lthough William had again passed out in a puddle of drool, they couldn’t pull the copy of the Unknown Anthology from his cracked, bloody hands.

Dirk is working out now.

He is lying on his back on the floor in his apartment, hands in the air. On each hand is a stack of books he is lifting repetitively.

On his left hand are the book-length poems, all hardbound: Pound’s Cantos, Ark, Olson’s Maximus Poems, Zukofsky’s A, Leaves of Grass, and, at William’s suggestion, Bad History by Barrett Watten.

On his right hand are the recent postmodern novels, again all hardbound, some signed: The Big Joke, Underworld, Mason and Dixon.

He does thirty lifts, veins bulging on his powerful arms.

Then, clutching the heaviest volumes to his chest, he begins to do a series of abdominal crunches, silently, methodically, eyes straight ahead. After several hundred repetitions, he divides the books into two large, handled canvas bags and executes a series of curls until his biceps threaten to explode from the amount of blood being pumped into their fatigued fibers. Without resting, Dirk then lifts the bags above his head and begins an equally torturous set of tricep presses. Next, he began to do reverse curls, his Popeye-sized forearms quivering from the strain.

His expression is inscrutable, though verging on grim.

That was the point at which he decided to stop reading fiction and to stop writing poetry, and to write exclusively in the medium of transgressive cult religions.

And a movement was born.

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