a more total silence

Sitting in Michael [Dennis]'s library [of some nine or ten thousand books of poetry] after he died, I though how different it feels as a reader compared to how it feels as a writer. That was something I wasn't prepared for after my first book came out. I am sitting here in my own library with a stack of books by ______ next to me, and so I have this sense as a reader of an ongoing conversation with their work, but it is one-sided in so far as they don't know that I have these books next to me, they don't know that we are in a conversation even though they're doing all the talking and I'm doing all the listening. Or maybe it is ______, who died decades ago and didn't know (because of course they couldn't have known) that their work would be interesting to some obscure minimalist poet in the twenty-first century. For the reader, the book is present, it is a presence, it is being read and reread, but for most writers there is only silence once it goes out into the world and the hope that perhaps you are in a conversation - or a friendship, really - the depths and duration of which you can never really be aware.

I mean that beyond the feelings most writers have that they don't get reviewed often enough, or their work isn't understood, or their sales are inadequate. I mean a more total silence, a kind of mathematical silence, the silence of one book against the million and millions and millions of books that exist (or existed (or will exist)). Think of the difficulty of keeping a book in print for one decade or two, let along across a century. And I also mean the kind of immediate silence of not knowing whether the book is being read here and now. Someone might have your book open in their hands at this exact moment, they could be sitting somewhere in conversation with you, and you will most likely never know. Even if that reader is the generous type who sends notes to writers saying Hey, I liked your book, that lovely and kind gesture still doesn't communicate the ongoingness of the relationship each of us has as readers to books and writers to whom we frequently come back.

-  Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)