Following a book I wrote about Emily Dickinson and my interest in documents and manuscripts, I was asked for an essay for an anthology that Stanley Cavell and Charles Warren were editing, and which would later become the book Beyond Document: Essays on nonfiction Film. They suggested that I write something about a documentary series about poets on the PBS channel. For me, the series would be boring. One of my Buffalo students who was also a filmmaker suggested I watch Chris Marker's Sans Solei, because the film could be considered as a documentary and also as a poem. Sans Solei and La Jetée opened up a whole new world for me. A world where Dziga Vertov's films were included and above all Tarkovski's Mirror. It took me two years to write Classify the Facts; or nineteen ways to see Marker. The section on The Mirror became the core and changed the way I have written essays, which have since been called poems.