dumbfoundry

Joe Duemer tries to sneak around death:

I admit it, I think about posterity. I like to imagine someone reading my poems after I am dead. One way of thrusting one's self into the future is to publish. Books disappear into libraries, where they become little time capsules. Not all time capsules get dug up, though. How, then, to maximize the possibility of, say, an undergraduate in Iowa in say, 2204, pulling a book off the shelf* & reading a poem by Joseph Duemer? It seems that being published in anthologies might produce a kind of shotgun effect in driving my birdshot into the future.

Never mind shelves, Joe, it's risky to suppose Iowa and undergraduates will exist in 2204. Just write the best poems you can and put them on the web. Then you'll be buried in the electronic archives forever.

Or: write unreadable poems and make sure they're printed in big fancy books no one will read but no one will throw away. That is, if Boorstin was correct. There is a list of his laws here:

• The Law of the Survival of the Unread


• Survival of the Durable, and That Which is Not Removed or Displaced


• Survival of the Collected and the Protected: What goes in Government Files


• Survival of Objects That are not Used or That Have a High Intrinsic Value


• Survival of the Academically Classifiable and the Dignified


• Survival of Printed and Other Materials Surrounding Controversies


• Survival of the Self-Serving: The Psychopathology of Diarists and Letter Writers


• Survival of the Victorious Point of View: The Success Bias


• Survival of the Epiphenomenal


• Knowledge Survives and Accumulates, but Ignorance Disappears.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Tuesday, March 09, 2004 at 11:36 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.