_{One does not need to extrapolate conclusions from specific cases to comment meaningfully, if generally, on the current conditions for creating and circulating art and poetry in the United States. Never before have so many online and print publications and projects absorbed so many images and words without any accompanying critical formation encouraging what used be called a culture of reading each other. Was it Blaser who said that when we were writing we had a magazine, and when we had a magazine, we were writing? Easy enough now to say that’s what you wanted in the Bay Area in 1995, harder to say now that you could not see then that Recent Events demanded it. The afternoon you dropped off the manuscript (do you still remember the address, 282?), you met Etel and Simone coming up the stairs. There’s a work by Fattal in the Walker Sculpture Garden. In your thin files are letters from Duncan McNaughton and Beverly Dahlen, a pair of poems from Leslie Scalapino, letters from Michael Amnasan and Steven Farmer, among other artifacts: four versions of a samizdat circular that will stand the test of time. You have a theory that you cannot prove about New Coast and the need for a scapegoat. You accept that social forces and class structures operate on subjects subconsciously. You never accused anyone of conscious malice after 1995 although the poetry tells another version among many contending versions too late to disavow. The same afternoon you attended a party for bride and groom at the groom’s apartment, a stranger seated at the table next to you gave you her phone number. Hers was the company you kept in the late afternoon and early evenings in a Berkeley boarding house for foreign students. No one knew except your wife and the wife who lived at 282. Did you glimpse a memory of the same smile for which there are no words in any language on the face of a life-film figure waking up from a late afternoon nap, her child sleeping beside her despite the life time that separates February 1, 2025 from April 2, 1995? “Impossible to live outside these dates.” (Quoted from memory). Forgive Lullaby Alibi. A feat of philology may well transform Louise Labé into Liberty Leading the People, so vehement was the disavowal of Toba’s recognition the day of the march for a woman’s right to choose. One of the letters from Ankara asks after Milton Chee. The writer of the letters from Ankara was the most political person outside the Party that you met in the Bay Area. The work’s time span, 2006-2018, misses by one year only the chronology of your silence if you date your return to poetry from the Woodland Pattern workshop. Someone finally called you to talk about your poetry. Half a world away, someone else was working in your place. You had been waiting for the work since the Home Movie notebook, which you only discovered after February 1, 2025. The day after the Buffalo post from Łódź, you received an email about the poem going everywhere; Nettime’s Jordan Crandall started the Under Fire project. You forgot about it, like you forgot about the notebook. Is forgetting one’s writing a method? Worse than social death is the writing turning into a style. When you say the artwork you saw changed your life, you are sure that you mean the artwork gave you back your work, that you could see the accumulation, like the Passegen-werk. You are writing it now, in the afterimage of a child in a highchair eating pickles with chopsticks.}