The Final Final Mathemaku

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.