I’m not sure if I believe in writing anymore. My thinking
may have devolved to the point that I believe in poetry without accepting the
evidence that writing exists. Or it is that I see poetry as so many things
besides and beyond writing. It may be that I have debased poetry and writing by
accepting so many vagrant means into the accepted ways of making of such
literary devices. For a poem, to me, is nothing more than an engine to run a
thought—or a feeling or just a word—through a person.
Every day, I proceed under the apprehension that something
will cause me to make a poem, that almost no day will close without my forming
a poem of the evanescence stuff of my day. The program of the poet is to be
prepared for that small twinge of inspiration that might barely make a
survivable poem, a thing one might care about, if one cared about words or what
they do or what the replacements of words to do a person and why, and why it is
important. Or why we wish it were.
I made in this day maybe twelve poems, counting this one you
are reading at this moment. One lasted for but an instant—
breathrough
—and then it was gone. I sent it out into the world as a
sequence of letters, a coded message for the eyes, yet I created it for the
ear, whispering what it might sound like into my own ear, hearing how it
couldn’t work well enough unless my voice gave it breath enough to keep it
alive—then imagining it the form of
breaththrough
and sending it out, unwhispered, again—maybe as a new poem,
maybe as a revision, but thinking of it as a poem about the speaking of a poem
through the body: coming from the head (worn with work), transmitted first to
the arms (one entumored), and finally to the thumbs tapping it swiftly and silently
out into space, that electronic and digital space humans inhabit when they
forget they live in airspace, in groundspace, in trees-sleeping-until-spring-as-brown-but-waiting-to-be-green-space,
and sent there just in case someone was listening—or someone was seeing well
enough to listen to what was seen.
In the afternoon, I paused from reading and shopping and
cooking and cleaning to make two poems, both out of scraps of ancient court
documents so small and so removed from their home documents that I cannot
repatriate them—one of these poems made inside a bell jar my mother-in-law had
given us to hold a single ornament for an evergreen in the process of dying and
one inside the distorting glass of a small bottle that once held a small quantity
of artisanal tonic water. Both pieces of trash, because I make these poems out
of rubbish, out of what has been left behind or tossed away, out of trash from
the street, out of cloth tape and rough twine that once held together sets of
documents, out of disintegrating ribbons and wax seals that had confirmed the
authenticity of the files, out of straight pins and paper clips that held pages
together, out of the bodies of insects (housefly and moth) that had died among
these papers.
These are found and made poems that take decontextualized
scraps and recontextualize them. I put fragments of words together with other
visible but atextual pieces and create a poem out of text and textile and
texture. I create little things to look at and read, because looking and
reading are often the same process, the act of persons bringing information
into their bodies. They do this not because they are required to; they do it
because meaning is nourishment, because connection to another body even through
nothing but the data a person presents to them is the human act of learning and
knowing and coming to know more. In one of these little poems—consisting
primarily of a single length of cotton tape decorated with a scaly textured spine
of nothing but thread—there appear these markings, in no particular order
except however each person sees them:
of the
Clerk of the
in the City of New York.
54
[three
loops of a pen]
[another
three, but different, loops]
pe
dn [but these letters are upside-down, so
“dn” is actually “up”]
CE
ER
HA
MA
PRO
[a pencil mark]
[the
slightest sliver of a the lowest reaches of a line of text, where the only
recognizable part is
the bulbous-ended descender of a g
or a j or a y, but which seems impossible to be any of those]
Yesterday, I was interrupted in the course of my day by a red-leather
bound volume sitting among hundreds of shelves of others books, but this one
bearing the arresting title “In the Matter of Bird.” (Merely a case title for a
civil case without a defendant, because sometimes the most supposedly mundane
phrasings stop me and allow me to listen to their possibilities.) I texted this
title to myself yesterday, expecting to write my nightly lineated poem against
this title, but I forgot and instead wrote a poem off the top of my head about
rain and self and the holding of reality within the body of a person, and thus
the separable and separate body of every person.
Tonight, I wrote—in a faux-red-leather bound volume that
includes a bar directory for the state of New York—a fragmentation poem (something
like the grenade with the same forename but less deadly): each line a fragment,
a set of metrical lines (but only in that the meter of the poem matters but is
inconsistent across every line), and nothing more than an imagining of the chaosmic
flight of a small bird aloft within the wind of the earth and the wind of its
own making. I keep this poem for myself now, but I will read it to my wife upon
her waking tomorrow, and she will say it is good, and I will note that it is a
failed little creature with no more than one unbroken wing.
Near the beginning of the day today, I made two little
versi, poems in which I bind two words together by slipping the letters “vs”
between them (in the manner of my friend mIEKAL aND). One of them was
run vs rum
—which I created in my head while “running” on a treadmill
and I intended as a counterpart to the poem
gin vs gym
, which I wrote yesterday. These versi are maybe no more
than word games, but a poem is a way to play with words, to play with meaning,
to cause a little tumult in the mind of another.
I also created a few asemic fidgetglyphs, usually tiny
visual poems made out of characters drawn or written to approximate the forms
found within imagined writing systems. As the years of making these have
progressed for more than a decade, I now create forms that are more
logographic, eschewing almost entirely the use of actual alphabetic characters
or written language. Yet I call these poems, even though they concern the
making of shapes with ink and followed by my watching to determine when their
expressiveness diminishes and I decide it is time to stop making them—until my
imagination returns. I love cutting ink into the sturdy pulp of the paper,
drawing lyrical curves or straight lines or expressionistic jaggedness.
As I was writing this, I remembered that I had discovered
today that I had a small ovoid stone of granite, which I had decided could be
the base for my next “stoen,” which is merely a poem of textual scraps glued to
a rock or stone of any size. Most of these stones are flat and expansive enough
to hold a collage of text that uses up dozens of pieces of paper to create a
poem. But I thought this one would be small enough to hold just one piece of
paper—if I could find the right piece. So I looked through my accumulated “wordscrapts”
(as I call them) and found the slip of paper I needed.
This irregularly rectangular paper scrap was covered with the
writing of a loose but firm hand. Heavy pen strokes predominated, some so deep (or
the ink possibly acidic) that a slit appeared through the only whole world on
the entire piece:
child
I glued this one piece across the top face of the stone,
allowing the slit to show through as an opening, a rupture, and the aporia, in
the text. I even took my microspatula and opened the slit a little and cleaned out
the seeping and drying glue—so that the stone could show through the paper and
the text, so that I could preserve and display the act that pen mark made more
than a century before today.
A friend of mine, tonight, responded to my posted photo of pareidolia
in beer foam in my wife’s glass (my caption was “Lascaux Beer”). He wrote, “I
thought your glass was decorated with a band of horses. Just artistic foam.” My
response was “Band of brothers, man. We will always be a band of brothers.
Because those are the ones who die together.” And I think even that
exchange—jokes and all—might be a poem, since I cannot tell the difference
between poetry and life.
The music playing as I was writing this paused for a string
of seconds and plunged me into silence, or the closest thing to silence I can
find: a slight ringing in my ear and the muffled murmur of traffic a long way
off and down. Within that breach of the sound enveloping me, I decided to make
a poem by speaking it into a machine, by making it up as formed it, and I
decided not to use the words of language but the glossolalia of the moving
tongue. Such language is not really ever asemic in the way my fidgetglyphs are;
this language is always filled with the meaning of the voice, that meaning
beyond word, the meaning of tone and speed and pause. I was surrounded for over
an hour with the aching sound of the Icelandic tongue, but I took not the sound
of the language but the emotion of the voices from this music and made a little
poem, one I could feel almost too sharply inside myself, as if I were actually
telling a poem about hurt and pain. The mind of a poet is a strange thing and
can even trick the poet.
The night has gone dark—has been dark for a while. I live in
city high above the streets, with a view of the river, the harbor it slips
into, and the opening of the sea it becomes, and I can sometimes hear only my
own voice whenever my wife is asleep. Tonight, I am not quite done with this
day of making poems, but all I have left—unless some other urge overwhelms me—is
to continue to take poems I’ve already made and write them down over an over
again. I’m working on a tiny leaflet of five poems of mine, poems written last
month, mostly as I was driving to my office upstate. The title of the leaflet
is “oieaux,” which also serves as the first poem in the book. Each of these is
a poem in French punning off the word “eau” (or “water”)—except that one of
them also makes a translingual pun in English. People generally sees puns as trifles,
but to make a poetic pun is to be working fully in the medium of one’s work—in
language, in a target language, doing what only that language can do.
I have already made these poems, so my poemmaking now is
merely writing, but not writing in the sense of making some new written thing,
but in the sense of writing the same thing down, in pen, over and over again,
so I can have 100 copies of these poems to distribute to people, 100 copies
written entirely in my own hand, everything on the pages written in my hand—and
written on brittle acidic paper that will likely fall apart with time. Because
the poem is not just its words; it’s also how its words appear in space, on
pages, against the ear.
If I’m truly organized today, I will do an integral (but
sometimes unmet) part of writing life, and I will collect metadata on all the
poems I’ve created today and store that metadata in the little database I keep
online so I can always look up a little fact about my writings and works.
Because I’m not just a poet; I’m also an archivist, someone interested in
records and driven by a need to document—because I’m drawn to words because
they are human and because they are data.
Geof Huth is a
poet of mixed and many means. He presents most of his work (mostly nanopoems)
into the maw of social media. He almost never finishes making a book of his
work, and he never publishes except through his own presses, dbqp and pdqb,
which produce very little. If he didn’t exist, there would be no need to create
him, but he would still create.
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