xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxJoshua Ware destroyed/remembered my book.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In a staggering fashion. What is here is only 1/10th of what he sent me.

They printed fifteen hundred of these in an industrial scale print house in Canada. They made their way into the world and you get one back like this from someone you hardly knew.

Germ growing in Cleveland. I think d.a. levy, Russell Atkins, Tom Orange, Bagazine. Cleveland has a thing for precarity falling apart, forgetting, moving on for good.

Josh is skeptical. He’s skeptical of the things we do. An inflated economy of praise built on a fundamental inattention to what we’re praising. What does it mean to read someone? To simply signify this in public? These are trite things I’m saying in this moment of skepticism, umbrage, sanctimony in regard to po-business as usual. An inflated economy of umbrage built on a fundamental inattention to what we’re rejecting. Josh has The Oops to say be something about it. A tiny circulation. A fragile circuit once it arrived in my mailbox.

Josh is making claims about time, memory, reading, circulation and care. There’s one way to pour oneself into a book without the worry of connecting it into an already. A month of constancy, the house to store the threads of his memory that can store each other.

How Romantic is this? How mock-heroic?

He takes my book to task sometimes, a call-in which I admire. I’ll be making changes because of his criticism.

Still, I hold The Oops in my hands like it is what it is, soft paper and only. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it & Josh.

I flatten it out and turn half his essay on the proximity into something you can summon.
Auto-destructive art? No, its not the same but sending it to me is almost like throwing it in the fire.  (Update (8.11.15 No, not fire at all: it is like using it to make a beautiful drink.) Just sense the energy, the attention crashing back such an act entails, the trust or is it aggression to make me make meaning of his digestion of my book, returning vomit/food to the dog. There’s nothing symmetrical possible, no satisfactory tag back, nothing quick, trenchant, or clever. Just The Oops living out its half-life on a shelf not because I want it there but because I don’t know what else to do with it. It being what I, narcissus, think is some of his best poetry.

I read from The Oops to a small crowd in St. Catherine’s, Ontario a few weeks ago. That was the only time I’ll read them to others. Someone in Canada remembers a thread of it. The rest is here and gone. Go find Josh.