subtext

A few weeks ago a friend told me that she was reading a typescript I had given her several years ago. It was a series of poems titled: “Primogenitive Folly.” I went and found it on my computer and reread it and have since posted a few of the poems. At the time I wrote it, I had been reading Guy Davenport’s “7 Greeks.” I was interested in the way he simply translated the words that were there. If the greek was fragmented he simply translated the words that were there and to indicate where words were missing, Davenport would put parentheses around empty space. I liked the way the gaps, the silences, between the words , and the iconic nature of the words themselves took on meaning when placed next to one another. Bits of the Greek survived in packing material for trade goods, like an ancient world bubble wrap, waiting for a scholar two thousand years later to interpret the authorship through some strange arcane knowledge. So as I began to work out what I was going to work through during the summer of 2001, I was thinking about fragments and the randomness of the surviving words.
For several years before the summer of 2001, I had been interested in the use of constructs, fairly random for the most part, as a way to structure long poems. So I decided to use the first 64 prime numbers as a way to structure a series of poems. The total length of the series would be 64 poems to reflect the number of ideograms in the I Ching. Many years earlier I had used the I Ching as a lens through which to write a series of 250 six line poems over the course of a year. I didn’t want to limit all of the poems in the new series to a set number of lines. After worrying over how I could have a structure that was not a static shape on an individual poem level, I came up with prime numbers simply as a numerical device to limit or push the length of the individual poems in the series. I decided to use the prime numbers as a way to number the words, syllables, letters or lines of each of the poems in the series in a purely arbitrary way. All of this random numerical structuring reminded me of the habit of the some of the gentry in England in the early 1800’s, where they would construct fake runes on their estates called follys. Since I was going to write poems which purposely contained empty space and erasures, both false and real, similar to the Davenport translations of the Greek poems, I named the series before I began writing it, “Primogenitive Folly.” A bad pun since I was using prime numbers as a way to generate my “folly.”