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The Archivist
Samuel Smarz, perpetual archivist —
Blind in an eye and of defunct gender—
Lived in his basement, saver of paper:
From his early scribbles to dying scrawl
His would-be biographer would cobble
A life from literary imaginings.
What order, and what superimposed theme,
Does this artwork bestow on Smarz’s life?
A plot-line perhaps, an heroic arc;
Cycle of circles, series of boxes?
Nothing’s as false as a natural tale,
But the hungry artist gives it a try:
Infuse Sam’s sad eccentricity with
Fantasy, poetry, philosophy.
Theory of Experience
Positing theory of experience,
The archivist collects and reconstructs,
Making known the structure of exchanges
Which began as unpublicized matter:
All is public—so this man binds events
Into greater correlates of being.
The minor event such as the fresh text
Totters on the nothing-status of trash:
My typings were in fact abjective,
When some literate saint brought them to life—
Through sequence, heading, and relationship,
So that this manuscript defined itself:
A timeline of desire, continuum
Of elongation and truncation.
Matthew Kirshman lives in Seattle, Washington with my wife and two daughters.
He is an English teacher, but before that has had a varied career—telephone repairman, bartender, and cook, to name a few.
Publication credits include: Altpoetics, Annapurna Magazine, Apeiron Review, The Bacon Review, BlazeVOX, Café Irreal, Charter Oak Poets, Dirigible: Journal of Language Arts, Futures Trading, Helix, Indefinite Space, Key Satch(el), Mad Hatters’ Review, Phoebe: The George Mason Review, posthumous papers (NothingNew Press), Vangarde Magazine, The Wayfarer, Wilderness House Literary Review, Xenarts, and Z-Compositio.
Email: Matthew Kirshman
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