I have long loved the oddball books, the ones you cannot find in stores. Kurt Vonnegut’s Sun Moon Star. Joan Didion’s Telling Stories. Raymond Carver’s Near Klamath. Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia. Denis Johnson’s The Man Among the Seals. As a writer, I’ve had the joy of making one myself: a 2010 chapbook reprinting a profile of Frances Kroll Ring, who, while a young woman, spent a year and a half as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary when he was working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. So few copies of my little book were printed that I have seen it just once in the wild. The pleasure of such a publication arises from its status as a shadow project, not ancillary but unknown, unknowable, removed from commerce, which renders it, most essentially, a piece of private literature.
Earlier this year, I published another private volume, although I’m not sure published is exactly the word. Yes, there is a book, Peculiar Hotel, a collection of poems and photographs produced for a multidisciplinary exhibition in Berlin. (I was drawn to contribute to the show, which will remain up until July, because of its insistence on blurring or erasing boundaries of form and genre and its attention to “the poetics of being.”) Yes, the process of developing it felt similar to that of my previous books, from the writing to the editing to the sequencing: the intention to build a work that is cohesive, that seeks to make a statement in the world. In this case, such a statement is particularly personal; nearly all the poems, and every one of the photos, speak to the decline of my octogenarian parents over the past four or five years and the death of my mother in the fall. In that regard, Peculiar Hotel may be the most intimate of my books, which is among the reasons it seems appropriate to me that it should appear in an edition of one.
An edition of one? That is the fate of all the books—there are a slew of them—created for the Berlin exhibit; each will be displayed for visitors to the host gallery in a kind of reading room. There’s something about this that moves me as well, the book as ambient in a fundamental sense. What I mean is, with only one copy in existence, Peculiar Hotel can’t go out and find its readers. Those readers must discover it on their own. But isn’t that always the way? Hype, press, publicity, book lists: They only go so far. No, the marvel of reading, and of writing, resides in shared proximities. “Here is a single person sitting somewhere writing a book in silence,” E.L. Doctorow observed in 2009, “and here is another person sitting somewhere and reading that book in silence. What is written in silence, and read and written about in silence—that’s us.” The process, in other words, has to do with coming together through the medium of language. Even the best-known works of literature must connect with their readers one by one. This is yet another reason I find myself compelled by the notion of the book as a private, or singular, artifact.
There’s also more at work here, however—another set of urgencies. These involve the push and pull between writing for oneself and writing for an audience, a dynamic every published author understands. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing against publication. I wanted to be in print from the moment I first realized, at the age of seven, that each book on my father’s shelves had been made by a human being.
“In a cheap novel,” Frank Conroy writes in the 1967 memoir Stop-Time, “the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. ‘I’m a novelist,’ he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say.” Conroy’s right, and I am lucky. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life writing for public platforms: newspapers, magazines, websites, books. I’ve produced work that matters to me, work I stand behind. Most important, perhaps—and in a way I couldn’t have understood when I was younger—I’ve had the chance to participate in the conversation Doctorow was describing: an exchange of ideas, without doubt, but more essentially, an interplay of souls.
And yet, Peculiar Hotel feels like a return as well—to some more elusive, or elemental, state. Let’s call it writing for its own sake. Not only because it is a book of poetry—my first form, my first love, both text and subtext of so many youthful notebooks of secret writing—but also because of the circumstance of its release. No one will ever be able to buy this book, or to review it. No one will ever recommend it to a friend. Such mechanisms are rendered moot, inoperable, by the very nature of its creation. For me, this has become almost entirely the point. To be freed from the apparatus, the machinery of publication: It represents a liberation. It brings me back to a condition of…innocence is not the word I want, but maybe artlessness. It recalls the ways I wrote when I was young. It reminds me that before I ever thought about engaging with a reader, I had to write first for an audience of one. To explore, of course, the febrile nature of the language, as well as my relationship to it. But also, equally essential, to activate a conversation with myself.
The poems in Peculiar Hotel function in very much this fashion; many were drafted on the fly, typed out in extended drafts on my phone while walking, then edited and honed. For a long time, I avoided thinking of them in terms of a collection, although if I’m being honest, I also hoped they might coalesce into one. The writer’s dilemma again, the juxtaposition of the private and the public, the need to excavate and the impulse to reveal. At the same time, how to publish this? The material felt so close, so difficult to share. It wasn’t that I was trying to work anything out—there was nothing to work out, just a matter of bearing witness, of reporting back from the center of my grief. In that regard, it felt to me as if I were writing as a way of keeping track, of holding us together, although this, of course, is just another fantasy. Better, then, to say I was mulling and recording, trying to preserve what I could, the very moments, as my parents’ lives came apart before me.
As I began to lose them, and they began to lose themselves.
I did, let me admit it, publish some of these poems in periodicals: 3 of the 17 that constitute the book. (The title effort appeared in Alta Journal late last year.) This, however, felt like a secondary motivation, if it could be called a motivation at all. For one thing, I hadn’t been a poet in a long time, which is to say, decades had passed since it was my central discipline. I also wanted to be careful about how much and what I was revealing, if not in the poems, then in the world. This, too, brought me back to how I’d written as a kid—quickly, in bursts, and for myself: what Allen Ginsberg, in his 1956 poem “America,” called “an unpublishable private literature.” Ginsberg had been an early model; I admired, and still do, his mix of improvisation and structure, both of which are necessary to make a poem. In the face of ongoing parental collapse, I had misplaced my shaky faith in narrative. In both my life and the poems, I didn’t know what to do. This, I understood, was the challenge. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would become part of the thrill.
Because writing these poems was a thrill; I can say that now. Not because it brought clarity or refuge, but because it did not. To suggest otherwise would be to lie, and that is what the poems refused. Instead, they required me to sit still, to be present, whether on the page or in my parents’ home. They required me to think in terms of triage. Or more accurately, in terms of getting through the day.
Still, what to do with the poems once they had been written? The idea of a collection kept tugging at me. What I had in mind was not a diary or a scrapbook but a more integrated body of work. An edition of one. I wouldn’t have imagined it. Yet when the opportunity arose, I didn’t give it a second thought. I wanted a form, a venue for the writing that might be as intimate as that of its construction. I wanted to release the book in a way that encoded its withholding, that grew out of the desire (the need?) for privacy. I loved that Peculiar Hotel would be on loan to the gallery until the show was over, at which point the physical volume would be returned to me. I look forward to seeing the shape it’s in after being handled. I look forward to the scars and smudges, the torn pages even, the marks that its readers—assuming there are any—leave behind. Talk about tactile: This is the writer-reader dynamic as somatic interaction. This is a relationship defined through the medium of the readers’ hands. This is serendipity and structure, not as an aesthetic but as evidence.
This is as unambiguous as it gets.
When I was 20, I wrote a song that touched on similar issues, although I didn’t recognize their importance at the time. Here’s the bridge, in its entirety:
watching the lines run down the page
brings a sense of peace and order
that dissolves whenever i move my eyes
beyond the paper’s border
All these years later, the lines feel accurate, if also not completely adequate. Yes, writing helps order the world, but it ultimately fails in that endeavor. Every one of us will watch our loved ones die and later follow them. We are always talking to ourselves. More useful, in that sense, to consider the work as its own experience, one more set of questions without answers, a means of being honest about the most vital things. I didn’t want the poems in Peculiar Hotel to be a product. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to publish them. And so, an edition of one: a solution so fine it feels miraculous, and a book I already favor over all my others because of how it situates itself in the gray space between writer and reader, between the private and the public world.•
