Tonight I marked the one-year anniversary of Barnabas’s first appearance, and: In 1966, Beach Boy Brian Wilson arrives late

Tonight I marked the one-year anniversary of Barnabas’s first appearance

From Book 2, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)

Tonight I marked the one-year anniversary (4/17/68) of Barnabas’s first appearance

brooding over the DVD extras: asked about fan obsessions, Kathryn Leigh

Scott, who plays Maggie and Josette, tells the story of a female fan who paid her

dentist to bond fangs to her teeth (“They’ll be there forever,” Scott says,

“but she’s a housewife—with two children”) and off-handedly reveals

that some Dark Shadows devotees legally changed their last names to “Collins”—

961 episodes to go, and I’m still worrying that my multi-volume impossible object

is nothing more than a pair of fake fangs permanently attached to my teeth

(“They’ll be there forever,” Scott says, “but he’s a professor—with two cats”).

More anxiety today, self-loathing doubt that composing a poem in 1,225 sentences

over an indefinite number of years— “writing as an act of radical endurance,”

as I described my project in a recent interview—is the equivalent of starfuck

body modification; I coped by cheating the poem’s procedural constraint, wrote

this extra sentence about yesterday’s episode: the witch Angelique returns

as Cassandra—green, Manson-girl eyes matching her dress—blushing bride

of Roger Collins, who eloped with her (struck by one of Angelique’s spells)

after a one-day courtship and now feels he must defend the whirlwind

romance to his sister, Mrs. Stoddard: “As far as you’re concerned,” he says,

an indignant flourish, as always, rising in his throat, “I should’ve met an already-

approved widow, one with whom I would’ve spent months sipping tea and having dinner

until finally we got to know each other so well that we got bored to death with

each other—and then we would marry.”

_________________________

After 95 episodes in 1795 playing Ben Stokes, earnest and illiterate

18th-century Collins family servant, Thayer David swaggers around

Collinsport in 1968 as an art history professor who wears a monocle

(I couldn’t make this up if I tried); his advanced graduate degrees can’t

prevent him from flubbing his lines —did he really just call his own book

an essay?—and, yes, of course, you may see the talisman, Barnabas,

once Professor Stokes sees the witch. _________________________

Checking my email before bed (after a night of multiple rewinds to confirm

I actually saw a stagehand tap a yellow wrench against a machine buzzing

in Dr. Lang’s Frankenstein laboratory), I found a message from an old friend,

Dave Polster, who used to sit with me under the giant oaks on the Kent State

campus—one of which shielded Alan Canfora on 5/4/70, when the National Guard

opened fire on unarmed student protestors (ducking behind the tree saved his life)—

smoking cigarettes after our American Transcendentalism class, digging our

bare feet into prickly grass; Dave and I decided Emerson’s maxim, “Each age,

it is found, must write its own books” was a prophetic call for us to make

‘zines and comics, which we did, of course, giving them away at cafes and record stores

(the best we could do to endure the horrifying Reagan ‘80s); Dave’s email was an exuberant

response to the first volume of this poem, published last month (“Very haunting,”

he wrote, “your poor hunched shoulders!”), and if the book receives no other reviews,

at least I’ll know my words made a visceral imprint on someone—though I fear I’ve

unleashed a vampire on friends and family, as Willie Loomis did on 4/17/67, when he broke

Barnabas Collins from his grave and exposed the bare neck and jugular of rural 20th-century

Maine to the hungry 207-year-old vampire: “After reading your poem last night,”

Dave wrote, “I awoke this morning and found a fucking bat sleeping on a window blind inside

our living room; I...