 3000, I'll see if I can make the resulting manuscript into something useful. I'll hit 3000 sometime this year.

The blog, International Pwoermd Writing Month, is active only in the Aprils of each year, during which months I post at least a daily pwoermd, and sometimes more, to this blog. I created 88 entries last year (70 of them pwoermds, one of those a visual pwoermd in the form of a fidgetglyph).

I do have a few other minor blogs, that added nine other entries to my blogs, bringing me to a total of 917 blog postings. (I'm not counting the content of my two Twitter microblogs in this number.) Plenty of work for one year, even if I'd done nothing else.

Of course, I also maintain an active Facebook presence, which includes some original content and serves as the meeting place of what I do on Twitter, Vimeo, and elsewhere.


Poems Written

The number of poems I wrote over the past year is ridiculous. I'll save the total for the end of this. Below is a list of the poems by the title of the collections, when I have a title, or otherwise by type.

Textual Poems (1574)

365 ltrs: 221

atwhich: 453

all Klimt with violets: 417 (not counting pwoermds)

He is Beckett, a sequence of five books of poems to Tom Beckett: Buckets of Rivers (30), Being and Beckett (30), [Bracket Title] (15), Beckett 4 (30), Beckett 5 (a long poem in many sections, but not complete, so it counts as 0) (Total: 105)

Miscellaneous textual poems: 12

This, Thine Year: Selections from a Year: 366

Epigrams and Anti-Epigrams (213)

I am counting these as poems.


Pwoermds (185)

Published on InterNaPwoWriMo (69)

Published on dbqp (114)

Written as part of all Klimt with violets (2 unique to this project)

Written as part of atwhich (many, but counted elsewhere)

Visual Poems (854)

Book Covers (2)

Calliglyphs (37)

Computer poems (16)

Crayonglyphs (17)

eXmaSscard (1)

Fidgetglyphs (762, including 26 in a project with Gary Barwin)

Found poems (2)

Frostglyph (1)

The Harmony Poems (10)

Photopoems (3)

Sandglyphs (4)

Screenshot poems (3)

Snowglyphs (7)

Steamglyphs (7)

Waxwords (2)

Sound and Videopoems

My sound poems are primarily, but not entirely extemporaneous songs. A few, however, are actually scored. These are included in the numbers for sound poems below. Most of my work in sound now I consider videopoems, because I record something I am moving around or through as part of the process of the poem. I post my videopoems primarily to Vimeo and secondarily to YouTube, and I post my sound poetry to The Internet Archive.

Videopoems (141)

Soundpoems (9)

Mailart

My mailart activities consisted of 36 mailings, or three a month on average. In total, this probably means about 288 different pieces of mail.


Exhibits

The Last Vispo, Common Ground Art Gallery in association with Rampike Magazine, Windsor, Ontario, March 13 – April 10, 2010

VISPO at Eyedrum, Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, May 1st – May 15th 2010

Leaf and Signal, International Lo-Fi Arts Publishing , curated by Warren Craghead, The Bridge, Charlottesville, Virginia, October 1 – 30, 2010

Skylab Visual Poetry Mailart Exhibit Skylab Gallery, Columbus, Ohio, August 19 – 31, 2010


Readings and Other Performances

I had eleven opportunities to read or talk about poetry this year, which is more than I ever have in a single year:

Oral Interpretation of Literature, Class run by Daniel Nester, College of St Rose, Albany, New York, 4 February 2010: I had a great time here talking about sound poetry and poetry performance, and I delivered my favorite ever performance of my performance poem, "The Hero," but ended up capturing none of the audio because I'd plugged the microphone into the wrong jack of the audio recorder I had brought with me

Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, Albany, New York, 20 February 2010: Poetry reading with karaoke and other singing by me

Marginal Arts Festival, Roanoke, Virginia, 23 – 25 February 2010: Musical performance with Billy Bob Beamer and me and the presentation of "eye ful tow ers forth"

Unaffiliated Reading Series, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 10 April 2010: Poetry performance along with NF Huth and me

ntst Launch Reading, Manchester, England, and Schenectady, New York, 23 June 2010: Poetry performance and broadcast from my living room

Garden Poetry Reading, Stockade Secret Garden Tour, Schenectady, New York, 26 June 2010

Boston Poet Tea Party, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 30 July – 1 August 2010: A twelve-minute performance of poems, one sung

Avant Writing Symposium, Columbus, Ohio, 18 – 22 August 2010: Gave a talk and performance entitled "What Word Once Was"

20th Annual Subterranean Poetry Reading, Rosendale, New York, 28 August 2010: Ending the readings with a performance in nothing more than (essentially) a black

Intermedia Poetry Reading, Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn, New York, 26 September 2010: A performance of my visual poetry

Wedding of Erin Huth and James Long, The Stockade Inn, Schenectady, New York, 9 October 2010: Yes, I read two poems as my father-of-the-bride speech


Events Attended

I attended many events somehow related to poetry. The following list is not complete, since I don't list any of the events under "Readings and Other Performances."

Cadmium Text Reading Series, Kingston, New York, 16 January 2010: Featuring NF Huth and Sam Truitt

Bard Roving Reading Series, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 29 January 2010: Featuring Amy King and Cara Benson

Red Hook Collective, Red Hook, New York, 28 February 2010: The Red Hook Collective met to make weird music and occasionally read poetry over it

Bard Roving Reading Series, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 12 March 2010: Featuring Celia Bland and Reb Livingston

The Miser by Moliere, Purchase College Repertory Theater, Purchase, New York, 14 March 2010: My son Tim worked on this show

Iowa City to Albany, Yes Reading Series, Dovecote, 306 Hudson Avenue, Albany, New York, 15 March 2010: Featuring Matthew Klane, Adam Roberts, and Rob Schlegel

Cadmium Text Reading Series, Kingston, New York, 20 March 2010: Featuring Dorothy Albertini, Nate Pritts, and Alan Semerdjian

Yes Reading Series, Social Justice Center, Albany, New York, 20 March 2010: Featuring Christian Peet. Elena Georgiou, and Karl Gartung, with Kate Greenstreet

Spectrum of Jewels, LAB Gallery, New York, New York, 27 March 2010: Kaz Maslanka's visual poetry exhibit, where I met Kaz for the closing of the show

Segue Reading Series, Bowery Poetry Club, New York, New York, 27 March 2010: Featuring Lynn Behrendt and Vanessa Place

Cadmium Text Reading Series, Kingston, New York, 17 April 2010: Featuring Mikhail Horowitz and Edward Sanders

Bookmarks Reading, The Art Center of the Capital District, Troy, New York, 19 April 2010: Featuring Cara Benson

Real Estate, The Art Center of the Capital District, Troy, New York, 19 April 2010: Show of verbo-visual collaborations by Jon Lathrop and Cara Benson

Marina Abramovic, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, 1 May 2010: Went there for the Abramovic show and was stunned by it and her live performance

Red Hook Collective, Riverby, West Park, New York, 28 May 2010: The Red Hook Collective met again to make strange music, I wrote a poem to Gary Barwin there, and my daughter Erin and then-future son-in-law Jimmy Long attended (and this also served as Nancy's and my birthday party, coming four days after her birthday and three after mine)

Dinner, Anne Gorrick and Peter Genovese's House, West Park, New York, 2 June 2010: I was in Poughkeepsie, just across the river from Anne and Peter, for a conference, so I spent an enjoyable and significantly poety evening with them: drinks with cucumber-infused vodka, a good meal in a restaurant, and finally more talking back at their house

Artwall: Mathematical Graffiti, Bowery Poetry Club, New York, New York, 10 July 2010: Featuring Bob Grumman, Gregory V. St. Thomasino, Casey Strickland, Kaz Maslanka, Richard Kostelanetz, and at dinner later that day I met Ken Gangemi for the first time

Impromptu Pre-book Party for the Release of Mark Lamoureux's Spectre, Astoria, New York, 11 July 2010: This was the day of the final game of the World Cup, so the only people who showed were Nancy, my daughter Erin, my soon-to-be-son-in-law Jimmy, and me, so we went to a restaurant and enjoyed some sangria, in both the red and white varieties

Robert Kelly Reading, Oblong Books, Rhinebeck, New York, 23 July 2010: Robert Kelly reads from a new book of short fiction, The Logic of the World

The Fifth of July, by Lanford Wilson, Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, New York, 25 July 2010: My son worked in this theater this past summer and ran the lightboard for this show

Society of American Archivists, Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 10 – 14 August 2010: Spent five days in DC doing almost nothing related to poetry, besides writing poems

Lunch, with John and Kathy Bloomberg-Rissman, Amherst, Massachusetts, 24 August 2010: On our daughter's birthday, Nancy and I drove to Amherst to meet John and Kathy, who had driven there from Boston, so that we could meet for the first time and talk about poetry and life and buy too many books of poetry from a local bookstore—oh, and go yarn shopping

Yes Reading Series, Social Justice Center, Albany, New York, 26 August 2010: Featuring Sarah Giragosia, Jennifer Karmin, and Bernadette Mayer, with assistance fromt Cara Benson, Deborah Poe, and James Belflower, followed by an après-poésie dinner with our friends Anne Gorrick, Lynn Behrendt, and Teresa Genovese

Dinner, Roy and Martine Arenella's, Greenwich, New York, 27 August 2010: On my deceased mother's birthday, Nancy and I had dinner at Roy and Martine's, where I had a chance to read Grenier's 12 from r h y m m s for the first time, and where we talked with David Greenberger and his wife, and met Ken Gangemi for the second time this year (more of a literary meal than I usually have anywhere)

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine, Exhibit, New Museum, New York, New York, 26 September 2010: A wonderful exhibit of the work, including vispoetic work, of Brion Gysin

Dinner with Jörg Piringer, Schenectady, New York, 2 November 2010: Nancy and I had multimedia artist and poet Jörg Piringer over to our house for dinner and good conversation

The Vegetable Orchestra, Proctor's Theatre, Schenectady, New York, 3 November 2010: Jörg and the other members of the orchestra performed music using instruments made out of vegetables

Intermedia Poetry Workshop, Central Booking, Brooklyn, New York, 7 November 2010: The first of six sessions of this workshop run by Ari Kalinowski

Bard Roving Reading Series, Center Lounge, Bertelsmann Campus Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 18 November 2010, 5 – 6 pm: Featuring Kate Greenstreet and Rob Schlegel

John Ashbery Reading Series, Weis Cinema, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 18 November 2010, 6 – 7 pm: Featuring John Ashbery and Anselm Berrigan

BookThug Reading, Yes Reading Series, Social Justice Center, Albany, New York, 19 November 2010: Featuring Andrew Hughes, Mark Goldstein, Maryann Apostolides, and Jay MillAr

Meeting, Matina Stamatakis, Schuylerville, New York, 20 November 2010: As part of my "Homes of the Visual Poets" series, I sat down with Matina to talk about her poetry and her life.

Visit, Roy and Martine Arenella, Greenwich, New York, 20 November 2010: After my visit with Matina, I visited with Roy and Martine again, finding more rare and wonderful poetry in Roy's house

Intermedia Poetry Workshop, Central Booking, Brooklyn, New York, 5 December 2010: The second of six sessions of this workshop run by Ari Kalinowski

After reviewing all of these events I have attended over the last year, I am struck by how poorly I wrote about these, many remaining completely undocumented here until now. I suppose I should resolve to better in this realm next year.


Books Read

I read 373 "books" this year, though some were as small as leaflets, or were actually entire literary magazines, so I better than met my goal of 365. I've documented the actual books read in other postings.


Films Watched

I watched 365 films this year, meeting my goal at about 7 in the evening on December 31st. I've also documented the specific films watched in other postings.


Coda

This is too much to say, too long an abstract, but it's a full life I'm recalling. When I die, there will be something left behind.

ecr. l'inf.

worng

morteamericano

soundbqpoem

seventeeth

Without Air

Geof Huth, "Our Own Air" (to Jeaneen Ferraris), written 27 May 2010, recorded 16 January 2011

My aunt died today, coincidentally on the birthday of two of my siblings (themselves born two years apart). Everything is a coincidence. We just have not figured them all out.

Since she had been sick for years with emphysema, her death wasn't a surprise and yet it was a shock. When someone finally leaves us, our bodies yearn for that person to fill that void their passing has created. But there's nothing to fill it with but words.

I was worried that my aunt would die the year I was fifty, so when I started writing a book of poems, one poem a day, each in the form of a letter to someone I know, hers was the third letter I wrote. Secretly, I wrote to her at the beginning of the project so that I could make sure she would receive a letter from me before she died. I had something to say to her, and there was some urgency to it.

The poem was called "Our Own Air", because it referred to her need for oxygen because of emphysema and mine because of sleep apnea, but it was "ours" in a larger sense, in the sense of our broader family. And "air" in the sense of life.

Today, to remember my aunt, Jeaneen Tanner Ferraris, I recorded myself reading that poem aloud, and I present that above. There's not much else to do. I'll spend most of the next week in California, a few miles south of San Francisco, in the place I am from. (My aunt died in the city where I was born.) And I will talk to my family. Because all we have now is words.

Two of the people I will talk to are her brothers, both of whom are older than she is. The world doesn't always turn out the way we expect it to. Out of a family of two boys and two girls, it is the girls, the two youngest siblings and the females, who generally outlive men, who have died. The other sister in that family was my mother, now over a decade dead. I can't be relieved that she is dead, but I know how she would have gone—slowly, and gasping for breath. Her emphysema was beginning in the months before a nurse looking for her cellphone on the floor of her car, slammed into the side of my mother's car, killing her instantly.

People die, but parts of them are left behind, in memories, in photographs, in words. I'm going to a funeral, which means I'm going to a celebration of a life and of mourning, which means I'm attending an event of vernacular poetry, a place where words bring the dead back to life so that they can hover before our eyes for a few seconds before evaporating back into the invisible air.

ecr. l'inf.

The First Draft of the Fourth Page of the 236th Poem

ecr. l'inf.

kni+words

We are made out the things that entrance us. The actions of our hands, the creations of our bodies, the forms that come out of those actions are even more precious, for they are ours and us, extensions of the self into place instead of the lost folds of wetware.

Just as sometimes letters, the DNA of words (ACGT), are formed out of water or in water, the former of which was the province of yesterday, some letters are made out of yarn, are knit into space, into place, have become florets that can be arranged into the classical shapes of the Latin alphabet ready to continue living long after the language of its name has changed itself into languages Romantic that have swept across the upturned face of Europe.

My friend Teresa Genovese is an artist (though, also, I'll note, a librarian), and she makes visuals out of fired clays and yarns, though never together: little pinch pots that rest upright on their pinches or things of yarn and the needles it's taken her to weave them into one blanket of knots. She is herself a human body festooned with yarned things of remarkable variety and dynamic shape, and the socks she made me last year I've used to keep warm my feet through this winter now plunged back into the rotten depths of frigid cold.

And I love these simple little letters she's made, as well as the design choices she's made while creating these. And I love rearranging them into words, even the word "Qage," and all magical word that means a letter and its allographic forms give meaning to textual space, the idea that an A is not always an A (let alone a), that text means not only as words we might pronounce in our head, but also as visual manifestations we might have trouble interpreting back into worded meaning.

My thanks to Teresa for reminding me tonight of the primacy of the letter and the need to examine just how each letter can be formed and what it might be formed out of.

ecr. l'inf.