8 Days After

Karri Kokko's "huth" (2011) and Anne Gorrick's "The Missing F" (2012) on My Bookshelf (2 June 2012)
I don't celebrate birthdays, though my avoidance of such has nothing to do with a queasiness concerning age. (Fifty-two simply isn't that old, anyway.) And yesterday was not my birthday. Instead, it was eight days after my birthday. So, in a way, I celebrated my birthday yesterday with a couple of friends.

My birthday itself was a strange day. It was probably the first birthday of my life during which no-one wished me a happy birthday in person, yet I received more birthday greetings that day (I'm fairly certain) than on any other birthday of mine. Most of these were electronic, but my father did call me on the phone, miss me, and leave me his rendition of "Happy Birthday." And one of my siblings, the middle one of my three sisters and also the middle one of my five siblings, did reach me on the phone and sing me a little birthday song with her two boys. A colleague at work did, sometime in the middle of the day, tell me he remembered it was my birthday, but he didn't wish me a good one.

Since I don't want people to give me parties or gifts, they have begun to assume I want no good wishes either. Actually, all I want is that they not spend money for my birthday, but lead a life of even gentle iconoclasm and you'll be misunderstood. It was no matter, though, since it was just a birthday. The boring three-day weekend after it was the problem part of the week, though it did give me a chance to watch my smelly dogs...

This past Thursday, my friend Anne Gorrick wrote me to say that she and our friend Lynn Behrendt wanted to take me out for my birthday on Saturday. After lots of thinking about logistics and other matters, I answered her the next day, saying that that would be fine so long as I could pay for my own meal. With an agreement reached (though one destined not to be honored...), our plans were set, and yesterday the two of them came to see me, and somehow found a parking space even though some slow-paced marathon was going on around the corner and most of the parking peopled had been finding was decidedly illegal, such as parking in front of the Governor's mansion.

Lynn Behrendt, Collage for Geof Huth (2012)
Lynn and Anne came bearing gifts. In the end, these are acceptable (meaning I could accept them), since Anne and Lynn had made them. Lynn's gift was a framed collage, one of her classic digital collages, which are always creepy (note the almost-naked man) and filled with detail. This one includes tree of my visual poems, lots of shots of my feet (maybe because they're my best feature), and a central face that is half bpNichol and half Robert Grenier. I recognized Nichol immediately, but not Grenier, whom I guessed was me, probably because I don't have a good sense of what I look like but this half of the face looked bald. And in the lower right corner of the collage is a photograph I took of my two children after they attended a reading of Lynn's in New York City. It is a strange little collage, just what I like, and it sits atop my dresser.


Anne Gorrick, "The Missing F" (2012)
Anne brought me a bottle of riesling (already drunk) and an object poem collage. Immediately, I noticed that the snippet she had used from a dictionary included those words the closest alphabetically to my name, none of which has an f as its fourth letter, hence the title of this piece. The collage includes three bullet shells, three target-like figures (two of which are gears), and a few inches of 35mm motion picture film, which hid the missing F, the indentation for which Anne has left under the upper flap of the film. Anne has written about this piece on her blog.

After admiring all my gifts (which also included candy: wax lips and gold-colored bubble gum flakes), we headed out for the restaurant, which I noted was just barely without the boundaries of my realm. I rarely move more than three blocks from my apartment, so my world is quite compact, but it holds the place where I live, my place of work, my therapist's office, quite a few restaurants, and not even a quarter-way useful grocery store.

We ate a big Mexican meal (tamales for all of us, margaritas for Anne and me, though I doubled her number of them), and we spoke, maybe too much, of poetry. We spent much energy trying to make a list of 20th- and 21st-century schools of poetry. Coming up with the schools wasn't hard, except that we realized that some of the possible categories we came up with were not really schools. And, by the end, we noticed how hard categorization was in this case because some people lived in two schools, and some really lived in none. We really didn't have schools for ourselves, though Lynn put me in visual poetry, which I noted was not a school and not broad enough to define what I did as a poet. We also worried about how precise to be with schools: San Francisco Renaissance, anyone? It was still fun. And I'm now waiting for Lynn to do something with the list.

Lynn paid for lunch, refusing to take money from me. Only today did I think of slipping two twenties in her purse. I suppose, if you can't have everything you want on your birthday, you also can't avoid everything you don't want at your birthday party.

After lunch, I took Anne and Lynn past the local used bookstore (Dove & Hudson), which is a fine store but not open the first seven days of every month. Anne really didn't seem to believe me until we made it to the store, which had a sign on the door saying it wasn't open for the first seven days of a month. Sure, it's a strange feature for a store, but that's the way it is here in Albany.

Before Lynn and Anne left, I took them on a tour of the Empire State Plaza and its subterranean concourse (the scene of a zombie poem of mine). What they didn't seem to realize was that this place is filled with a huge collection of modern art, created during the reign of Governorn Nelson Rockefeller. So we looked at the outdoor sculpture. I told them a few interesting stories. And underground we looked at paintings and sculptures. I made sure they saw my favorite painting there, Gene Davis' "Sky Wagon," and the Isamu Noguchi sculptures, one of which I love (the one made of travertine marble). Just before we exited the concourse, which was empty as was the plaza itself, I sang this song in the big emptiness:

listen to ‘Concourse Song’ on Audioboo

Anne was quite amazed at how alone we were in these big public spaces, alone to look at all this art in this free museum, some of which simply never closes. I walked Lynn and Anne past a few nice house and about a half dozen tiny parks (parklets, in Anne's parlance), and they drove south.

I went back to my apartment, fell asleep within half an hour and awoke twelve hours later, but still a little unwilling to arise.


ecr. l'inf.