Organizing Isolation: Half-Lives of Love at Long Distance

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There is no more “high stakes game” than one person attempting to communicate with another. We are not often capable of saying just what we mean; when we can say a thing, it is often not what we mean. And most of our waking lives, we don’t know what we mean, if we mean anything at all. This transmission of specific significance from one person to another, then, usually fails -- but when it succeeds, there is no mistaking it. The right words make us -- briefly -- permeable, and not alone.

But once encountered the written or uttered words decay. We forget commas and then contexts, phrasings and meanings, even feelings. Organizing Isolation has been an attempt to play with that radioactive decay -- glad that the results are subject to the same forces that scattered the materials of their construction.

I scanned most of the letters I received between 2013 and the end of 2016, printed them, cut them up, and glued some of the words, phrases, and redactions onto fresh paper. While this book collects some poetry, it is not, really, a poetry collection. Neither is it a scrapbook. It might be a novella in nine voices, or it might just be a paper-trail.

A paper-trail led me here. Gerry Crinnin left it, in books and zines, letters and emails; scraps, quacks, and screams from the balcony; haikus and Seneca Reds. If that “high stakes game” is endowed with any urgency -- for all of us but especially for me -- it’s because of Gerry, and a few people like him. Creeley, Kessler, Pound, Moore, Williams, Berryman, Stanford, MC. In particular, here, I’m indebted to Gerry’s collection Tell All Your Navy: A Half-Life of Letters, which gave me half of my title, and a method to manipulate. In general, I’m indebted to his frequent reminders that “an enigma should be able to blitz” -- and that a poet should be able to take the hit.

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