Coming back up for Air, I Realize I Haven't Drowned at All

Three Boxes of Publications, Most Acquired This Year (30 November 2011)
I took notes for this, so I have to get it right.

At best, I am Frank O'Hara. Can I be Frank? At worst, I am Frank O'Hara. I came up with the title for this constellation of words while foldering poetry pamphlets and magazines and arranging them in boxes in alphabetical order. I have filled three boxes so far. I will fill at least one other, and maybe more. Estimating is the art of being wrong but vaguely sure of it. We depend on what we don't quite know.

When I came up with this title, I first thought I should make a poem out of it, a poem to go under it, with it. But I thought better, deciding that this title needed to be the title of a little essay to end the night I'm struggling through with pencil and folders.

I made all these notes about what I was going to write, and my handwriting is somehow appealing to me. I like how it is long and thin, a bit messy, and occasionally stylish. Not good handwriting, but serviceable. (Like this is not good writing, but serviceable.)

Moving through all of these publications reminds me that I have failed at doing in this space what I had wanted to do: to talk about poetry on the margins, poetry that makes its value in the margins, poetry not much cared for but all the more special for exactly that reason. I have a little pile of books to write about, some that I had read at the beginning of the year, and yet I've set down no words about them. And I wondered why. I didn't wonder what my excuses would be. I know those well enough. I wonder how I let this happen.

And the reason was simple and clear: I am a failure poet, a poet of failure.

I've written about this before. I've suggested that failure is not only an option, that it might be a preferred one. Why? Because success is fleeting, at best, and usually not found—because it is the work that matters to me. I don't put much effort into publishing what I write. My energies, such as they are, I focus into writing, into making. Call me Fabbro, or even ffabbro. My focus is making, not distributing. If I write a book, I might send an electronic copy of it to a few friends, but only if it's reasonably short. No-one's read the book of 156 longish poems I wrote a few years ago. Plenty of my poems have entertained only me.

Since we could reasonably argue that poetry is meant to be consumed by others, that success is other people (other people knowing one's poetry), I can claim, without fear of contradiction, that I've failed at being a career poet. I am not unknown, and I don't bemoan the fate I've created for myself, but I have to accept that most of my poetry is a big secret to the world. The other day I prodded Douglas Rothschild into saying this about the reading he was planning to set up for me in New York City: that he wanted to have my friend Chris Funkhouser be there to be the "name poet." I have to say that I really love that.

I have amassed a full cubic-foot box of poetry I've written this year alone, yet I don't think I've published any poems this year, except a few found photopoems in Otoliths, one poem in the book The Bury Poems, and a small book of photopoems put out by Redfoxpress of Ireland. (I'm not counting the little publications that I create for each reading I give.)

These papers of mine, and all these publications I've made my way through this year remind of more than my failure as a blogger about marginal poetry and a career poet (though I'm not saying I'm a failure as a poet, just that I care about something else; I want more to leave something behind than to have people see it now). This detritus of my life reminds me that I am a person hungry for experience, hungry for media. I want to watch every movie and read every book. And this consumption is a kind of craziness.

I'm estimating that I'll donate about 80 boxes of dictionaries and other wordbooks to the University at Albany this year, along with another 10 boxes of my papers. Why do I have so much stuff? Because it is matter that matters to me, because each book represents knowledge.

The one with the most words at the end of the game wins.

But the game is ending for me. I'm in love with the book, as a physical object, as a carrier of meaning, as a dear friend that opens herself up to me whenever I need her to. I thought, maybe, that I couldn't shake this, but I can. I'm holding onto thousands of books, and still more boxes of my papers, but this year will be my greatest divestment of stuff ever, of the stuff of meaning, and meaning is all that I'm about. (Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" is playing while I write this, because my life needs a soundtrack, and because this is the right soundtrack at this moment.)

I am giving up my books and my papers because I age faster than most people. I feel in my body as a child. Everything is a pleasant surprise to me. I am still energetic enough (and I'm not that old at all). I am still enthralled with the pleasures of the earth. The book and the word entrance me because they are about meaning, but also because they are bodily forces. With them, through them, I return to the body, which is the source of poetry, because poetry is life, because the body is life.

But we, eventually, have to give everything up, we can hold onto nothing forever, and I want to give things up at my pleasure, I want to give them away before they become a burden to me. I need a lighter life. Not a weightless one, but one that is nimbler than mine is now, one of a couple thousand books instead of five thousand. I want to read my way through all my cheap paperbacks (Faulkner, Borges, Smollett even), and I want to discard them, give them away to someone else, start a new life for them.

I want to be filled with them without having to have them. I want the memory of a life instead of the life that these books were. But those most important markers of my life (these personal papers of mine and this huge collection of wordbooks) I want held together as a piece, as a memory of me, just as I will carry within myself a memory of them. So I'm keeping them together. Sometime soon there will be nearly 200 cubic feet of materials that carry the DNA of my thought, words and images and sounds that maintain a better memory of me than I do myself.

I have created this world of meaning, thus I can give it a new way to mean, and a new place in which to do it.

More than a week ago, I fell while walking up the stairs with two heavy boxes of papers and books. The weight of the paper in my two arms (which hugged the boxes to my body) pulled me forward and into the stairs I was walking up, and my left thigh smashed against the corner of a stair. My leg was in pain for hours, so I had to sleep with the pain, but it resided quite a bit. I did not bruise, not for a week, and then the other day a huge bruise, deep and purple but also greenish, appeared on my inner thigh, obliterating this diffuse pink birthmark that otherwise rests there. My entire leg is now sore, sometimes remarkably so. A sharp heat impedes my walking, and I remember that we cannot ever escape the past or what we have done there.

So we might as well preserve what we can of the past somewhere, so we can visit it, and see what we are like. And that's what I'm doing by putting together all these boxes of meaning, which are not less (and nothing more) than my message to the future.

And not all futures are distant.

Geof Huth, "Bilgious" (a poem written in a book of neo-Dada poetry tonight, 30 November 2011)

ecr. l'inf.