I’d wanted to write “occasional” poems, but wanted, too, to write poems of the non-occasion. Each day can be one or the other – though usually the latter – or both simultaneously.
I’d wanted to write (and not write of) the occasionlessness of days. To write, too, the occasion of days (and not of it, as well). And to yet somehow stay clear of the cloud of significations that the particulars of time passing, the stuff that inevitably gathers around the specifics of a day, a month, a year – you know, the manifestations we’ve grown accustomed to courtesy the regularity of our year-long trips around the sun…
I’d wanted to write a (not of a) lifetime. To write the cumulative occasions of the occasionless.
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So to do that:
I’d played around with several approaches through the 1980s, all of which were wanting and thusly failed. The penultimate was a piece entitled dd/mm/yy, and it came close. But no cigar. Those damn clouds...
I was, I discovered, using the wrong kind of calendar.
I’d a longstanding interest in astronomy and cosmology, and it was amidst the measurements of time and space that I found what I needed: the Julian Day system, a simple, cumulative count of the days elapsed since the chosen Day 1 of January 1, 4713 BCE (Wikipedia can tell you all about it).
I was delighted to discover the potential open-endedness it suggested, both in moving forward in time and in working backwards into it, allowing me to mine material from my notebooks and journals. The use of a conventional calendar would have still provided me that opportunity, of course, but encountering Julian Days made me think anew of time, afforded me permission to work more freely backwards as well as forwards, and anyway I was anxious to get out from under the baggage of the conventional calendar.
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Another way of putting it:
I’d wanted to escape from the gravitational tug of a poem inextricably linked to a certain point in the planet’s journey around our sun (or the accumulation thereof). The days added upon one another arithmetically (+1, +1, +1…) as the Julian Days are argued a form of linear progression akin, in my mind anyway, to that of one line impinging upon another within the contextual structure of the poem, within the contextual structure of an open-ended series…
Too, I’d wanted (still do) to attempt to stop time from becoming fixed and fixated, from becoming firmly lodged and rooted. I didn’t want my texts to be held for a kind of ransom that way, by a system (the conventional calendar) that would grasp the order of words by the neck and end up choking and trivializing it. The texts would not be reduced to contextualization within sunny summer days, chill winter nights, the newnesses of spring, nor the fecund decay of autumn. They might be of, but they would not (necessarily) be about. And they would not be delimited by.
So a simple titular integer denotes sequence, linear time, and under the sign of the integer there is the accommodation of texts that have stood alone, separated from the containment of other dedicated poem sequences and seriality. The lyric misfits and runaways find a home (indeed, even the visuality of a concrete poem finds inclusion). More importantly, perhaps, there will be no formal, set beginning, no formal, set ending. The Julian Days just starts and it will, at some point denoted by either death or disinterest, just stop. There is nothing immutable about it, fore or aft.
Gil
McElroy
May
2021
