The Last 4 Things

Kate Greenstreet

 

An author's statement

 

Back in the spring of 2004, while I was wrestling with the last prose sections of case sensitive, some new writing began to come. Not poems exactly, but stretches of poetry. I thought maybe it could become one long poem. Maybe a book-length poem. I liked that idea, partly because it was something I had never tried.

So this long poem (“The Last 4 Things”) was underway before case sensitive was picked up, before anyone had shown much interest in anything I’d written. A few of my poems had been published, three or four, but I was accumulating rejections as though that were the goal.

I worked on “The Last 4 Things” for several years. While case sensitive had been rooted in narrative—it started as an attempt to write a novel—this time I didn’t have characters or any kind of story. I didn’t have a theme in mind. I just followed it. At various points, the poem seemed to be about marriage, faithfulness, exile from home, the loss of faith, the loss of God, living with danger (the effects of that), disappearance (including death), the urge to make art (and why), specifically picture making (photography in particular), war and the aftermath of war, the desire/need to communicate (truth, lies), and possible meanings of the number four.

I wrote and wrote the poem until it finally felt finished, “like itself”—which is to say, almost invisible to me. As when cleaning house, what is noticeably out of place disappears. Or when you succeed at remodeling a room and you know that the job is done because everything feels like it was always there. Call this “natural.”

The poem was finished in autumn 2008, but the book wasn’t. This past winter, I wrote a second section: “56 Days.” What a diary might be like if one weren’t attempting to explain a day’s meaning or describe events. Just noting—something seen, heard, remembered. I had the idea that this second section could even serve as ‘notes’ to the first part. Which was a pretty great idea I think, although it didn’t work out. (My ideas never work, but they do get me started.) Lines from Proverbs 31 kept coming to mind and I threaded them—straight, remade, and sampled—through the days.

I began to imagine a character, a woman who’s been traveling for a long time and who, for some reason, stays in one place for 56 days. Not a writer. She writes just to keep her internal chemicals moving, like someone working in a darkroom would lightly agitate the corner of a tray of developer, waiting for an image to appear.

Photography can be an art, also a form of record keeping. It’s a way to see and a way to relate to other people (while standing apart). It can be a job or what you do when you aren’t working. In “The Last 4 Things,” there were references to taking pictures, and at some point I began thinking of the person writing notes in “56 Days” as a photographer. That led to the kind of familiar idea of shooting one view every day, imagining she did that. I thought I’d do it for 56 days. It almost worked. I basically stuck to the view out my studio window, sometimes using a still camera, sometimes video. But a few times I went into the yard to get closer to my subject, that house across the way with the double flue chimney.

The accumulating results of this daily shooting suggested a basis for a short film. The shots got attached to something I’d seen a few years earlier. I do enjoy saying that the video was inspired by a Julia Roberts movie. Actually the spark came from a pirated DVD one of my brothers picked up on the streets of Beijing, a movie starring Julia Roberts, featuring English dialogue accompanied by subtitles also in English that had no obvious relationship to what was being said. I loved the effect. As I watched, I didn’t realize for a while that this was simply a mistake. It made the movie a lot more interesting! For the “56 Days” video, I decided to pair two bits of text from each page of my protagonist’s diary, one spoken, the other used as a subtitle.

My protagonist. Now she exists. There is a pilgrim’s dust around her: basic phrases in many other languages, things like “do you want a cup of tea?” and “will you take our picture?” Not hard philosophical questions but small expressions of courtesy and the request that is put to her by strangers everywhere, a question she can say yes to without thinking.

For the movie “The Last 4 Things,” I took a different approach: I made 18 separate video experiments, each representing a page or two from the title poem, then strung those together. I mixed up the pages I’d selected, as I would for a reading.

In a video interview at maxgreenstreet.com, I talk more about making the book and the films. You can also see what the poet eats for lunch.