poliphilo

Charles Fort published four books that are sui generis (plus a novel no-one bothers about) and I have them in an omnibus volume. I forget how much of the omnibus I've already read- though I'm pretty sure I finished the first book- The Book of the Damned- so I'm starting in on the second- which is called Lo! The omnibus is cumbersome and hard on the wrists and digits but Fort the writer is mercurial. Colin Wilson- an admirer, by the way- called his style "atrocious" but that's not a word I'd use. Words I might use are "torturous", "aphoristic", "gnomic", and "poetic"- this last because he has a gift for alighting on the startling word that is also exactly the right word- just like Emily Dickinson.

He spent most of his adult life in New York- with a period of a few years in London (so as to have access to the Library of the British Museum.) He was married, childless and loved going to the movies. He died in 1932, aged 57.

His life's work was the collecting of accounts of anomalous things- rains of frogs, UFOs (though that term wasn't yet in circulation), mysterious disappearances - hundreds and thousands of them- and building up a picture of a world much wilder and more perverse than the science of his time would allow. On this rickety substructure he built theories- which he didn't necessarily believe- some of which may even be true. He was puckish, mischievous, contrarian- and my brain can only take him a few pages at a time.

His followers created a society in his name- which he refused to have anything to do with- being utterly and stubbornly his own man- and a journal, bearing his name, which I believe is still being published.

At the time of my first encounter with him I wrote this poem. I may have published it here before. If I did it was a very long time ago...

The Little Boats Of Charles Fort

The little boats of Charles Fort
Bob in the seaways above the Bronx;
They're ready to go.

Bob on, brave boats,
You carry good tidings!

Actually,
We're talking boxes- not boats exactly,
But each is freighted with hundreds of notes
On joyous things that actually happened
But couldn't have done. For instance the times
When seafood tipped from the sky in summer.

The world is not explicable.
The world in fact is extremely odd.
Let guns go off and a very big flag
Be loosed to the wind as the boats bob out!