Book of the Year Three Thousand

My "epic" poem, Book of the Year Three Thousand, was written somewhere between 1969, when I began work on Book I, and 1973, when I completed Book II. All told, both books constitute over 80 legal sized, typewritten, single spaced pages. Eager to disseminate my work, yet distrustful of the usual venues, I figured out a way to squeeze all 40 odd pages of Book I onto a single poster-size sheet, possibly the only "book" ever printed complete on one page. Shortly after, it was reissued, using the same master photo, on a single page of the avant-garde music journal Source.


In December of 1972, shortly after the poster was printed, a friend and I drove to New York,  the two of us taking turns reading all of Book I at the Kitchen, an institution devoted to installation and performance art. It took about three hours. A few months later this performance was the subject of an enthusiastic essay in the Village Voice by music critic Tom Johnson.

With respect to my little essay, recently posted here under the title, Why I Write Such Excellent Poems, I should make it clear that the process for achieving "excellence," as described therein, does not apply to Book of the Year Three Thousand. Whereas most of my poetry, like just about everything I write, is subject to a continual process of revaluation and rewriting, over and over, until I get everything "just right," Book was written spontaneously, word by word, just as the words spilled out of my typewriter onto the page. And I never (or very rarely) looked back. There was no effort to rewrite in order to achieve "excellence," because, as I then saw it, and still see it today, the standard in this work is entirely different. While writing it I could have cared less whether every single word or every single line was as perfectly chosen and perfectly placed as possible. What counted most was the spontaneous flow of language, guided by a kind of free association not too far removed from the "automatic writing" of the surrealists. Only, unlike the surrealists, I did not go into anything like a trance when writing it. My mind was clear and I was, at every point, making rational decisions. I knew what I wanted, but did not always know where I was going. And if that sounds confusing, I suppose it is, sorry. In any case, this work is far from "excellent" in the usual sense, and cannot be evaluated according to the usual standards. It's not so much a poem as a kind of verbal tsunami, designed to disarm and overwhelm.

Book of the Year Three Thousand is one of my most ambitious works, and is among those that most satisfy me still. It was the inspiration for a film of the same name, and also an ambitious orchestral work, titled Great March Across the Plain. Two pages have already been posted here, and I plan to post more in future.