The’re is No The’re The’re (or maybe the’re is)

Today, I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old, [imperfect/ in perfect] health.

Something like that. This line is almost stolen from Ted Berrigan, but his number of years was 48. That is because a year ago I was 48 years, 5 months and 16 days old, so I wrote a poem with that line within it. This line of Berrigan’s came from his poem “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” which was the penultimate poem he ever wrote, finishing it about six weeks before he died. Berrigan’s original includes the phrase “In perfect health,” which I changed to “imperfect health” in my poem. Ted’s own use of the phrase was, of course, ironic; he knew he was dying and that time was slipping away, that his years of testing his body were ending. That idea, of a brave facing of death via a transparent lie about his health, appealed to me, especially since I was facing my own mortality last year. I was also entranced by the fact that I could write a poem when I was exactly the same age Ted Berrigan was when he wrote “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” so I waited three months and wrote the poem, “Bearth: Day,” which carried too many puns within the basin of its first word.

I found this poem I had created interesting. It was written in a single stanza and almost in a block, ending at exactly the twentieth line, included text appropriated from somewhere, and I add typographical pipes to serve as visual caesurae to the poem to indicate rests within the poem. Some have complained about these pipes, seeing them as ugly presences that slow down the reading, but I see that annoyance, the foreignizing of the reading experience as something important, and also as a second level of pause after the line break. These features of the poem led me to give this loose verse form a name: vigesimon (vigesima, the plural form), after the fact of its twenty lines. Twenty has been an important number to me, for two reasons: 1. It represents the Mayan “full man,” the full count of digits (fingers and toes) of a man, thus the complete man, and more importantly so since the Mayans appear to have had a base-20 numbering system; 2. My twentieth year was the most reckless and difficult of my life, and turning 20 seemed like a irrevocable transformation into the adult I never wanted to be, making my twentieth birthday almost a harrowing experience, and who else has had that ridiculous reaction to twenty? Birthdays neither bother nor please me now, and I expect no untoward reactions to turning fifty next year.

With a verse form in hand, I decided to investigate its uses, so I wrote a number of these poems, soon realize that I was writing a book of these poems. This book became part of my writing project entitled be, comma, to, an examination of isness, which is to say of everything, though my everything, even in the face of 154 poems, seems a bit more limited than reality’s. As part of that project, this book carried and carries the title The’re, serving as a contracted contraction of “They are,” since all the books within the project are based upon the conjugation of the English verb “to be,” the most irregular in the language—and thus the individual books in the project are designed to be quite different from each other. I may end up changing the title of this book, or using Th’ere as the structural title, the title within the scheme of be, comma, to, rather than the main title of the book.

I continued writing poems for months until, probably when I was in Manchester, England, I realized that the vigesimon was my equivalent of the sonnet, so I decided to write 154 poems, the same number as the number of Shakespeare’s sonnets. That would make this a big book, one made bigger by the fact that I allowed myself to write the occasional vigesimon that was longer than twenty lines, but only if it consisted of a sequence of subtitled sections, each of which was a vigesimon itself. This means that some of these poems are 2, 3, 5, or 7 stanzas long, thus the book itself will run roughly about 180 pages in length, before the addition of notes showing my sources and appendices. The appendices add information to the poems, and consist of “An Index to Discarded Titles” (keyed to particular poems, but created after the writing of the poem), “An Index to Last Lines” (keyed to poems, but different from the actual last lines of the poems), and “An Index to Memorable Lines” (keyed to poems, but not appearing in those poems or any others in the book). I did one practice run producing this faux metadata for the ten poems I wrote on my trip to England this spring, so I know I have much work left to do.

Sometime in September, I discovered that I’d written almost no poems for the book in May or June and none at all in July and August—for some reason, I tend to write fewer poems in the summer—so, in the middle of September, I began a strenuous process of poetry writing, which meant I had to write a vigesimon almost every day for almost two months. I complicated that process yesterday by deciding I had to write the longest vigesimon ever, a 140-line behemoth, as the penultimate poem of the book (taking the place of “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza” in Berrigan’s oeuvre). But somehow I finished the book on time today. The writing of poems kept me so busy that I gave up blogging almost completely for two months, but tonight marks my return to that daily grind, though I expect other entries will be a bit more interesting than this one—and maybe even shorter.

I wrote these poems all over New York State, while riding in airplanes and trains and cars, in New Jersey, West Virginia, England, Georgia, and North Carolina. But I wrote not a single one in Finland, where I was focused on other writing, including another book. I’m glad to have this first draft finished—one that takes up three file folders when printed out will all its metadata—and now the editing begins. With any luck, I’ll be done with that a year from now.

The poems in this manuscript were meant to be different from one another in focus and style, and sometimes they are, but I notice a sameness in them that I’ll have to fight against during the editing. And, now that I’m finished with the book, I’ll have to give up the vigesimon and focus on other forms of writing. Once I’m finished editing this book, and once I’m finished putting together the manuscript of my next book, something I’m behind on.

I write because I enjoy it. No other reason really. Or, in the end, no other reason. So I enjoyed this process. And, while reading over some of the poems yesterday, I noticed that I enjoyed most of them. That’s a good sign, I suppose, but one I don’t expect to hold. Editing will be a bear. Soon, I’ll begin to focus on another way of writing poems. For now, I present the final poem of the book, not its strongest candidate, but as good as today.

Water of Life

ffor I will consider the tissues and fissures of life
the vague disparities | between connection and
correction | a basket of pears not yet sweet | the bite
of ginger at the point of the bite | A fire rumbles in
the fireplace | slight whistling as water escapes
from wood | The articles of articulation demand
a set of certain rules | A small glass of liquid green
eau de vie de bourgeons de sapin | for the nose and
the tongue | the tang and tendrils of fire | A perfected set
of tanglewords | for the poem left to write | Eyes behind
glasses behind shades | the ghosts we call memories and
the stains they leave behind | Knuckles red from arranging
wood on the fire | words on the page | ffor I will consider
the workings of these words and even the water | Athwart
an ancient quarry | whatever comes of it comes out | Each
windowframe frames a simple picture of the night | black,
blackness | or the reflection back into the room of the room
itself | Today I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old
imperfect | belt fastened a notch looser | I do not have
another year to waste | I do not have the time tonight to try

ecr. l’inf.