Publisher as author

April first is here at last--I feel the world belongs to me and that I have it all to myself. Calla Lillie's have been left at the back door by an unknown admirer.

The new book's here if I say so myself, and I do. Mare Island. And what's so here about it?

Mare Island's a genre bender. The pictures really led the writer, not the words, rare for a writer like me; looking back, it's like the pictures took me by the hand and started walking with me as I walked around Mare Island .

The book's a walking meditation. I mean it wasn't composed in a garett over looking the Golden Gate Bridge; it was composed on-site over a span of somewhere between 15 to 20 visits to Mare Island--on an iPhone (it was during one of these visits that I learned how to dictate on my iPhone), on scraps of paper I'd stuffed in my backpack, on the back of golf scorecards, in the margins of the day's New York Times. Paper will tolerate anything, Josef Stalin said.

There's no bibliographic category called, 'walking meditation.' There is, however, 'creative nonfiction', a genre that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives written more to entertain then to inform, so as to distinguish itself from journalism or other forms of technical writing. As I was writing what became the thing, Mare Island, I used the phrase, 'imaginative journalism' when anybody would ask what I was up to, and continue to like the phrase, possibly because it's my own. Imaginative journalism is too cute by half, as one of my advisors said, advising me never to use it in public.

Once at a party full of poets and artists, I was asked by one of the guests what I wrote. I said that I wrote poems. He then asked, "are your poems fiction or non-fiction?" I had no answer I'm afraid, but his question continues to be a good one, raising, as it does, the possibility of there being a meta-genre large enough to hold fictional and nonfictional poetry.

It's Mare Island the book's birthday today, April 1, 2016. Mare Island was once the naval shipbuilding capital of the western world. 50,000 people used to live at work at Mare Island. Mare Island was closed by an act of Congress April 1, 1996.

The story, if there is one, of the composition of Mare Island the book, is that the composition fit perfectly with certain retrospective concerns I was having about my life and times at the time I first saw Mare Island. What had I, what had we, done with our lives? What had we made, what were we leaving behind?

Slowly but surely I was reunited with my old self when my hero was Marcel Duchamp. When Duchamp died a critic was asked, 'what was Duchamp's greatest work of art'? 'The way he used his time,' the critic said.