It was quite dark the other morning between rain storms, and, as is almost always the case when this occurs, the gloom reminded me of “The Dark Day”:

The “dark day” of last week, so strange in its complexion, so altogether unlike anything that has been recorded within our time, served to frighten many superstitious people as if it were an omen of ill fate, and to fill the general talk with wonder and speculation, while it draws attention also to the fact that this is in every respect, over large regions of the earth, an exceptional summer, marked by extraordinary weather and by “signs in the sky” as extraordinary.

The piece goes on from there. The term “dark day” itself dates back, at least in the United States, to May 19, 1780 when smoke from distant forest fires caused New England to grow so dark at midday that candles were needed and farm animals went to sleep. Certainly anyone who has experienced this kind of phenomenon, as I did on the day of the Oakland Firestorm in 1991 – which I first noticed in my backyard in Berkeley when the sun “set” at 11:30 AM – will not soon forget the sense of disorientation that ensues until one figures out the cause. In that instance, the fire consumed over 3,400 units of housing within a 5¼ fire perimeter and cost some 25 lives (including that of my cousin Bob Cox), taking two days to control & turning the Oakland & Berkeley hills into an imitation of Nagasaki.

The “dark day” of the text above, however, precedes the Oakland Firestorm by some 90 years, being dated September 11, 1881. The text appears in the fourth issue of This, published in the Spring of 1973. Even in 1973, found texts were not unheard of, although they were still uncommon in most literary journals. This 4, the first not to list Robert Grenier as co-editor*, was formally pushing its own envelope – in addition to a lengthy interview with Clark & Susan Coolidge & a series of “station breaks” by Joanne Kyger (e.g. “What are your references” or “A swirl of white petals / momentarily blind him”) that eat up as much available white space at the end of selections as possible, the issue came with an insert (not listed in the table of contents) of “30 from Sentences” by Grenier, a series of 16 4½  by 6¾-inch cards wrapped in a red rubber band. This issue also contains Watten’s “Factors Influencing the Weather,”** the piece among Watten’s early poems that certainly had the strongest impact on me as a poet – I’ve stolen from it again & again over the years.

A newspaper article that commingles weather with cosmology, “The Dark Day” continues for three pages. It’s not especially great prose. One sentence could in fact qualify for one of Jay Leno’s patented “stupid newspaper items”:

The sky has been marked by noticeably brilliant sunsets, and some auroral displays of peculiar nature have occurred, like that of the night of July 2, following the attempt to assassinate President Garfield, which was repeated with more remarkable beauty last Monday evening.

A few years after This 4 came out, I would have a job in which one of my duties included reading through selected dates & sections of the San Francisco Examiner over the course of the previous 80 years. As “The Dark Day” makes evident, what passed for both news and journalistic prose style was quite different at the end of the Victorian era.

But what I got from it in 1973 was the idea of language as evidence, an idea that may have been proposed elsewhere previously, but with which I never actually connected until I saw it at work almost simultaneously in two very different contexts. One was ”The Dark Day,” the other was the early novels of Kathy Acker, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula & The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec. The idea of language as evidentiary is what really enabled me to think of sentences as doing something other than “telling a story,” a recognition that led within a year to my beginning work on Ketjak. In retrospect, I think it may well have been the range of usage between the absolutely non-committal presentation of “The Dark Day” in This & the openly transgressive appropriation in Acker’s fiction that made it apparent just how much room there was to investigate the uses of language in writing.

So often, on a “dark day,” I think back to this old anonymous newspaper article and the tremendous impact it had on my life.

* In fact, Grenier had pulled back from editing duties well before this.

** In a single-stanza version visually quite different from the one that begins on p. 290 of Frame.