epilogue

Jim Guetti died from lung cancer in early 2007, several months shy of his 70th birthday. In a memoir he self-published on iUniverse in 2005 called Silver Kings, he reveals that a cancer specialist saw an ambiguous mark on an x-ray of his lungs and wanted to perform exploratory surgery, but Jim refused. He’d calculated the odds of the occurrence of the rare type of tumor the doctor thought could be there against the odds of dying during surgery and decided he didn’t like them. Considering he’d already survived colon cancer before I met him, I was shocked by this decision, though, at the same time, it was very much him, the gambler. I didn’t hear about his death until a couple of years afterward. We weren’t close and had fallen out of touch. The last time we’d spoken, I’d called him to get his address to mail him my first book of poems, so it was probably around 2000. I was curious to see what he’d think of it, if he’d recognize any of his teaching in it, but I never heard back from him. I figured that meant he didn’t like the poems, which didn’t surprise me as I knew what I was writing was pretty distant from the poetry he enjoyed, though it occurred to me after reading Silver Kings that he may have been dealing with the cancer by then and was too busy trying to stay alive. I’d wanted him to see the book because I felt like my whole process of becoming a poet began by reading Wittgenstein with him. Until recently, I was under the impression I didn’t actually start writing poetry until 1994, after I moved to California to enroll in the graduate English program at UC Berkeley. But not long after reading Silver Kings, I discovered a notebook filled with poems from my senior year at Rutgers. Not good poems, and few complete ones, but it seems like I started trying out things based on what I was learning in Jim’s classes fairly immediately.