Anniversaries

By Tracy

I'm one of those people in whose minds particular dates seem to brand themselves, so that I can't help but note them passing each year -- yesterday ten years since the death of John Forbes, today two years since that of someone else I once knew, a strange pairing of two anniversaries that is peculiar to me, since the two people were unconnected in life. It sounds morbid, but it's not entirely -- birthdays and other dates engrave themselves into my psyche in a similar fashion. I cannot-not-notice them.

So today I am thinking of W. S. Merwin's poem "For the anniversary of my death" ("Every year without knowing it I have passed the day...") which is from The Second Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon, 1993), and can also be read at

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171868

and just in general of the strangely private nature of calendars, that exists alongside their public function...

Remembering John Forbes

By Tracy

[The dates are coming up slightly wrong on this blog, for where I am. It's actually the 23rd I mean... I will have to figure out how to fix it...]

It's ten years today since the poet John Forbes passed away & this blog entry will be short, just a little way of marking that date; I find it hard to believe so many years have already gone by. What a decade separates us now from him...

Therefore almost ten years too since the special John Forbes issue of John Tranter's Jacket:
http://jacketmagazine.com/03/index.shtml

Damaged Glamour, the book he had just completed when he died, came out not long after.

Since then, Forbes's Collected Poems 1970-1998 has appeared (Brandl & Schlesinger), as well as homage to john forbes (ed. Ken Bolton, also Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002).

I don't know if there are any commemorative readings, gatherings or whatever going on today, but I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking of him. There's a lot that could be said, but I don't really feel up to saying it.

My favourite Forbes poem, for what that's worth: Ode to Doubt.