I set my scanner for JPEGs at 70 % compression, then assembled them into PDFs. Fast and low-cost. I additionally took photographs of assorted ephemera with my telephone at god-knows-what decision. Not each model of each poem would survive. But I’d do my finest to protect the phrases themselves. 

I started to tear the hell out of his folders. Unbinding, yanking, feeding stacks by the scanner and watching some originals crumble as they got here out the opposite aspect. It felt good being a nasty librarian. Just a little damaging, drunken pleasure. (A big bottle of bourbon vanished over two weeks of night time scans.) Ah properly, Dad! What are you going to say now? I put many duplicate manuscripts within the recycling bin, at first relishing the concept this heavy, heavy paper would exit of my life, after which, as I pulled the bag to the curb, properly—lossy. 

But that was simply the atoms. Dad additionally left a variety of bits. There was his each day poetry weblog, which I spidered and parsed right into a many-thousand-page digital ebook. That was straightforward sufficient, one night time’s work. He additionally wrote flash poems for many years—a couple of traces a couple of occasions a day, one file per thought, yielding 1000’s of paperwork with names like POEM12A.WPD, within tons of of folders with names like COPYAAA.199. I loaded them right into a database and threw away all of the duplicates. I transformed the rest into extra fashionable, tractable LibreOffice information. That format would protect all of the tabs and areas that had been so necessary to my father. He was a devotee of white house.

I supposed to arrange the flash poems into one quantity per 12 months, however the time stamps had been screwy after many years of transferring information between computer systems. I beloved my father, however not sufficient to undertake 1000’s of forensic poem investigations. So I fulfilled my filial obligation by batch processing. I used all of the wonder-tools at my disposal: text-chomping parsing code and Unix utilities galore; Pandoc, which might convert something to textual content; SpaCy, a Python pure language library that may extract topics and tags (“New Haven,” “God,” “Korea,” “Shakespeare,” “Republican,” “Democrat,” “America”). I made a decision that my father wrote two issues—Poems, that are lower than 300 phrases, and Longer Works, that are longer. I let the pc type the remainder. 

My father’s final decade was one in all relentless downsizing, from house to assisted dwelling to nursing residence, shedding belongings, throwing away garments and furnishings. And on the finish: Two containers and a tiny inexperienced urn. The final zip file. After I parsed and processed and batched his digital legacy, it got here to 7,382 information and round 7 gigabytes. 

The sum of Frank took two days and nights to add to the Internet Archive, at a charge of some information per minute. I ponder what the universe will make of this bundle of data. Who will care? Scholars of brief performs in regards to the Korean War? Sociologists learning Thirties Irish childhoods? I’m certain his phrases shall be ingested, digested, and excreted as chat by untold bots and engines like google. Perhaps they’ll be capable to make sense of all of the modernist imagery. At least he’ll have slowed them down somewhat. In time, all of us find yourself in a folder someplace, if we’re fortunate. Frank belongs to the world now; I launched the information below Creative Commons 0, No Rights Reserved. And I do know he would have beloved his archive. 

The two containers have turn out to be one, taped again up and positioned within the attic. No one will fear about that field apart from me, and in the future my interior unhealthy librarian could really feel able to throw it away. All the digital information are zipped up in a single place too—partly as a result of I don’t need his poems to indicate up each time I search my pc for one thing. Tomorrow I head to the interment, simply my brother and I, and the inexperienced urn, too, shall be filed away into the bottom. I’m glad this undertaking is over, however I ended up welcoming the work, guiding these final phases of compression. My father wanted a substantial amount of house, however now he takes up nearly none. Almost. Death is a lossy course of, however one thing at all times stays.