One Poem

PREHEAT TO TASTE

do you smell gas?

is the oven on?

what’s the over under

on yr commitment to the bit?

i’m just popping my head in

trying to make sense of the weather report

happy friday everyone

can you smoke in here?

got a match?

let’s live outside the strike zone

far from perfect meatballs down the plate

plenty gripe about the entire game

hinged upon one umpire’s eye

but there’s another saying in the big show

the ball doesn’t lie

*

i’m talking the walk of intention

i’ll try anything at once once

a little r and r at the leper colony

moonlighting as a bootlicker

my dreams fill w capital 

yr tax dollars hard at work

but i want my tax dollars to have fun live a little

i want them to love what they do so they don’t have to work a day in their lives

the only job i want to give em

is putting a hit on the 2,781 billionaires

wHaT’s ThE dEaL with the rich and famous killing this beautiful circus ring we live on

yr telling me you don’t have 2,781 bullets to spare?

it’s all in yr delivery

everyone! run!

there’s trouble in paradise

it’s all about that one-day primal

*

a bullet a zinger a belly laugh

the slant rhyme of knife

you have to leave slay the angels

stay classy war

kitchen’s closed spay the eels

you can’t cook with us

you don’t have what it takes

not a single onion on yr person

me i got 3 sometimes 4 and at least 2

are up in the air do you smell gas?

no fair i wanna promise something big

and deliver the impossible

electrical fires happen all the time

number one cause of incidentally

burning the house down

*

the joke whizzes by

flits thru yr guts

it’s hot in here

take off all yr clothes

get me that syringe

get me 4 ccs of that email chain

wait wait wait i’m not a doctoral candidate

i’m not on a radical sabbatical i’m not the president elect

yr on fire rn

stop drop the hole

hop down into it

ta-da

pop the bottle cut the ribbon

yr greatest work

*

i want to be an effective secret agent of change in the world

you bring the baking soda i’ll bring the coke

what do we got?

a 3rd grade youtube video a schedule II substance

i painted a tunnel onto a giant rock

a train tunnel just wide enough for the train

one of the bullet ones

you wait here

i’m gonna go check it out

ok i’m back

we’ve really gotta go

it’s coming

full-steam ahead

ahoy!

where are we?

did we just wet-willy the landlubber?

did we just snap back blackbeard’s eyepatch?

did we just brunch on bottomless parrot tongues?

did some people in this room think we were gonna die tonight?

*

do you want to dance?

i can’t

help i’ve fallen and i can’t get up

oh sorry but yr shoes untied

oh sorry i was scooping up the field mice

oh sorry i caught you on fire

i really thought you were the ground green wire

***oh that’s a mirrorrrrrrr***

here bop my button pop my cherry blaze my prairie

emergency services will be here soon wee-ooh-wee-ooh

*krrk* shots fired down on broadway *krrk*

sounds like an automatic weapon

everybody hit the floor this is a

hold up are you thinking what i’m thinking?

let’s boogie

how do you say drugstore in french?

let’s take this city on a pill to-go

*

go throw a road rager

ope red light.

the florida plates next to me are blasting their fantasy audio book in a bad british accent

“the birds line up against the sea wall”

i woke up this morning

obviously

green light!

my first thought was i wanna die

red light!

but the weird thing is the next one was

i never felt more alive

like clockwork i’m depressed for playtime

my mind all dolled up

messed to the times

you moved you’re out

roll the stop sign

smoke it

*

all the highway lines roll right into my pockets

i’d adhere to the speed limit of it all

if it weren’t so durn blurry

there’s a massive tanker of gas

do you smell gas?

going 80 down the interstate

i roll down my window

try to get its driver’s attn

“OUR JOBS HAVE A LOT IN COMMON YOU AND ME”

i don’t think he can see me

“OUR—JOBS—HAVE—A—LOT—IN”

i don’t think he can see me though

was kind of thinking he was gonna 

run me off the road

kind of had a hunch

he was gonna murder me

oh this that’s just my antenna 

been crackling tons lately

who do you call when that happens?

would you mind sharing their number?

i won’t tell them it was you who gave it to me

*

i know this isn’t networking

but i just got off speakerphone w a priest

i put the priest on speaker

so he could hear the smoke and the horns and the sirens

explained how no we will not be crowning mary this first sunday of may

thanks anyway nice chattin daddy

to think in the past

i was an altarboy larping for the lord

getting geeked on eagle’s wings

the beady-eyed soothsayer the opposite of heads

call it in the air do you smell gas?

at 8 years old

i was somewhat toothless

*

did you know there are bills being passed

so that at a near-future near you

you can donate gasoline to goodwill

simply fill up a can

launch it at the backdoor

and let the sun do its thing

sup with this little light of mine

i have officially commandeered the wheel from jesus

i was getting so sick of listening to bruce springsteen all the time

my lover asked me to tone it down a notch

i frisked myself for dials nothing

it was like i was a piece of cheesecake

and yr asking me to chock the back tire

of a semi-tractor trailer

parked somewhere in the bay area

just doin my job here

i’m hauling the asinine

i’m booping the reset button of the moon

i’m blowing speakers in public

daddy shark doo doo doo doo do do

i really loved yr sound poem last night

the banging of pots and pans

gently fed thru a paper shredder

is noise finally having its moment?

the ocean smells like a go-kart

smells like reverse ain’t on the menu

smells like the long overdue manual shifting of gears

the endtimes sound funner when it’s a plague of grasshoppers

our hunger lowkey locust with the mostest

is the shrill insect of my heart finally tapping into the frequency of fire?

will that sweet dream i’ve been having lately

finally be produced into must-see TV?

the one where i will myself to spontaneously combust

then comb back the flames in my vanity mirror

and remind myself the mantra

“the universe is not very big you agoraphobic moron

you can step on it

see all there is to see

sing all the songs along the way”

but then the leaking suspicion 

the overeating engine

the brink of kaput 

*

ding all the dongs along the cray
ding ding ding ding ding ding
the check engine light at the back of the brain
ding ding ding ding ding ding
there it is god i love that one
ding ding ding ding ding ding
such a banger
ding ding ding ding ding ding
jalopy? i barely know me
ding ding ding ding ding ding
i don’t know much about motors
ding ding ding ding ding ding
but i know they can explode
ding ding ding ding ding ding
this is of interest to me
ding ding ding ding ding ding
dynamite wick sparkling slow
ding ding ding ding ding ding
xy axis of hammerspace-hammertime
ding ding ding ding ding ding
drawn and quartered by its quadrants
ding ding ding ding ding ding
plot points dying for an encore
ding ding ding ding ding ding
in the red of days late
ding ding ding ding ding ding
what a giddy-up to slip in it
ding ding ding ding ding ding
what a gas suck a sip
ding ding ding ding ding ding
it’s in my ear now i can’t get it out
ding ding ding ding ding ding
it’s in my head ring my bell
ding ding ding ding ding ding
can i workshop my bit about beauty
ding ding ding ding ding ding
before i drop a gear and disappear
ding ding ding ding ding ding
you are one of the most beautiful people i’ve ever
ding ding ding ding ding ding
how’s that fuckface
ding ding ding ding ding ding
doesn’t that lack a certain panache
ding ding ding ding ding ding
slack tact of an adroit doink
ding ding ding ding ding ding
now step and see and sing
ding ding ding ding ding ding
our job is so simple so easy free
ding ding ding ding ding ding
make a monkey laugh make super good time
ding ding ding ding ding ding
take-one dedicate to the organ wheeze grind
ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding

∩

Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an interdisciplinary poet who enjoys clowning boundaries between language, visual art, and sensory performance. He lives in New Orleans, where he co-runs Splice Poetry Series, acts as intermedia editor for Tilted House, and teaches experimental poetics and clown studies at Louisiana State University. Recent art, criticism, and performance appear or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, Annulet, VOLT, Poetry Northwest, Accelerants: An Action Books Poetry Film Series, Triquarterly, NOIR SAUNA, and Sonora Review, among others.

Two Stories

It was our first day of couples therapy & I had no idea what he meant

“Being married to Victoria,” he said, “is like letting her drive on a back road at night going seventy miles an hour. But you know this road, so you know there’s a cliff coming up. You have to make a decision. You can either tell her to slow down and spend the last two minutes of your life fighting, or say nothing and let her drive off the cliff.” Our therapist asked me if this was true. I said yes.

Trees Don’t Talk

Dad’s in jail. Mom was always a good, industrious wife. She took care of the house while he worked at the shop. She made either chili or chicken soup every night. But no matter what she did, he was not satisfied. He knocked her about and beat her. When the neighbors finally did something about it, the police showed up and took him away. He’s supposed to be making himself a better man in there. When I visit him he tells me he’s learning chess.

“You ever play chess?” he asks.

“No,” I say, holding the phone to my head and twisting the cord around my finger. “I haven’t.”

“Get her a chess set,” he says to my mother, yelling across the glass and pointing at me. “This girl needs to learn how to play. She needs to learn, I tell you.”

My brother takes the phone out of my hands. “My turn to talk to Dad,” he says.

*

            At home, I spend my days in the backyard, climbing around our Ficus in circles and circles. It’s a tree known for its shallow root system and multi-pronged trunk. It makes for good climbing. I sit with my back to the trunk, my legs dangling on either side of a branch, and press my hands into the bark.

            “Dad’s in jail,” I tell the tree. “But maybe he’ll get out soon. If he betters himself.”

            The leaves wave in the wind, and one falls on my forehead.

            “Thank you, tree,” I say.

*

            My mom comes outside to get me. She tells me to come in for dinner. She helps me down from the tree, a hand on either side of my waist, and puts me on the ground.

“When Dad gets out,” I ask her, “will he still beat you?”

She gets down on her knees.

“One day, when he’s let out, it will be otherwise: I will beat him while he rails at me.”

            I lift my finger to her face and trace the deep lines under her eyes. I know nothing else but to believe her.

*

            The day Mom cuts the tree down, I cry and cry. She carries a large chain saw into the backyard and works her way through it before I wake up. The roots were getting under the house, she says. They would wreck the whole foundation. She makes me go to school that day. I show up outside the classroom, my face puffy, waiting for the door to open. I stand there with my friends. One of them is crying. 

            “My dog died today,” she tells me. One of my friends holds her hand. The other hangs onto her in a half-hug. All their lower lips quiver. All of them are blonde.

            “My mom cut down my favorite tree this morning,” I say.

            No one cares. They hang onto each other, and I stand there and shuffle my feet on the ground.

*

At dinner I push my beans around the plate.

“I didn’t know you’d be so upset,” my mother says. “You hardly go in the tree.”

I slam my fork on the table. “That tree was my best friend,” I tell her, my voice hoarse from crying.

“Trees don’t talk,” my brother says, shoveling rice in his mouth.

“They do so,” I say, and, as if in a nightmare, despite my fury, I cannot raise my voice above a whisper. “This one did.”

*

            That night, I go into the backyard with my blanket. I curl up on the stump and whimper, “Good night, tree.”

*

            Dad is let out early for good behavior, and on the condition that he promises not to beat my mother anymore. He makes me play chess with him. He says we can play for candy: if I win, I get a piece. If he wins, he eats it in front of me. 

            “Where’s a good table?” He asks, picking up the salad bowl and tossing it on the ground. “Your mother’s got the whole kitchen busy. We can’t do anything in this place.”

            She turns to look at him, her hands wet from washing dishes, her whole body sagging, exhausted.

            I tug on his shirt and take him to the tree stump. I keep him entertained there for hours each day, though he always beats me at chess, and his stomach grows larger from all the KitKats and Reese’s. Eventually he falls back into his old ways and, in order to keep his promise to the police, he torments my mother without beating her: when one night she burns the chili and none of us have anything else to eat, he rips out her hair, throws forks at her, takes swipes at her with his legs. She rails and tells me and my brother to go to our rooms, and my brother picks me up and carries me out of the kitchen, and I hold onto the door frame until one of my fingernails rips off.

*

            “Your mom and I love each other,” my dad tells me the next evening, when we sit playing chess.

            I nod without meeting his eyes.

            “C’mon, I have another back-rank mate on you,” he says. “You’ll never learn. Never learn, I tell you.” And he smiles and cracks open a Pepsi and hands it to me.

            “C’mon, you can have it anyway, you deserve it.”

            But I am sullen, my mood unable to be remedied. My dad recognizes this and suggests we see a movie.

            “Ok,” I say.

            Before I follow him to the car, I touch my hand to the stump. “Come back, tree,” I say.

*

            When we get home, my brother runs from the house and drags us to the backyard, pulling my dad by his forearm. There was the tree, fully grown, with my mother’s body hanging from it, and a large white rope around her beck. The three of us stand in the grass.

            “I didn’t touch her, I swear it, I didn’t, I tell you,” my dad says, looking at both of us, wide-eyed, daring one of us to contradict him.

            I walk up to the tree. My mother’s tongue is purple in her mouth. I fall to my knees and put both arms around the trunk. I tuck my head into my shoulder.

            “Welcome home, tree,” I say.

            Dad wants to cut the tree down. He says it is cursed. I refuse. I tell him my mother’s spirit has gone into the tree. I sit by the trunk day and night. I stage a hunger strike. I climb into its branches and won’t come down, even when he throws forks and rocks at me, and finally climbs up himself. I crawl from branch to branch, moving in a continuous circle, outpacing him. When he climbs to the edge of a branch to grab me, it cracks beneath his weight, and he falls to the ground. I sneak into the kitchen at odd hours for food. He grows tired. He says we can keep the damn tree, but I need to go to school.

            “I’m going to get thrown in jail again for child negligence,” he yells at me, holding up a bowl of cereal as an offering. “You’ve got to go to school, I tell you. You’ve simply got to do it.”

*

            Years later, I no longer climb the tree. I am doing homework inside, when my dad walks into my room with an ax.

            “The roots are fucking up the house’s foundation,” he says. “I’m going to cut the tree down, and I don’t want to hear another word from you. Not another word.”

            I turn my shoulders away from him, hunched over my desk, my hair covering my face.

            “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”

∩

Brianna Di Monda is the managing editor for the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Oyster River Pages, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Worms Magazine, among others. She’s a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for Fiction, a semifinalist in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, and a nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

Two Poems

Relief Construction

In the gallery where the artist chose the works,
the maps were drawings, 
the drawings scores for dances,
the dances people doing 
ordinary things, like walking 
around a square of black tape,
or falling, getting up, and stumbling,
laughing. On the monitor, 
a little light fell on the surface of a bowl. 
Then it was water, as we saw.
For that was how to make a film:
time passing, light and water.
We stood on the stairs above the projector
and looked down.
We walked the length of the city in the heat,
had our first drink in a twilit bar. 
A few of the seats in the dining room
filled up with families as we were sitting there.
I looked up from my life for just a moment
and that night 
or else the next, we weren’t alone,
and then we were alone again.
The shadow as it passed left us in tears.
A little light fell on the surface of a bowl.
The rest of the autumn was uncompromising,
and some of the leaves held on, for a while,
deep blues in the grain of the trees.

 
Ardmore, 1994 

I

Each thing loses its use with force.
Windows are for leaning out of,
oceans are for thinking. Houses
are for animals and children.
Cupboards are for caviar and Swiss Miss.
Futons are for fingering the chords
of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
Rivers are for taking a shell out
into the winter thaw. The light advances
just too far ahead of the weather
and the water is a medium,
ragged meter, up and down,
perpetuating silence
in between the oarstrokes,
like the afternoon when Robin drove me
through the fragile first week of April,
up to the front of Winchester Cathedral.

II 

The first house had a well.
The second had a goat.
The third house had a baby owl.

The first house had a wall
the garbage trucks collapsed.
The second house had animals

That strayed. The third house
was an abbey, late
twelfth-century facade.

The first house had two doors.
The second had a downbeat
dropping in the chorus.

The third house had a horse
that ate the olive trees.
The first house had a lullaby.

The second had an elegy.
The third house had a little house
across a courtyard:

That was where I stayed.
The limit of the lullaby
was pure distortion and

the limit of the elegy was rage.

III

Whatever form we put them in,
our losses are our own. The night
is private. Under it we lie awake
and wait for love to pass right through us.
Where were you when I was waking up
to see the stars had stayed
into the morning? Many of your poems,
like your marriages, your fame,
your near-death accidents at sea,
from which you were revived,
are goads to the hesitant:
the Hellespont requires
only one friend to keep an eye out
from a dinghy while you weave
among the oil tankers. Have you seen
this power that turns the light into an object,
thrown so hard against the siding?
It reminds me of the summer of 1994, the day that I looked up
to find you leaning from the second story window
of your house in Ardmore, waiting
for the children to arrive.

∩

Walt Hunter is the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization; Some Flowers; and The American House Poem, 1945-2021. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Three Poems

1 [I peel the orange in one motion]

I let the TV lull me to sleep. I walk all throughout the house. I draw a map poorly in the dirt. I turn and turn a stone in my pocket.

I forget to include a key to the map. In one grid of the map, burdocks gathering around the dead tree. Smudges gathering around the burdocks like dogs.

The map has every kind of weather. And rain when my finger falls through.

2 [ the blue age]

My name is John and I can do all the things John can.

John and I are receptive to codependency. We tend

To each other’s hunting dogs and have the same inseam.

John and I have the same palm-sized grief

That we can’t show each other.

He builds my refuge and I build his.

It’s mean to be sad at John.

Here are John’s four hands.

Here’s John four-in-hand.

Here’s John looking real good.

There’s nothing that I can’t teach John that he can’t teach me.

3 [false spring]

Dear wish, a small fire in a jar
proves me unchanged.

The lead high in my gum remains
un-worked-out and has no reason to leave.

There are nights I go
without my bad nerve acting up.

When I sketch the fire’s outline
it is blurry with physics.

There are nights I go
to sleep in error

and push up out of my dreams.
Bone-cold and not so sudden.

∩

TR Brady is a writer from Arkansas. They received their MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. TR’s work has appeared in Tin House, Bennington Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. They are the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor and live in Moscow, Idaho.

Speak So I Can See You: On Jesse Nathan’s “Eggtooth”

Jesse Nathan, Eggtooth, Unbound Edition Press, September 2023, 136 Pages

“Manure brings good flowers,” it’s been said: “the more you stir it, the more you stink.” Who do you imagine speaking these words; what do you know about this person? Someone familiar with gardening, perhaps a little knowledge of farming, or maybe someone who knows nothing about either gardening or farming but has remembered the aphorisms of their youth. “In the heart, a fire,” the voice continues, “in the head, smoke.” With this new aphorism, abstracted from the practical knowledge of skill, has our sense of this person changed? What lessons the voice offers suddenly become more idiomatic: “All good things are three,” a phrasing distinct from the more commonly observed all good things come in threes. This difference characterizes the figure arranging the words, if such a figure exists at all. “Words pay no toll,” the voice says, yet as I describe these aphorisms here, in this context—prose designed to think about Jesse Nathan’s debut volume of poetry, Eggtooth (Unbound Edition Press, 2023)—they begin to lose the quality that makes their spokenness moving and strange. Here is Nathan’s poem “In Those Parts” in full:

A voice insists manure brings flowers
but also the more you stir it, the more you stink.
Sometimes the voice says, In the heart, a fire—
in the head, smoke. Sometimes
All good things are three.
Or, Words pay no toll.
Yet also
Speak so I can see you.

Not the poet, not what is more commonly called the “speaker” of a poem, but rather a disembodied “voice” moves through the structural placement of these aphorisms. The first verb “insists” conjoins the doubled condition of “sometimes” (does the degree of insistence change?), leading finally to the mind turning against itself with “or” (the voice choosing which aphorism is appropriate to the situation) then “yet also,” and another thing, yet another. Two operations happen at once: “a voice” speaks an idiom, then the poem arranges those clauses into lines which make a single stanza. “Speak so I can see you”: the arrangement of these aphorisms suggests a life “in those parts,” a remembered place that is not here, the poem’s present.

An eggtooth is the sharp bit of a baby bird’s beak, a temporary growth that helps it break from its shell that soon after disappears. Eggtooth is a volume that considers the past—private and public, intellectual and emotional—as creating the present conditions through which this poem might be heard right now. Listen to the start of the book’s first poem, “Straw Refrain”:

Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,
only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hiss
the hiss of grasses hissing What should
What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,
my mind, you hardly
seem to be.
On days like these.

Does the mind strain itself to make these observations about the “young gray cat”? No article attached to subject, two sentence fragments in the middle of a stanza (“appressed to dirt. That hiss / the hiss of grasses hissing”) that begins with a complete sentence (“Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood, / only the eyes alert”). The center of the stanza, Nathan’s poem duets, the landscape transcribed in this new context like the voice that “insists manure brings flowers”: “What should / What should.” Yet the pattern of end-stopped and enjambed rhymes level the mind, pause once for “wood” and continue past “should,” pause once for “this” and continue past “hiss,” listen for a moment then continue until the stanza contracts, “on days like this” ultimately corrected to collude with the rhyme: “you hardly / seem to be. / On days like these.” 

You hardly seem to be on days like these: this is a stanza we have heard before, but a stanza we have not heard in what feels like a long time. Nathan borrows this structure from John Donne, poems composed early in the seventeenth century. Robert Hass, in his introduction to the volume, considers Donne’s formal influence on Eggtooth, or what he calls a “musical theme”: “I will leave it to readers to identify what Nathan gets from this echo and borrowing. My sense is that it registers at the level of sound the way everything is like and not like everything else; it creates an ecosystem of echoic effects.” Just as the disembodied voice shapes itself with aphorisms, just as the landscape hisses in “Straw Refrain,” the “ecosystem of echoic effects” is a matter of what “seems to be,” how something stays the same just as it changes, or “the way everything is like and not like everything else.” Here is the first stanza of Donne’s “Witchcraft by a picture,” which Nathan identifies as a model for the kind of music he wants to create:

I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pitty my picture burning in thine eye,
My picture drown’d in a transparent teare,
When I looke lower I espie,
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and mard, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou performe thy will?

How does the “I” confront and evade itself? The subject of the first two lines does not repeat, omitted from the second verb “pity”; with an inflected syllable to begin the second line, the clause reads almost like an imperative to the speaker himself, the figure seeing his reflection. Then inverted syntax delays its subject—“I espie”—until after the image of his reflection “in a transparent teare” has been staged. As the enjambed “wicked skill” barrels forward into the next phrase, the mystery of “pictures made and mard, to kill” seems strangely normal to this person, almost expected.

It’s been said that witches could kill by making and destroying a picture of their victim. A rhyme lingers; the sentence continues beyond the rhyme. Donne’s poem is a self-sacrifice, and his attention to the way a line might begin and end models for Nathan a way to attain these “echoic effects.” Here, then, are the first two stanzas of “Eggtooth,” the title poem of Nathan’s volume:

And so at last spoke John Donne’s ghost. Leaned up
out of my book and nearly bit me.
“Seven,” he says, “sponsors creation but
also vice. Three (and four) holy, but three
marks the rooster’s count.” His face
was gold, pounded thin. “I say
use me like an eggtooth, break 

the shell that shields you, let me be the germ,
hoarder-of-calcium, the bulb of sharp
caruncle, expression of beak (of horn)
that makes a toothlet to snout-thrust, a barb
to barb what’s chipped away
by the very thing maintained
and encased. Enamel glaze

Like the grass that hisses, like the voice that insists a rustic aphorism, the rest of the poem is spoken through John Donne, no further interjection from the person arranging his request in lines that rhyme. “Use me like an eggtooth”: for Nathan, what is the shell that needs breaking? Accuracy of experience, precision of language, the form appropriate to the mind that “hardly seems to be.” What seems like a process of withdrawal in Eggtooth rarely becomes an obfuscation. Another figure present in the poem, the thing to hiss or insist or speak, foregrounds in turn how these observations might happen in verse: what a rhyming stanza inflects in the landscape, how syntactical variation suggests to us these observations are being made right now, as we read the poem. Everything is like and unlike itself.

Writing on what we call the Metaphysical Poets, T.S. Eliot said, “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” A thought to Nathan is also an experience, and the sensibility modified is the utility of speech: aphorism, idiom, paraphrase. Nathan disappears; sometimes the creation of an “I” precludes knowledge and memories this figure could not have known otherwise; often another presence liberates, like the biological function of an eggtooth. “What the Cedar May Have Said” begins, “If I were half as free as you / I wouldn’t droop,” and the poem ends:

If you were half as free as me
you wouldn’t go –
you who leave not once, like guests,
but over and over, like friends.

The symmetrical possibility of freedom, the implication of the cedar saying something else—what it may have said, or what it may have said otherwise—positions you ambivalently: you are you as addressed by the cedar, and you are also I, the figure who imagines what the cedar may have said. Throughout Eggtooth, this pattern of voicing and interjection is not always so figuratively revealing. “The Whole Poop,” for example, begins with the claim of information: “In military slang, poop is the really valuable info. / As in, Gimme the whole poop on the guy.” Like the voice that insists “the more you stir it, the more you stink,” military slang is inherited: “My uncle, who did a tour in the navy, says so / and I’m thinking about it as I clear the bindweed / from the buffalo grass.” A thought occurs immaterial to the work at hand which in turns shapes that labor. The usefulness of this phrase, of course, extends beyond what it might have meant to the uncle during his navy years; Nathan attaches the idiom to the two-and-a-half stanza description of removing “the bindweed / from the buffalo grass.” The labor leads to language and its utility: part distraction and entertainment, part meditation on usefulness. Only in the context of military slang can one understand the way this info is “really valuable”—otherwise, like here in this poem, the idiom stages its own strangeness to finally become, by the end, an unthinkably natural expression: “Somewhere in the pasture’s air / a meadowlark trills. I hear / his song down its stair.”

The five sections of Eggtooth are followed by a Coda, a single poem titled “This Long Distance.” If one follows a narrative through these poems, they move from rural Kansas to a coastal city, from childhood to adulthood, and the art most clearly remembered over those years.

And he when he’d call his parents, his dad would begin
with weather – Five inches since Friday,
seven and three-tenths since Monday, it may even
hock up more – and his mother would inveigh,
or other times dial up other composings –
First frost came so we picked up the hoses,
slid the barn door closed

Stories about the weather lead to local gossip. Well into adulthood, a thousand miles from home—how does one share the aphorisms that will not quite be understood elsewhere? After these familiar patterns have been exhausted, without the physical proximity of body language, and without the avatar of John Donne or the cedar tree, the son can only make observations: “And the son, not really sure what then to say, / says an iconic radio tower, from where he sits, presents / like a comb jelly.” On the other end of the phone, parents respond to their son’s observation—particular to “where he sits,” the image presenting itself, a new city—with a final interruption. A last figure to embody what might not otherwise be said, with the “personal and clear” language “of the train out there,” the image traverses:  

And they, who in his imagination
are in the dining room he knows well, hold up their phone, up against
the back window to let him hear
the call – so personal and clear –
of the train out there.

∩

Christian Wessels is a poet and critic from Long Island. His work has been supported by the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the University of Rochester, where he is currently a PhD candidate. He splits his time between New York and Pforzheim, Germany.

Three Poems

song of aperience

of the big divine 
     of the glebe
   lambblessed
“welcome back to
     whimper”
ur vision 
   ur worsdt
flocks of emerge
privy to the
   sheepliness
already outways
     emptside
this relationship is
   non-obvious
this varnish is
     song
   just tiny portions of
   serrated pigment
leather    dauber   muscle
   peakstroughshollows
     a manucodex
without contraemia 
no authtrophy

we have time to watch the war scene

when bro has time to watch the war scene

brusque’d up

     fka

brickbrickbrick
brickbrickbrickbrick

oftfuck     conqling

   lastum     gooneration

            i went to war eyedlet and
     everyone knewed you

your pleasure

the lyrchical i

reality due to incapacity
   published

I write like can’t
     quote

“you were the sand /”
   I am   probably never   a crest

“saltily into you”
     get a   condition of myis

impression
   complistically

or   I don’t imagine alit
     libcommunisms

subscriber   ex-suburban
   fundamental garde

i don’t avant
     or adhere

yet another poet vs
   poet lecture

keep going to
     craft   i hear

kept talking
   “story”   as if

we are writing stories
     not poems

do you find this   self?
   weepy?   like what

so we hate training
     our precepts now?

it should console i
   and   it does not

∩

Jenkin Benson is a third year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. He principally studies the creative interchange between Welsh and Irish modernists. You can find links to his poetry here.

Three Poems

Toll Nil

land near
the lake smells
like hell
the warm

marsh moon
I see you

Honey Pie

crimson-eyed rose
mallow dew drop

in you much
longing

familiarity so
like a train

where it takes you
how it goes

the world a more
every person

when I look
the world a train

from your storied
rootstock

I Practiced Nothing

time I threw time
to time’s stage

where there lapped with
somewhat sweet licks

set stage
so helped

too empty, my waste
of coming into time

∩

Jon Conley is a writer and musician from Cleveland. He is the author of House Hunters International :: Sonnets (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023) and the founder of Yum! Lit. Find him online at conjonley.tumblr.com and @beachstav.

Six Translations from The Keeper

I segue real hard. (Alberto Caeiro)

I never kept agaric de-ribbed baños,
but such nonce thoughts
arrive on winds of Mace
           whispering: GORD-ass.

I know that iconic wind, that sun.
My soul drops tears as mini-alms
           in that pasture’s grunting pocket.

And yes, it grows cold at the end of the plain.
A butterfly tries to open the window
           at the end of the plain.

O Buffalo Bayou (I stack the last O’s).
O Natural Light.
O fourteen umps
of e-comm.

O Rebanho de Rebanhos. (Alberto Caeiro)

When it grows cold deep in the plains
When it grows cold          deep in the plains
      Watching sheep and seeing
ideas Watching            sheep and seeing

                      The sheep are my thoughts:
 That knitted hills, valleys, plains
are knitted hills valleys, plains sun-turning

              Or, watching ideas and seeing sheep
(Or, to be all my sheep walking
     Scattering over the hillside
             As ten happy things at the same time)
As ten costume dandy pelts straddles

                                   I never            kept sheep
                                I’m keeper      of sheep

                      “Hey, keeper of sheep,
           Yes, you, on the other side
of the road                    sun-turning:

What is the meaning of the wind that passes?
   What sheeping meaning to the wind
that passes?
What will sheep keep
                                   knowing of wind?”

Toad Sensações. (Alberto Caeiro)

The keeper guards the door
           with rebar.

The sheep are his pens.
His thoughts are Mentos.

For example, to think of a flower.

For example, to eat
           a fruit
           (and vice versa).

His eyes and his ears
            (...you know).

Epigraph. (Mario de Sá-Carneiro)

The catastrophe halo
is deserted,
mirrored.

I fuck Myself.

Who am I?

Here, everything’s
gone... combination
has died

In stylized
shallows —

even alteration is a ruin...

A dull soybean dilutes me
            In the kitchen...

Não. (Mario de Sá-Carneiro)

...

walking past the sheepish
                               skyscraper

                                    rising
                                                 mirrored

                       doors spinning
         valets idle

minimal
            founts dried up, bleached—

               a shriveled mauve balloon

blue wall of curved
                                   topiary
                                                 sepulchral...

...

Sea brahmin, you mope for us. (Mario de Sá-Carneiro)

Oh to stick myself okay and
tame between covers,

and not do any more nodding.
Yellow wool. Light of fluff.

That my door stay shut.
That I always have at my bedside

a bowl of cakes, some liver,

laver, Cali feta,
a dove, a bottle

of Madeira, a “cute
Enya sim,” some human

Garfield maid art

∩

Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916) was a Portuguese poet and writer. With Fernando Pessoa, he founded Orpheu, the central journal of Portuguese modernism. 

Alberto Caeiro (1889-1915) was a fictional shepherd and a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa. 

Joshua Wilkerson is the author of Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream and the co-editor of Beautiful Days Press and the journal Works & Days. Recent work can be found in Tagvverk, Annulet Poetics, New Mundo, Noir Sauna, and Volume Poetry.

Two Poems

ICEWALKER AND DIRTWORM SWIM IN TANDEM

All his life, Icewalker

has made leaps across enormous canyons

just to feed Dirtworm

single sunflower seeds

and in this way,

Dirtworm has been nourished

for entire winters at a time.

Some days Dirtworm burrows for

miles and miles just for one

glass of water in the middle of a tidal wave.

Some days Icewalker bangs on

pots and pans just to startle

                                                      a cat

he imagines to be a lion.

Dirtworm distrusts Icewalker, and

Icewalker thinks that Dirtworm is a

drag at parties, needlessly pulling

                                                      dead deer

                  to spectacular galaxy bursts

that he doesn’t see because of the

pinprick scope of his focus. Sometimes

Icewalker will get blackout drunk

and send Dirtworm,

                                    squirming and shivering

                  under his blankets,

backwards through a depressive sink.

Dirtworm feels a wild rush:

a mess of confusion

that pulls feather

after feather

every direction outward

and then untangles into

a sharper,

                  clearer tunnel.

TWO WATERS

I.

A bright glacier day

in pinprick cold,

                                    every pin

raining down—

                                    running out

into the breeze and the sting,

dancing slowly, then

                                                      loudly,

then softly,

                  then loudly in the

freezing drought and in the stars.

There are waves in the curse,

droplets in the light. Molecules

passing through an aroma

of thrilling,

                  hot confusion. Galaxies,

speckled sand

                                    flowing downward.

II.

Today is not the day

                  and tonight is not the night

to kiss a stranger

                                                      but really,

there probably won’t be any of those

for a very very

                                    very

long time. It’s warm at the bottom

of an aching river, sitting

                  cross-legged on the floor—

the rushing water

                                    all around

feeling so much like love.

∩

Eric Wallgren is a writer and musician based in Chicago. His chapbook Icewalker & Dirtworm is forthcoming from Community Mausoleum.

Psycho-Materialism, the Anti-Book, and the Literary-Academic System: On Four RM Haines Chapbooks

RM Haines, Three Essays (for a poetics of psycho-materialism), Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Civil Society, Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Dysnomia, Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Interrogation Days, Dead Mall Press, 2022

What happens to writing gestating in money? What happens to writing whose form is given by the whims of money? It can disappear: as a CNN article on academic literary magazines notes, “There’s an idea rising in higher education that the market should decide what gets funded, which then leaves more artistic pursuits like literary magazines out.” It can mimic the shape of the desires of the donor class. In Post45, Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland quote a passage from Sherry Kempf’s book on her internship at Graywolf Press, in which she writes that the novel Little by the Ojibwe author David Treuer is a type of project that “fulfill[s] the community outreach goals that funders are looking for right now. The book is written by a person of color whose own community will be served by the grant.” Taking Kempf’s experience as a point of departure, Sinykin and Roland bring the point home: “State and philanthropic money freed Graywolf from surviving solely on sales and subsidiary rights but made the publisher beholden to the priorities of its funders.” The choice, here, seems to be between two different incarnations of a neoliberal approach to publishing—one shaped by the free market and one by philanthropy.

In his essay “Poets Should Be Socialists,” poet and publisher RM Haines critiques another neoliberalized publishing apparatus: the U.S. literary-academic system. This apparatus is one, Haines writes, “supposedly designed to support poets—but which serves primarily to professionalize and class them.” Haines suggests that under this particular social arrangement, poets are compelled to mold themselves into careerists, accumulate credentials and debt, provide a cheap pool of labor, unflaggingly submit, and pay mounting submission fees to make a living. This auto-exploitation is the typical path to career success (if it ever arrives), and the typical mode of becoming a writer. In this process of becoming a writer, however, Haines contends that poets also become “legitimizing ornaments of capital,” participating in a mode of literary production that “unconsciously reproduce[s] the values of the ruling class.” While Haines writes harshly, his critique is not meant to vilify anyone. He continues: “rather, my criticism is structural and institutional. The fault lies with the university itself as an instrument of capital, overseen by boards and presidents and other zealous advocates and enablers.” The parasitism of the neoliberal university has created the conditions in which people are required to consent to exploitation to access literary recognition.

Haines’ own hollow experiences with this neoliberal apparatus of literary production led him to self-publish several collections, beginning with A Dark Address, in 2020. Subsequently, he started his imprint, Dead Mall Press, and self-published four more collections: a chapbook of essays (Three Essays (for a poetics of psycho-materialism)) and three poetry chapbooks (Interrogation Days, Dysnomia, and Civil Society).

These self-publishing efforts, Haines writes, were an initial attempt to break with an apparatus of capitalist literary production and an atmosphere of auto-exploitation, and instead to move towards socialist/collectivist publishing practices. Self-publishing, for many, is an attempt to circulate one’s work in a gift economy—to share one’s work outside of the market of commodities. It’s a rejection of prestige. As Haines suggests in “Poets Should be Socialists,” what’s less reputable than self-publishing your own work?

Haines has since published seven chapbooks by other authors through DMP. In doing so, he contends that DMP is operating “outside publishing,” if publishing is considered to be the game of prestige, marketing, literary contests, and professionalized presses. Instead of publishing to find customers, DMP publishes to find collaborators. For Haines, “the ideal arrangement between poets and publishers is an intensification of collaboration, leading to more known affiliations and long-term associations.” This publishing ethic is enabled by Haines’ DIY approach to making books —he designs the books and eBooks, produces them at home, and distributes them himself. DIY bookmaking keeps cost low, and it also allows him the sort of autonomy that’s a key part of DMP’s politics. As he writes in the press’s FAQ page, should he begin printing perfect-bound books and pursuing wider distribution for them, costs would increase and he would need to start fundraising—in which case DMP would go down the road of becoming a nonprofit. This is an approach that, it should be stressed, is not new. As Haines acknowledges, many presses have long been exploring similar publishing practices. 

Nonetheless, what Haines is doing is notable. His initial four publications through Dead Mall Press, together with the launch of his press, mark the elaboration of a poetics Haines calls “psycho-materialism”: a Marxist approach to literary production that seeks to suffuse material reality with the psyche and the psyche with the material. Haines orients this approach within what he describes as a “psycho-political moment” characterized by the economic rationalization of the mind. Drawing on the philosopher Byung Chul-Han’s notion of psychopower described in his book Psychopolitics, Haines describes this moment as one in which economic modalities characterized by technologies like Big Data nudge people into self-disciplining themselves in such a way that makes their minds into engines of economic productivity (Three Essays, 20). Here is where Haines draws his notion of the “auto-exploiting subject” exemplified by contemporary poets and writers, and where the connection between psycho-materialism and the literary academic system is apparent. Psycho-materialism is in part conceived of as an escape hatch from neoliberal forms of publishing. 

In the third essay of Three Essays, “The Ghost Mine Explodes: Toward a Psycho-Materialist Poetics,” Haines provides a sketch of psycho-materialism. He describes it as an aesthetic that aims to lay bare the interpenetration of reality and psyche and thereby explode the commodified forms of expression that legitimate its assimilation by neoliberal institutions like academia. 

He positions psycho-materialism within a modernist lineage. It’s not surrealism, but it orients itself by the conjunction of surrealism and Marxism. It works towards the synthesis of the insights of Rimbaud and Marx that André Breton insisted upon—something Haines notes Sean Bonney described as “one of the most important ideas in the history of modernist poetics” (Three Essays, 15) and yet to be achieved. 

How does psycho-materialism attempt this synthesis? In the first two essays of Three Essays, “Identity and Its Discontents: Notes on Rimbaud” and “Revolt and Divination: On Sean Bonney’s ‘Letters Against the Firmament,” he offers psycho-materialist readings of Rimbaud and Marx (via Bonney) that circle around an integration between the two.

In “Identity and Its Discontents,” Haines interprets Rimbaud’s oeuvre, focusing on his famous quote, “I is an other.” He suggests that Rimbaud might expand our understanding of the psyche to encompass not just the mind but material reality. Here, ego spills out into the world, engendering the realization of the “materiality of soul” (Three Essays, 6). This configuration produces a reconfigured poetics characterized by ruptures in the borders between mind and matter and “[n]ew languages for relation that does not admit ownership of meaning, of property.” (Three Essays, 6).

While Rimbaud reveals the interpenetration of ego with alterity, Marx offers a method for its realization. In “Revolt and Divination” Haines argues that Marx “fought to bring an invisible order that had emerged from the visible, material relations of capitalist society back into plainly material terms.” (Three Essays, 9). He ascribes this work of reading the invisible a divinatory logic akin to that employed by Sean Bonney in his poetry collection Letters Against the Firmament. This scrying, or augury, is the function of the psycho-material poem. Contrast this with “police realism,” Sean Bonney’s term for the aesthetic produced by those in power who determine what is and isn’t sensible. As opposed to exploding the psyche, police realism “keeps one’s psyche in one’s head,” Haines writes (Three Essays, 10). Against this aesthetic of the invisible, psycho-materialism aims for a lyric “I” that is collective rather than privatized—clarifying rather than mystifying.

While Haines has a clear picture of what a psycho-materialist poetics should do, he shies away, in Three Essays, from clearly delineating what it should look like. Nonetheless, he offers a few examples of the forms it could take:

disrupting unified voices and discourses by adding more layers and registers, more material in dialectical tension and collision … Juxtaposed citations, fictions, jokes. Polyvocality … Montage, collage. Syntax as surgery (Three Essays, 25–26)

In the trilogy of poetry chapbooks inaugurating Dead Mall Press, Haines puts his own recommendations into practice. Up until this point, I’ve outlined Haines’ vision of psycho-materialism as an aesthetic, which is how he conceives of it. But if, as Haines argues, this aesthetic is to recast “the poet’s consciousness of their task as imaginative worker” and break out of auto-exploitation (Three Essays, 18), then psycho-materialism has to function not just as an approach to writing but also to publishing. 

I argue, then, that Haines’ self-publishing efforts fall within the lineage of what Nicholas Thoburn in his 2016 monograph calls the “anti-book,” a work of writing and publishing that critically interrogates its media form. Thoburn positions the anti-book as a response to the commodity book—the type of book published by the likes of the big five or the literary academic system. This is a good both Haines and Thoburn argue receives treatment as a product transcending economics, sacred, supposedly “immune to commodification.”

Here, putting the content of Haines’ psycho-materialist poetry chapbooks in conversation with parts of the conceptual map Thoburn sketches throughout Anti-Book reveals the ways in which Haines’ texts, both in content and form, challenge the commodity form of the book and produce a publishing alternative to the neoliberal academy.

The first of these poetry booklets is Civil Society, comprised of a short poem that is maybe the least chaotic of the three. In the final section of this book (subtitled “September 11, 2021, etc.”), Haines writes in muddled layers:

Dead dreams on the tarmac. Tent encampments in the streets of 
Kabul. Eight trillion dollars, 929,000 dead. “How far is it to the 
mineral deposits? How far to the laboratory, the factory, the 
mall?” 

“...OF THE SAME FOUL SPIRIT...” (Bush) 

A day before the US withdraws, one of its drones kills seven 
children carrying bottles of water. A fresh shiver across the planet 
(deformed stars, a new and final word). 

“There was not a strong enough case to be made for personal 
accountability.” (Under the sirens, 

tearing at one’s skin.) (Civil Society, 9)

The poem quotes Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby’s statement on an August 29, 2021 airstrike. Other quotes are original to the poem. Some sources, Haines writes, he lost. The effect of these layerings is disorientation. The everyday catastrophes of U.S. imperialism are stripped of their mundanity through this disorientation and become horrifying.

Here Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of books, as analyzed by Thoburn, helps situate Civil Society and the rest of the trilogy. They offer three classifications of books: the root book, the fascicular root-book, and the rhizome book. Thoburn describes the root book as “an enclosed and sufficient entity constituted as an image of the world.” It is the dominant form of the book. The rhizome book, in contrast, is characterized by connection rather than separation. Rather than reproducing an image of the world, the rhizome book exists and evolves in relation to the world. The fascicular root book is a “botched escape” from the representationalist root book to the rhizome, and forms Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of modernist experiments with language and form. Whereas the root book is characterized by unity, the fascicular root book severs that unity and understands the world as “fragmented and chaotic.” Despite its reconfiguration of the world, the fascicular root book retains the same function as the root book, forming a “totalizing image of the (now chaotic) world.”

This typology contains some useful parallels with psycho-materialism. The root-book could be understood as police realism in their shared interest in cleaving the text from material reality and offering a transcendent, authoritative image of truth. The rhizome book shares with psycho-materialism an interest in exploding boundaries, whether between psyche and matter or book object and reality. If psycho-materialism is to challenge police realism, like the rhizome book, it needs to adopt a different relation to matter. Nonetheless, Haines elaborates psycho-materialism principally as aesthetic (Three Essays, 29), and as an aesthetic rendered in Civil Society, it mostly resembles the fascicular root book. The question arises, for Haines’ chapbooks, of whether their content has the totalizing function Deleuze and Guattari critique.

In the second release of this trilogy, Dysnomia, Haines draws on fragments from a variety of sources to produce a long poem: the letter Donald Trump wrote to Nancy Pelosi in December 2019 in the midst of his first impeachment trial; a testimony from James Mitchell, one of the psychologists responsible for developing methods of torture for interrogation dubbed “enhanced techniques”; and the revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his death. The collection’s name itself, Haines writes, “has a variety of references: the ancient Greek goddess of lawlessness; a moon of the dwarf planet Eris (goddess of strife); and a kind of aphasia. This fusion of law(lessness), strife, and damaged speech was essential to the poem’s conception.” (Dysnomia, 13).

An atmosphere of chaos results:

“Nerve end cut out by Law / in trash stratum, pvxsyhe psyche 
as compost, as spasm / discards moaning, busted guts, objects
in protected air-space (blockchain/synapse) / said: mother planet 

gone, resisting / said: weapons supplied to Space Force / “here” “on
screen” “I” read the diagnosis / “A terrible thing you are dgnoi doing, 
but you will have to live with it, nto not I” / (cell dracfting fuct 

copies cpoiesz) / said: enter redemption codes, ask permission, [in- 
audible, laughter], (all the gixs gods turned informants) / see: Idols 
& Judges, all Americans, see: the anthem on repeat / “Not I” (Dysnomia, 6)

Like Civil Society, the text in Dysnomia disorients. Aside from fragmentation, Haines employs redaction, strike-throughs, and constant misspellings. Through these techniques, Haines deranges his source materials, many of which originate with the state, or from the powerful. 

The diversity of source texts Haines uses in Dysnomia lends it a resonance with documentary poetics. Haines’ intent with these sources is, in part, “fucking with, and fucking up, an archive of recorded documents,” which is likewise a key aspect, in one sense, of documentary poetics. But where documentary poetics’ version of defacing the monument could be thought of as a form of rewriting or counter-narrative, psycho-materialism shucks narrative, or garbles. This garbling, however, is not meant to derange for the sake of derangement, but to clarify. In Three Essays, Haines regards the psycho-material explosion as a moment of lucidity. He quotes Sean Bonney’s assertion that the poem is not “magical thinking” but “analysis and clarity” (Three Essays, 13).

The documentary impulse of psycho-materialism, then, aims for a lucidity that does not appear lucid—a “continuity in discontinuity” (Three Essays, 14). The mechanism of this production of lucid derangement is apparent in Haines’ conceptualization of Guattari’s chaosmosis, which he considers characteristic of psycho-materialism: the reconfiguration of the psycho-political operations of capital into novel forms that resist and re-organize the “psychic valence” of those operations (Three Essays, 25). 

Haines’ documentary poetics is in this sense one of “noncommunication”—a concept Thoburn notes appears in both the writings of Deleuze and the Situationist International. That is, instead of a counternarrative, or alternative form of communication, psycho-materialism attempts a breach in the subjectivity introduced by psychopolitics, which appears as noncommunication. 

The resultant fragments congeal into a kind of toxicity. In “The Ghost Mine Explodes,” Haines emphasizes that it is the “poison space” of our current “nightmarish reality” that poetry must operate in to confront that reality and open up a different approach to the psyche in opposition to police realism (Three Essays, 23). The ordinary contaminants enveloping our everyday lives via spectacles like those of CNN or the New York Times are transmuted by psycho-materialism into hazardous materials. This is, to paraphrase Haines, poisoning to cure.

Here, psycho-materialism begins to differ from the fascicular root-book. Rather than reproducing an image of the world as chaos, it aims at metabolizing the toxicities of psychopolitics towards a lucidity that is currently impossible. But what is the clarity offered by noncommunication?

The final release of the trilogy, Interrogation Days, focuses on the psychic toll of the U.S.’s ongoing “war on terror.” Later on, in “Lines in a Time of Error” (a poem containing quotes from Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Donald Rumsfeld, the Prophet Mohammed, and Syrian militant poet Ahlam al-Nasr), Haines collages:

2001. The poet declares his aim: 
“To create a show of terror 

more spectacular than anything 
the world had ever witnessed.” 

O love, O dream, buried in the heart. 
To bring into being. To sing desire 

into neurons, into weaponry.
One listens to the Prophet’s words: 

Better suicide than to be thought a poet. 
Better nightmare than false dreams. (Interrogation Days, 17)

The embarrassment of being a poet here is the embarrassment of complicity with police realism. Under the re-configuration engendered by this collage, poetic speech hawks false dreams, is a gun, a procedure, a spasm, a show of terror. Like Dysnomia, through its derangement of quotes from various poets and politicians, Interrogation Days employs psycho-materialist aesthetics to reconfigure poetry as nightmare.

Haines acknowledges the limit to the cure offered by a poisonous aesthetic that wallows in catastrophe. “Any aesthetic gesture can be appropriated and neutralized by capital,” Haines writes in the footnotes of “The Ghost Mine Explodes” (Three Essays, 29). Therefore aesthetic interventions are not sufficient to achieve an anti-capitalist poetic practice—one must also attend to material publishing practices (Three Essays, 29). Psycho-materialism, as an aesthetic alone, might similarly be vulnerable to cooptation. But in contrast with Haines, I consider psycho-materialism as not just an aesthetic—it’s an orientation towards literary production as a whole.

The notion of the anti-book supplies the approach to the materiality of books and publishing that psycho-materialism requires. In exploring the concepts orbiting around the anti-book, Thoburn calls attention to the expressivity of the materiality of books—text is not the only means of signification for a book. Drawing on Ranciere, he writes that, in fact, “the medium of signification may sometimes be more politically decisive than the content it carries.” This expressivity of the form of an anti-book lives in what Thoburn calls a “self-differing” relationship with its content. That is, the content of the anti-book addresses its form in such a way that what’s communicated by its medium and its text triangulates or even approaches a kind of mimesis or unity.

Here, the materiality of Haines’ self-published chapbooks comes into play in their reading. If the psycho-material text can be understood as an anti-book, then Haines’ DIY approach to publishing them becomes an additional site for their interpretation. Saddle stitch binding, the lack of ISBN, the way the books initially thwarted Haines’ attempts to get them stocked in bookstores—all of these aspects of the chapbooks’ materiality are expressive.

Thoburn’s understanding of the communist object, of which small press pamphlets constitute an example, provides a relevant analytic for understanding how and what Haines’ publishing practices signify. Thoburn risks a schematic of the communist object, understanding it to have three key characteristics. It is a lively, perhaps even agential object existing in a sensuous relation with its reader; it is an object without utility or commercial value; and it is an object closed off to commodity exchange but open to the “fleeting and permeable” circulation characterized by the practices of the collector. Crucially, the communist object is not an other to the commodity but “emerges in the midst of the everyday objects and desires of commodity culture.”

For the psycho-materialist text, an especially relevant aspect of the communist object, for me, is its status as comrade. Thoburn explores this aspect through Russian Constructivism, which configures the object as a “sensuous entity in material equality with the human, the object as ‘comrade’ and ‘coworker.’” For Boris Aravatov, a Soviet critic active in the Constructivist movement, capitalist consumption produces an object that is configured as private property: mute, solitary, and easily mass-produced, constrained by bourgeois individualism. In becoming a commodity, it becomes deadened. In being liberated from the property relation and absorbed into a “communist material culture of the object” as articulated by Aravatov, an object is retrieved from suspension and is given agency. It becomes dynamic. It explodes into material excessiveness by closing the “rupture between things and people.”

This sensuousness and dynamism is a key attribute for a psycho-materialist text. The mute, isolated death of the commodity is the death of the privatized lyric “I” of the police realist text. So long as a book object is constrained by its status as property, something to be owned, the text will convey a psyche confined to the individual. “Cracking open the psyche,” as Haines writes, necessitates cracking open the isolated, finished veneer of the unit of private property as well (Three Essays, 13). If the psycho-materialist aesthetic communicates the interpenetration of materiality and imagination, the psycho-materialist book embodies it—releasing the psyche from the confines of the text into the material of the book itself. Police realism, in this sense, is not just an aesthetic but a material regime producing dead book-objects.

There is, however, an apparent divergence between the content and the form of the psycho-materialist chapbooks considered here, whereas for Thoburn an anti-book requires a mimetic relation between the two. The forms of Haines’ chapbooks (compact, neat, iterable) seem to contradict the garbled noncommunication of its contents. Like Thoburn’s small press pamphlets conceived as communist objects, Haines’ chapbooks operate not as an independent entity existing outside the structures underlying the commodity book form, but as an “unreliable mimic.” Just as the psycho-materialist text breaches the subjectivity arranged by police realism using its own language, the psycho-materialist book object breaches the economic structures producing police realist texts using its own form. The psycho-materialist chapbook’s detournement of police realism’s form and content marks its realization as an anti-book—a poetic object resisting literary auto-exploitation.

This convergence between material and aesthetic practice is ultimately what’s most transformative about Haines’ poetic practice. In “The Ghost Mine Explodes,” Haines describes the experience of living under police realism as a “nightmare” in which any possibility of radical transformation is foreclosed (Three Essays, 23). Producing a psycho-material anti-book, on the other hand, is an attempt to break out of the barricades erected by police realism, even if that attempt ultimately amounts to a cure that is nightmarish. The choice to wake to the nightmare is the freedom the anti-book offers, and this freedom is a future achieved via escape from psychic domination.

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Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Landfill, Sip Cup, and elsewhere.

Editor’s Note: We’re Going Down

Friends, enemies, lovers, strangers,

Happy May Day and welcome to Community Mausoleum. We thought we’d seize this occasion to introduce ourselves and attempt to describe some motives and aims of this project. A press, a journal, a website, a memorial. What?

Well, we confers a sense of collectivity and maybe even legitimacy, but we in this context is actually misleading. It’s just I, at least for now. Hi, my name is Zach Peckham and I’m the editor of Community Mausoleum, a publisher of doomed works and ephemera, and Coma, a journal of new writing and criticism focused on small press literatures. I live in Cleveland, Ohio where I work as an adjunct instructor at two institutions of higher education, and as an editor at an independent publisher and a literary magazine, respectively. You can look at the CV on my website if you want more specifics. I do not have health insurance.

I do however have a disease where the only way to keep working amid certain conditions of the world and the feelings they engender is to, well, do more work. Start another project. Make another thing. A press. A journal. Both. To this, one could ask, quite rightly: Does the world need more books? And, of course: Does the world need another literary journal?

The utopian answer to both is the same: Of course not. But that doesn’t matter because literature is not necessary. It serves no purpose other than to be literature, and it’s precisely this inherent rejection of value that makes it invaluable.

A more practical answer would be: Unfortunately, yes. In my limited travels and travails as a reader, writer, and editor I have seen the overwhelming evidence that while literature itself may not be necessary, additional and more particular outlets for it most certainly are. There is simply more affecting, invigorating, hilarious, horrendous, fucked up, singular, necessary writing being done than can ever be stuffed into vehicles of record and supposed merit as journals and books. There is far more adventurous, entertaining, razor-sharp, celebratory, eviscerating, ambitious, wild, crucial writing about writing and reading (i.e. “criticism”) on works that won’t get covered by traditionally respectable outlets being pitched and submitted for publication than can ever be considered or accepted by editors, proofed for print or screen, or budgetarily justified, financially or otherwise, by a board or department or group of friends with a shared email account and some spare time.

So, the publishing priorities of Community Mausoleum and Coma constitute a bifurcated yet unified response to conditions that have created these false scarcities, conditions that are recapitulated constantly by logics of reputation and legitimacy, mastheads and sales figures, release cycles, bylines, and other prestige- and profit-driven forces on both sides of the publication event horizon that define the literary landscape. Community Mausoleum is a publisher of doomed works. We refuse to help ourselves or make it make more sense. In addition to new poetry, prose, and translation, Coma endeavors to publish generous and generative critical writing about small press, micro press, nonpress, nonprofit, and no-profit literatures. If there was enough coverage of small press worlds in the world, we’d do something else with our time. Maybe take up golf or get on a consistent running schedule. Apply to some jobs. Finally work on our own writing.

There we go being a we again. While we’re here: one last thing. We have this theory. The theory is that the kind of writing we love, that we know is out there and isn’t being valued, isn’t just going undervalued. The problem, which is its own solution, is that it isn’t able to be valued anyway. We already know the economics of writing don’t make sense and the economics of publishing don’t either. This is perfect, because this kind of writing actually can’t be paid for at all. In some cases it may even reject compensation entirely. What would be the point? It’s invaluable, unvaluable. We’re talking about the kind of writing that wants to be written, that needs to be written and gets written no matter what. Not the kind that happens on a deadline, as a job, or for a fee.

Make sense? Didn’t think so.

But if you know what we mean, consider this your invitation. Pitch, submit, get in touch, be a reader. More soon. More later. No rush.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
May 1, 2024

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