Three Poems

THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE

No one’s heart is in my ear.
I clock what works until the blur
begins to thud. WTF? The eagle
flies over us, but I’m the only one
who notices it, because I’m always looking up
when everyone else is a baby or a puppy
tethered to the big fat milk of the earth.
Some wear blue dresses. Others
wear bows. A few just have fur
growing out of their ears. I grab an apple
from the fridge, and I crunch it
with my teeth. I crunch it into sauce
with a ravenous invective. I run my hands
through the galaxy of my hair, and the air
feels soft as a bunny or a drunk.
You know the kind I mean
always getting snared
in the lawnmower’s blades.
I’ve never been sorrier than I am
when that happens, though
for the record it’s never happened
to me. So what I’m saying is
I’ve never been sorrier
no one’s heart is in my ear.
But someone is a throwback
to an earlier tradition,
which means they don’t have the right
relationship to history
in the present being now
and then later in a bubble of what was.
Here in this instant
I am rummaging the gauze,
but not in it. I am interested
in the ones who make
the wildest lunges at the sea
or into space. The wound
is too deep to go into
a poem. You should see
the look on your face
when you read that. What you’re feeling
can’t be particularly stated
in the didactic, but it has something
in common with a profusion
of doves. The shadow of the eagle
never fades, but it passes.
Eventually. The shadow of the eagle.
The shadow of the eagle.
The shadow of the eagle.

THE WINE DARK SEA 

Solving for the epithets,
I dissolve illuminati.
The Rimbaud manuscripts, the motion
picture calligraphy. And the heart-
worm medication for Bear
in the geraniums. He is tangled
in his leash again; I am tangled
in the dictionary, so large
that it hurts when it slams
into my battleship. I am
a rebellion against all official demands.
Here, add amplification. There, a force field
collapsible, carrots or a chair
across the room in a fit
straight into the gate of the audience.
Are you whistling the audience? I meant
“force feed” not “force field” back there,
but why change now in the midst
of this forbearance. The rabbits
are not John Keats. The rubber skulls
are not a march of death. But
everything important is insensible at first
so I am trying to be insensible
and maybe a little French
because all my superheroes detonate
the grassy tasting butter
naming their betters
in chains on a fiery lake,
which they got from Surrealism
and I got from Revelations,
which is where Surrealism begins
mystically with punk rock, and
where Joe Strummer first appears
as a Cadbury cream egg. And to think
even this is a poem. Then Taylor text messages
a puff pastry gobstopper, and Dean floats
the scrambled eggs to a zookeeper-baby,
obviously dreaming with stuffed animals
in her stroller. Meanwhile,
Sam and Chris collude
with clouds to include the clouds
in what is clearing already,
the light burning through it.
But the drawing board I go back to
is still only pages and pages
of ones mixed with zeroes,
so I have nothing to show
for my efforts at telling
ever and always
how to live and what to do,
which is improbable
and irrelevant to almost anyone
who isn’t a sea monster already
or curlicues of cursive
about to be a shipwreck.

PERSONAL POEM #13

“We must lose ourselves in the indecipherable”
—Noelle Kocot

Reading the wrong things
or reading things wrong. My head
feels baked in a cup of instant coffee.
We started drinking it in London
and now we can’t stop. How lucky
                                                to go
to the clouds with all my problems,
which are minor amazements for them
of cholesterol mildly elevated
and blood sugar a little whackadoodle.
How does anyone spell the unspoken
when it’s staring at them in the mirror?
I don’t know,
but I’m trying
too hard to stay an age I haven’t been
for more than twenty-five years. And
I’ve been selling off pedals and amps again
now that Black Plastic closed, and I lost
my record store job, which was extra cash
keeping me afloat and maintaining
the possibility of new sonic exploration.
In the meantime,
Agnes has finished her college applications,
and Melanie is a thousand CrossFit workouts
into beaming like a sunflower orbiting
Mars. I just keep walking the dog
                                                    in a circle
to pee on things. That is,
he’s peeing on things, not me. I do
all my mark-making in contexts
like this one, which is a problem
that’s better than drinking too much
or being a washed-up glam rocker, but
worse than having a regular haircut and a job
that pays a living wage. I don’t know
why I’m being so morose. There are rasp-
                                                                berries
in the refrigerator, not even
hyphenated, despite my best efforts.
And this year I officially officiated
Russell & Alex’s wedding without messing it up.
I managed to write some
super-warbly, pixelated, falling-apart songs—
and Jesus Christ,
I’m sitting on a thousand poems
that no one wants to publish, but
they keep appearing anyway, mostly
disguised as the poems of Dean Young
still raving from the grave. Also, Mike and I started
a new magazine called SOLID STATE,
which I photocopied at work without asking
anybody, other than the aforementioned
holy son of god, and thus
my prayers
were answered
by me and my copy machine credentials,
which are 30178 if anyone would like to use them.
I’m into sharing too much with everybody.
Or at least it seems that way
from this bewilderingly long distance, but
really we’re so much closer than the limitations here
indicate how
a wild, vast meadow sprawls out before us—
so many things we can be, say, and do.
So many chittering undulating dimensions,
creative ways to lie about the facts
to tell the Truth.

∩

Matt Hart is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books, 2022), Everything Breaking/for Good (YesYes Books, 2019), and The Obliterations (Pickpocket Books, 2019). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including American Poetry Review, Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Lungfull!, among others. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati and plays in the post-punk/indie rock band NEVERNEW and edits, solders, and publishes the journal SOLID STATE.

Shame, Punishment, and the Creative Writing Workshop

It was close to dark when I arrived at the Juvenile Detention Center. I had been teaching creative writing workshops there once a week for the last five weeks. That day I drove carefully through the cool gloom, around the rural roads and farm houses to arrive at a facility tucked along the side of an isolated, low-traffic road in rural Northeast Ohio. That day, I prepared a lesson about odes.

C wrote a poem celebrating the bible he began to read. He waved me over to ask about the title. On his paper, he wrote “Ode to Jail.”

He asked if I liked it. “It’s really powerful,” I said, beginning to explain the surprise of it, how jail isn’t something we typically celebrate, how his poem isn’t really celebrating it, but rather explaining the pain of it, how that subversion would trouble the reader, trouble the poem that follows.

“So it’s good?” he asked again. He didn’t want my poetic waxing, he wanted my approval, a nod that he was on track.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”

He came up with it independently, but he modeled it after the poem I introduced, “Ode to Joy,” by a local writer. I explained that “ode” often meant “in praise of” or “in celebration of,” but I was never sure the residents could hear me, were listening.

Writers in Residence, the organization for which I worked as a Teaching Artist, refers to the incarcerated youth of JDCs as “residents.” The word seeks to remove connotations from the kids’ identities, focusing on their status as living in a certain place rather than being imprisoned in a certain place. Other language used includes “justice-involved” or the person-forward “youth who are incarcerated.”

After the writing workshop each week, the residents enjoyed a snack and chat with the student volunteers from Hiram College who sat with them during each workshop. I was the Teaching Artist, which made me an authority in the room, the teacher whose directions everyone followed. I worked with the residents individually as much as possible, peering over their shoulders while they were writing, asking questions, stepping in when they were stuck. During snack time, though, I let the residents enjoy social time with the volunteers. They sometimes talked about the organization’s Reentry and Mentorship program. Sometimes they’d talk about college, the world outside. Chatting and snacking. Asking questions of kids not much older than themselves. I stood in the back of the room and listened without interrupting.

When C wrote “Ode to Jail,” I doubted he was thinking about the history of odes, the complexities they might hold. I’m not sure he understood that “Ode to Jail” could be read as “Celebration of Jail,” or “Direct Address of Jail,” and could invite the reader to consider the “you” the speaker spoke of as Jail itself, not the bible C told me about, the bible that was beginning to help him find clarity, or at least pass the time. But he was proud of his poem. Proud enough that he read it to me, to his table, and to the whole room.

C wanted to keep talking about the bible he began to read. He spoke with seriousness and intensity. Even when he was writing silly, playful poems, he demanded attention, his tone deliberate and commanding, each word, each syllable, each rhyme. In my individual conversations with him, if he thought I was misunderstanding him, he would look at me, brow furrowed, lips slightly pouted, and say, simply, “No.”

When he addressed his table, fingers covered in Cheeto dust, to tell them the story of Adam and Eve, he did so with the fervor of a priest. He spoke in his slow and careful way, eyes locking back and forth between his tablemates to be sure he had everyone’s attention.

Some things he misremembered, had to correct. He said God made Eve first, then remembered it was Adam. God made them both with free will, and they didn’t wear clothes, and the only rule was to never eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Important in teaching is watching. Being witness to. Offering up and stepping back. I bring the tools, the structure, the foundation. I say, “Here is a poem that might be different from what you think a poem is. How does it speak to you?” The participants talk about the poem as it talks to us. What’s familiar? What’s relatable? What is surprising or confusing? What jogs a memory? What kicks the cobwebs out of you? What leaps?

One week, I brought in Chen Chen’s poem “When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities.” To introduce the poem, I asked the residents what they wanted to be when they grew up. Answers included voice actor, construction worker, and athlete. When they wrote on their own, though, they didn’t write about voice acting or football. A wrote about an imagined life partner. D wrote about the pain of love. L wrote about wanting to be true to herself, but to be normal and without pain. What they wanted, each one of them, was to be loved.

The one rule God gave Adam and Eve was simple. But Eve couldn’t listen, C explained to the table, as though none of them had ever heard this story before. As though once they heard it, everything might click. Everything might join together and fall into its correct order.

I often talk about teaching poetry as providing tools. As a teaching artist, I travel independently to a variety of sites working with people of different demographics to generate poetry or expressive writing responses to a model text or idea. I don’t teach craft, per se, though it often comes up. I don’t teach vocabulary terms, though they often come up. I don’t teach literary history, though it often comes up. A colleague who has taught in an adult mental health support group for nearly six years has pointed out that his regular workshop participants would have completed an MFA by now. The context or rigor of a writing lesson isn’t its inherent value.

In JDCs, the tool of writing is invaluable. The residents are controlled every minute of every day. They can be punished for any small infraction, or anything the correction officers perceive as infraction. They are intentionally isolated from the outside world, and often intentionally isolated from each other. The realities they face are purposefully clouded from the general public. Though many on the outside might have a general sense of what goes on in a JDC, few truly know.

The tool of poetry then has multiple uses. Notably, to share information. No one will know what life in a JDC looks like unless they experience it themselves, or unless someone who has experienced that life shares it. Writing of any kind can spread this information, though poetry can hold the tension and emotional weight that might accompany the telling of this reality. Writers in Residence produces chapbooks at the end of each program session (usually 10-12 weeks of writing) that include the work of the residents, as well as information about incarceration in the state of Ohio.

Another function of the tool of poetry is to process or heal. The residents I worked with often shared traumatic experiences they survived. Some experienced mental illness. Those without trauma or mental illness still struggle under the conditions of supervision and isolation inherent in being incarcerated. The healing benefits of writing have long been discussed and understood. It’s often easier to write something than it is to speak it. Even easier when it stays private, when it’s a reflection of the self only for the self to see. Writers in Residence seeks to capture the healing benefit of poetry by aksing the residents to complete a pre- and post-workshop survey indicating their mental state before and after writing. The post-workshop surveys tend to show a trend of improved mental wellbeing after the workshop.

I want to believe that poetry and expressive writing can also reclaim agency. In a space where the residents are monitored, surveilled, ordered, tracked, and trapped, little freedom exists. The point is they are not free.

At a different facility, where I briefly taught through a different organization, A wrote about her experiences of being incarcerated:

They say stay calm and have hope but it slowly sounds like a joke.
The joke is this place is slowly starting to feel like home.
They use their power against us but they’re supposedly here to help.
They got our whole life in the palms of their hands and it’s starting to fold.

What happens when a life stops belonging to the person living it?

C explained that when Eve ate the apple—she couldn’t help herself—she realized that she was naked. She and Adam were embarrassed. For the first time, God’s creatures felt shame.

Snack time was almost over, and the corrections officers began walking around the room with a trash can. C was talking so much he had to rush to finish his cheetos. He tilted the bag over his mouth so the last of the crumbs filled his cheeks.

Sometimes I asked the residents how it felt for them to write their poems. Especially if the content felt emotionally charged, like it came from somewhere beyond the walls of the activity room, the walls of the model poem and prompt. They usually said “I don’t know,” or “Good”—maybe the answer they felt comfortable putting into the room, or the only answer they could register at the time of my asking. I asked them because I wanted them to think about the writing. Did they access something new? Did they discover something? Was the discovery beneficial? Was it harmful?

Writing helps me iron out the wrinkles of my memory. I can wade through a troubling realization, a loss, a gain, a pain, using lines and stanzas and voltas and metaphor. But I have accidentally retraumatized myself in writing what I was not ready to write. I have found myself dwelling in distressing waters for too long trying to dive for the appropriate image. It can be easy to end up there, flailing arms and kicking legs, the water overwhelming. And no matter what, when our hour ends, the residents return to their blocks without us, without pens and paper. If we lead them out to water, we risk leading them to drown.

Was my responsibility to explain to C that maybe “Ode to Jail” wasn’t what he meant? To recommend “Ode to the Bible” or “Anti-Ode to Jail?” Should I have interrupted the sermon, aksed C how he felt about that shame, that disobedience, if he saw himself in that story, if he saw himself turning his back to it?

For ten weeks, I taught a rotating group of children who were incarcerated. I called them “residents” so we could see, together, identities not defined by criminality. But I also wondered who else that language served. Once, at the second facility where I taught, I asked the residents what made a place feel welcoming to them. G asked me, smartly, if I felt welcome there, in that room, with them. No one is meant to feel welcome in prison.

Calling them residents over and over, to myself, to the people who will never see inside a Juvenile Detention Center, to the student volunteers, allowed me to distance myself from their experiences. “Residents” implying choice. “Residents” of an apartment complex. Of a dorm. Of a village, a community. While the language empowers the youth to see beyond the way systems see them, I wonder if it empowers those adjacent to (me) and complicit in the systems to get comfortable, kick up our legs, relax into the life where kids can be separated from the outside world for indefinite periods of time.

That week’s session was the last I interacted closely with C. He was gone two weeks later. When I left that night, it was not quite snowing, but it felt like it could. And if it did, every kid I left in the facility behind me would miss the first snowfall of the year. Mostly, I was sad for myself. None of them ever told me missing the first snowfall would be something that made them sad. I imagined it, inferred it. Thought kids ought to enjoy that sort of thing, be present for it.

A job of teaching is to become a mirror. I brought tools lent to me by others, and I could not dictate the best way for each resident to use them. Or if they should use them at all. That would have to be for them to discover. When L wrote about her mom’s death, when R puzzled over what he could ask future generations, when J refused over and over again to share anything he wrote, though he always wrote, I was there to affirm. To say yes, you’re on track, if it feels right, keep going. I asked questions and offered possibilities, other avenues for their writing, other ways of coming at it.

C got out, and maybe never finished reading the bible. He may never write another poem. He may end up back in the facility, as his recent time there was not his first, and recidivism is high when there’s no focus on rehabilitation, no support for reformation, no mechanism (generally) for the conditions on the outside to change when the resident is released. But once a week, for a few weeks, he wrote with his fellow residents, about things that comforted him, about loved ones he’d lost, about his favorite foods and songs and planets. And everyone produced something that had nothing to do with what we called them or where they were. Or, had everything to do with that. And maybe it was a light. A feeling like snow in October. A feeling like an alternative is possible. A bite of fruit that is just a bite of fruit.

∩

Carrie George is a poet and teacher living in Akron, OH. She is coeditor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (Kent State University Press, 2024) and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.

from “Atlas”

…

against storms
or rebuild buffers. Marked losses
of the sea. Southern border

                       to reclaim the mutilated waterfront
                       to give shape to the city

along the shore westward
tilting. Shored
in concrete. Manhattan seawall

                                       on striped bass
                                               of the piers     for non-water
                        the middle layer was powder
                                      the rock salt
                                                           tar to fill the weight
            of a dump truck 
                                      day-night on fill

in this dense metropolis what we found
of the world

                       a lucid vision
                       muddied at every turn 

…

                                                       in no man’s land [sic]
                                                       a new way of life

                       how many lost neighborhoods
                       gave lungs to the city 

                                   of a freehold estate
Andrew Williams’ $125 for three lots

who had gardens and livestock
drank from Tanner’s Spring 

                       addenda and provisos of course

who was a laborer          a waiter          a shoemaker

who stood for baptisms
                                      and burials
                                                           Black history is American
                                                           history

upon whose hearts and hands
the expenses will fall
                                   upheld by the bludgeons 

                                                         —see Chavez Ravine

                                                         see Dawes

                                                         see Techwood: the maps!
                                                         the maps all bob-
                                                         tailed, cut off
                                                         at the bottom, Niskey Lake
                                                         erased, Cascade Heights

by neither accident nor consequence
who fled to Sandy Ground
                                             to Skunk Hollow

 without plates in what was called the Gothic pattern

without quite a few pieces
of porcelain          a comb          a roasting pan
a smoking pipe          a toothbrush

a leveled hill

---

Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront. Crown Publishers, 2004.
Drusus, Livius. “Seneca Village: When New York City Destroyed a Thriving Black Community To Make Way for Central Park.” Mental Floss, 15 April 2015.
Gustafson, Seth. “Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta 1990–1996.” Southeastern Geographer, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2013.
Lalwani, Mona, et al.  “The lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park.” Vox Video <https://youtu.be/HdsWYOZ8iqM>, 2020.

---

∩

Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Doan Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. Glenn retired from a career in sound art and experimental music to focus exclusively on Atlas, a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Excerpts have appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, jubilat, and Plumwood Mountain; sequence-length excerpts include cricket (eclipse) (Stone Corpse Press, 2024) and verdugos (Ghost City Press, 2024). Glenn documents his work at glennbach.com and @AtlasCorpus.

Three Poems

Transit

Night rabbits steal the scene,
a flurried effigy, a shadowed flight.

Each street absorbed into stealth,
into shapes that leak beneath trees:

Specificity is the thing.

It’s a Tuesday to walk off a little piece
of heartache. Not large. Not quiet,

either. Wind stirs clouds gone wispy,
gone egg white. The dog chases the rabbit.

The rabbit chases the mineral forms
swelling beneath the loamy surface.

In the yard, a black umbrella shocks open,
startles nothing into something.

On a good day, its opposite follows
—whatever is behind is almost there.

Heat Wave

Lapses of light and shadow go hotfoot
through the house

Bad gin at the roof of the mouth Dogs twitching
gone jogging Legs up in sleep

All August this sweet slippage airless like relief
Like going to bed every night with wet hair

and waking up dry Like the slow wrist work
of rinsing the trees of peaches

Like the rangy old man who snaked the path
toward us talking of overpopulation

I don’t remember earmarking those pages Nor
not sleeping all summer I don’t remember

setting out the dish of milk though in the viscous
blister, six-thirty, it is there This is the effort

of naming things Urging vowels to claim
their counterparts Not to solve but not to commit

to any particulars of suffering either To say
I saw this To say I know that it was there

Charlotte

Green warp of vines, hand over hand,
shadowed gulch, swallowed glare

All the houses with stairs and doors
that (seemed to) lead nowhere—

Imagine being this legible to one another,
imagine through
the bodily fog, a cellular twang: flinty non-rot

which moves through the system like vinegar,
like memories of rock and roll

And all that’s needed is a little night vision
—candled, tidal, able with new clarity
to be met & met & met again: hands

and feet swarming with moss, mouth
rapid to light as a moth
my moss my mouth moth mouth

∩

Sarah Edwards is a writer and editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Ninth Letter, Annulet, Joyland, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Yale Review, among other places.

Three Poems

The Compiler is Contaminated

I became epoch in the distant multiplicity of mud. Guests sipped the coffin counterfeits of many vined brains. I languaged emergent control, attracted mime hands, beaks in their guts to sew the leaking handsome. The compiler is contaminated. My worldview is forever the terror that if barks, where stag are the wind of a going transition. Pardon the neck that I head, that treats screams as moving middles, for in that close and long lathe of the translator’s kink I have seen blue daffodils and snow begging from a colander. O, elder! For any promise you will need a gun! Hold firm in low wind scarce wings of little birds; block the comfort that requires hanging.

The Compiler is Contaminated

We promise scarcity the linguistic construction of belief. The real translation is a slow predation in red snow. Such strutting at meaning during wonder. And which neck of music? God amalgam. Conditioned elopement. The encyclopedic middle-to-moat of the combative original. I go small into aphrodisiac places, hedonic beneath swift treason. From whose horror exists an evening sketch of pines? Watch-chested horses slobber as does the leopard. You perform at the head of our principle: mutual and attentive as the beauty of birds in their passing of sores.

The Compiler is Contaminated

Somewhere, physicality is the point. Torn to dependence in tender morn, I turned them in where suture gives no alphabet for theory. Far monster, spider thing, script which they eat in mole purpled snow. No garden knocks from a peephole. Distance or no, objects are terror. You have brought wild sorrow o’er my text, a pause waking into its hole. The you is ephemerality shown where I slip wonderfully into comparative reset. The sentenced heart is clarity. What regret may solicit my eyes is mutual: nonesuch gore in the panoramic goodnight. O, beneficent twin, on to the inexperience. Somewhere physicality is the point.

∩

Evan Williams (they/them) is a Chicago-based writer interested in asemic texts and surrealism. Their work can be read in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Evan is on social media @evansquilliams.

Two Stanzas from “Inanimism”

Inanimism 64: Mortuary Science / Last Days of Layne Staley

the... articulate informality in Proust and Roubaud... the [diffusive] and topographic prose in Simon, Lewinter's prose... is disconcerting and frequently disruptive to the [level] of incomprehension, of jettisoning any sense of burden on one moment producing the next... (Trefry, John. 2016. "Reading Two Novels by Roger Lewinter." Full Stop. http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/09/reviews/john-trefry/the-attraction-of-things-story-of-love-in-solitude-roger-lewinter/) "Get Born Again" and "Died"... the last [recordings of] Layne... with Alice in Chains. (De Sola, David. Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) Body parts... [are] not [decomposing] for years... are... wax corpses. (Hibbing, Martin. 2008. "Mortuary covering for use in holding of corpses to maintain the condition of the body has thick wire grid of U-shape with windows." German Patent DE20071019954, filed October 30, 2008.) the volume of liquid escaping the body is too large [for containment] by the undergarment resulting in overflowing. (Novak, Ronald J. 2009. "Mortuary Undergarment with Drainage System." US Patent 8,943,613, filed December 8, 2009, and issued February 3, 2015.) Larusta... [references]... John Larusta, the alias [of] Layne [Staley] (De Solas 2015) In addition to providing fuel, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), such as arachidonic acid, provide [substrates] for enzymatic reactions... [producing] eicosanoid signaling molecules. (Steinhauser, ML, BA Olenchock, J O'Keefe, M Lun, KA Pierce, H Lee , L Pantano, A Klibanski, GI Shulman, CB Clish, and PK Fazeli. 2018. "The Circulating Metabolome of Human Starvation." JCI Insight, (August).) [laminae] are solid eggshell black... [oleaginous staining on] the [laminae]... the [oiliness compiling] a patina and this patina is [definitive relative] to the [literature] and [relative to the secret visitors] and [their] unctuousness... Out of that contingent black veil [an emergent]... series of [hallucinations obscurant] in the grain... [censorial] over clarity in... trepidation... a bright white [luminance]... (Trefry, John. 2015. "Language in Place of the Body." Entropy. https://entropymag.org/language-in-place-of-the-body-a-reading-of-m-kitchells-apart-from/) preparation for draining its internal cavity of liquids (Novak 2009) a [lowtemperature] mortuary bed which is convenient for corpse preservation. (Zhao, Jinhui. 2005. "Low Temperature Mortuary Bed." Chinese Patent 20,042,092,009, filed December 14, 2005.) the cryptic mysticism of a myth... hermetically tangible [presence] (Trefry 2015) Staley... a scant 86 pounds. (Christopher, Michael. 2017. "Remembering Alice in Chains Layne Staley 15 Years Later." Daily Times. https://www.delcotimes.com/2017/04/06/rock-music-menu-remembering-alice-in-chains-layne-staley-15-years-later/) a recent study in rats demonstrating a role for fasting-mediated hypoleptinemia as a causal driver of the shift to lipid metabolism in a mechanism involving the HPA axis and corticosterone stimulation of adipocyte lipolysis. (Steinhauser 2018) The target is never without the ordnance. (Trefry 2015) "I've seen pictures of my sister and her husband Greg in the court. And it's with her best friend, and Greg's friend... I'm pretty darn sure that Layne wasn't there." (De Solas 2015) [retrospection of]... [datapoints]... [with the assignation of postfacto] coincidental significance. (2016) shroud at... bottom of... coffin... corpse on top... second shroud on top of... corpse...tissue [rotting]... corpse [lying] in... grate... flesh... [consumption]... no more waxy corpses. (Hibbing 2008) the monolithic block of Lewinter's prose... [indulging] a specific form of Mechanism, the [generally abandoned anisotomic constriction] of scientific philosophy that describes all systems in terms of simple collisions of matter... [indulging] deterministic fantasies of [temporality and spatiality]. (Trefry 2016)

Inanimism 166: Last Days of Layne Staley / Mortuary Science

property... [acquisition is] through this roundabout mechanism... [keeping Layne Staley's] name off any public records [in association] with the transaction. (De Sola, David. Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) [in] stacks of Banffy, Mann, and Proust... William Gass's THE TUNNEL... had an aura of sorts. (Trefry, John. 2020. "Tunneling the Tunnel." John Trefry's Personal Website. https://www.jhtrefry.org/the-tunnel/) A six foot tall man of average to muscular build who weighs about 180 pounds will have about 25 pounds of bone. (retrieved November 10, 2020. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-human-skeleton-weigh#:~:text=A%20six%20foot%20tall%20man,about%2025%20pounds%20of%20bone.) "He wasn't crying, but he looked like he was about to cry. He reverted to about a four-year-old boy," Jerden explained. (De Sola 2015) The em dash and the content it [is dividing] are not as jarringly discontinuous... is... highly contingent and masonry. (Trefry, John. 2016. "Reading Two Novels by Roger Lewinter." Full Stop. http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/09/reviews/john-trefry/the-attraction-of-things-story-of-love-in-solitude-roger-lewinter/) The image of the door [inaugurating]... Think Tank is not... [directional]... It is simply a threshold. (Trefry, John. 2015. "Reading Julie Carr's Think Tank." Entropy. https://entropymag.org/think-tank/) [preparation of] a human corpse... for... viewing or funeral... is...by embalming. (Novak, Ronald J. 2009. "Mortuary Undergarment with Drainage System." US Patent 8,943,613, filed December 8, 2009, and issued February 3, 2015.) this [inanimate], this book... [is] capable of admitting us into [itself]. The book... has this effective permeability. (Trefry 2015) flea market discoveries are [demarcating] events in time... [electing] the physical form [of mnemonic embodiment] (Trefry 2016) [In accordance with] traditional funeral rites, [the family is retaining] the [corpse]... at home for several days. (Zhao, Jinhui. 2005. "Low Temperature Mortuary Bed." Chinese Patent 20,042,092,009, filed December 14, 2005.) Human starvation is marked by an early period of glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis. By 2-3 days... fatty acids released from lipid stores become the primary source of fuel; (Steinhauser, ML, BA Olenchock, J O'Keefe, M Lun, KA Pierce, H Lee , L Pantano, A Klibanski, GI Shulman, CB Clish, and PK Fazeli. 2018. "The Circulating Metabolome of Human Starvation." JCI Insight, (August).) [equipment of] a bed [fascia]... with refrigeration equipment and a transparent cover [forming] a [discrete lowtemperature] mortuary space... for corpse parking... for a long time... [preventing] the corpse from deteriorating, rotting and spreading odor and harmful germs outward. (Zhao 2005) In cemeteries with clayey soil... a lack of oxygen... [is preventing] complete decomposition of the corpses. (Hibbing, Martin. 2008. "Mortuary covering for use in holding of corpses to maintain the condition of the body has thick wire grid of U-shape with windows." German Patent DE20071019954, filed October 30, 2008.) The circulating metabolome... [reflecting] systemic metabolic processes... [is a misunderstood] aspect of starvation physiology... (Steinhauser 2018) large books... LA MEDUSA by Vanessa Place... MOBY DICK, (Trefry 2020) an amino acid surge... [driving] the shift to fatty acid and ketone utilization... [shifting] to ketone production by the liver... enabling [human survival for] prolonged periods of starvation. (Steinhauser 2018) Recording Layne's vocals was difficult because of the loss of his teeth, [resulting] in a lisp... [affecting] his speech and singing ability. (De Sola 2015) vessels [are not legible as] vessels, but [in colinearity with other things]... they [become] vessels that define contents and not contents. (Trefry 2015) coincidences... dog-ear the ceaseless events, (Trefry 2016)

∩

John Trefry is an architect in Kansas.

Three Poems

The God of Lesser Evils

is running for President of the United States
because The God of Lesser Evils
lacks imagination.

He is, of course, running unopposed.
They’re still holding a televised debate though,
hosted at Crypto.com Arena in LA.

During the Q&A section a reporter asks where
The God of Greater Evils is. Immediately, security slips
a black bag over her head and drags her from the premises.

The God of Lesser Evils then pulls
a 9mm from his waistband and fires
randomly into the audience.

This awakens a religious and erotic fervor in the crowd,
who launch into a ferocious orgy while The God of Lesser Evils
stands on stage with his hand over his heart, reciting the Star Spangled Banner.

As you watch this scene unfold, on your
52 inch plasma screen, you try to summon horror
or disgust, but all you feel is empty.

Like if you could reach your fingers underneath your rib cage
you could touch the gashes left in the bone by the carving knives
the doctors used to hollow you out at birth.

You’re so empty, you don’t even know how
to miss what is gone. But you can’t shake the feeling
that what is gone somehow misses you.

There’s Nothing Inside Me

that I put there.
You might call me a vessel,
but that implies purpose.

I’m more of a styrofoam
cup floating in the ocean
filling with salty water
it was never meant to taste
and slowly decaying into
microscopic pieces that will end up
in my stomach.

I’m always returning
to the ouroboros.
The irony is not lost on me.

God filled me with organs
and man fills those organs
with disposability.

I ask God to what end?
and God appears to me in a dream
as everyone I’ve ever grieved.
All of them formed together in one
horrific mass, they speak simultaneously
from their many mouths in a language
my organs understand.

I do not tremble before this
monstrous God because
I am dreaming and in dreams
I only fear the mundane.

When I wake up
I am hungry for a taste
I’ve never tasted.

The irony is not lost on me.

Etymology

After Threa Almontaser

The Poet asks me
What is the holiest

thing you’ve ever seen?
and I think of my best friend

sitting on our kitchen counter
telling me this place we

are in now, must be hell.
I think of our friend asking

what direction they should
orient a tattoo of a dead bird

they found. I tell them I like
the artistry and drama of the

side profile. Like the bird
threw their little head back

as they drew their final breath.
I wanted to stop writing

about dead birds but poetry
recognizes itself. Recognizes

what is holy. The word
from which holy is derived

means literally set apart.
Which begs the question,

from what?

∩

Delilah McCrea is a trans, anarchist poet living in Dearborn Michigan. She loves the NBA and knows the lyrics to every Saintseneca song. Her debut poetry collection, The Book of Flowers, is forthcoming in December 2024 from Pumpernickel House Publishing. More of her work can be found on her website.

from The Horoi Control System

Part IV

The Blessing of the Spectral Wall — The Horoi Control System Activates?!

Outside Client’s home, at oldest bound.
Sun near set, birds settled for evening,
A tension about the air confusing all.

Surveyor: with steel tape, theodolite, Pain’s Pain, ecto-bricks

Client: In waking semi-trance, left hand (TDH 51-17) gesturing rapidly

Client (quiet):

Today no one living left yet can
Pronounce the name I’m hauling
To front of cloud-dript consciousish
Mind’s melt, call him “lunar sprite,”
For a moon’s color native to the co-
Lor hitched aurically to his form,
Not a body, not a laughingly “friend,”
But a Form’s Form, feeling I know,
A surveyor can call off to distantest
Bound’ry and never hear back
Echoing that name, this non-
Being I seem now to, as being,
Re-member piece by bit, some-
Thing sleeping in what someth-
Ing else signifies, a guide I me-
An, ecto-name-in-form, a fai-
Ry harvest horned in spree of
Goodness, that goodness which
I, and thee and all against the
Rule of Being Seen in Pain, or
Seen in any seen event, of,
You pity self and I and all, yes,
The Horoi Control System… but
That goodness to which we call
Out, in sum, to summon, much formal
Magic studied to rally all this,
But whose name, whose
Real free presence!
Only dreams’ jokes reveal…

Surveyor:

That my fetched to ’ttention
Tens of thought-to-be beings
In habit clinging to your land,
Your home and you brought
Back to foyer of your thought
This “Lunar Sprite” you make to
Know is lucky meter for this job:
Reminds my Survey’s Self of
One I met in ancient dozen
Years ago, a little fellow with
A sort of angel’s glowing illth
Who traded at a loss with me
A boundless box of ecto-bricks,
See, ghostly mortar too, of use?
None at all, to a dead man living
Such as I, a realist scientist of
Land and its proper tying up,
What good some half-ghost’s
Sticky blocks? What good I see!
In here, in space-in-space, old
Measurer’s trick, bricks enough
Of ghostly make to make private all!

Client (with Bishop print slipped from sleeve):

Noth’ ever may constitute eth’ric
Wall but ghosts’ slab and stone,
These blocks you now prod-
Uce, Surveyor, from pet-
Ite wooden magic box there,
They sun a special light,
A white that’s black, a grey
Enlisting colors each, so like
The white a crow’s lost fea-
Ther takes on in singular,
So too like Lunar Sprite,
Whose copy in my mem-
Ory arrays itself to fuller
Still authentic presence,
As here remember is to make,
Think I’ve as much to offer this bles-
Sing as you’ve, if only like thus:
Note my sly gesture, from I. Bi-
Shop-Wolff’s “Conversation,”
1931, I tuck it now behind
My anxious back, please strike post-
Ure, friend, of man on left,
As I embody man on right…

Surveyor (assuming directed pose):

So! A gesture for occasion,
So pools from I to you
All confidence in this thing,
A strong tableau on which
T’hang a sign reads “under con-
Struction,” yeah? And dim-
Ensions come to sense as
If always plain as birth:
17 foot wide, 11 foot tall,
A wall not, clearest, wall
For keeping out a scaler, but
A Wall as Charm, pure wall,
A doll, in part, a charm…
But here: a shift in air and void!

Client (breaking posture):

Yes, a change along this olden
Line we prep for phantomic ba-
Rrier, Bishop’s gesture-database
A utility as ev’r, a second pose
Now for the formal blessing:
From memory, hand at per-
Fect angle to tilted chin, left
Woman in 1948’s “Double
Date Delayed,” ha! Dark surge
Flowing forth, the inevitable,
See it come to brutal halt,
See glow bright the bricks stackt
There, see outline faint of wall
To-be, see! name of what I called
“L_ S_”! … “Liar Punster…?” No
It says…. “Pale Sir Runt?”

Surveyor:

I can read it fine: the name,
“Plat Insurer.” No, a darker
Lean: “Saturn Peril!” No…
“Raptures Nil”…

Client (smiling):

Calm, calm,
A laugh rings out!
It settles, it settles.
See words form writ
On shape what will the spec-
Tral barr’ be: “Neural Trips”
Shifts slow to “Pulsar Inert”
See now these fade, no name
Exempt from shuffled punning,
A lunarific play on endless shifting,
Like I said, no mouth pronounces
Quiet, guiding quiet, no statement
But to say the human life
Is a system of cycles…

Surveyor:

Systems of cycles of met-
Rical bundles, yes, your
Trance-memory idol, brought
At final stand to ghostly
Light, lacks all name, all sen-
Sation its language, as
Distance and line are
Mine, gesture yours, so
Clear as transparent, it
Lives in its own absence|
And its blessing here
Seals our wall and will.

Client (realizing a plain fact):

I an owner-debtor to
The credit of that light.

Surveyor:

We build now then
A horos-wall of specter’s
Skin and marrow, an
Apport’d announcement
Of an old ownership of land:
Thee and thy moonish
Friend, osmosing credit-
Debt dyad, spirit to body,
This wall a boundary aga-
Inst the seeing-in of other
Binding lines, bound’s
Bound that is, a wraith-horos
Construction emitting pul-
Sing mass song of “nothing
Here,” do you, then, take
This hypno-figment savi-
Or as thy lawfully conj-
Oined spirit for sake
Of this ritual erection?

Client:

A satyr seed sows so
As to later satis reap,
Et dream-self cong-
Eals the slime of exp-
Erience into form for
Light to silhouette a
Sprite of lunar aspect,
If not of lunar rock,
Nor rock of any sphere,
But stuff of no material,
This same matter best
Fit for baking into bricks,
I guess, the components
Of this wall. Arising there.

Surveyor:

Arising here.
And right in time, as
That great Survey’s God,
Sol! does set in stone’s
Drop moment, here, it rests
Its lower edge on yonder moun-
Tain, as ever ’flecting it moon
Does rise to see the HCS awake,
Minding all with smile’s mask.

Client:

Lay then first brick in out-
Line of talisman wall.
And second brick. And on.

Surveyor (laying ghostly bricks, applying mortar):

I hear a tune,
Survey’s fade-hum gives warning of
A song strict non-unrepeatable,
The loop of song to govern mind
As eye of all lines ’bserves body,

Client:

I hear it too.
Choreographie instructed just
Under ear’s horizon, keys to
A posture subtle HCS asks us
Assume, it means it comes on.
What whispers. Well. Oh. The
Wistful lilt of that nymphe-horos
Head blends in with song, hear it?
Unison mech-voice calls in too.
They’re saying: “I hold the head
Above my head in triumph like
Winners do, recall earlier’s war-
Ning, the future upon which’s
Nipple sux the present pivot’s
Lips, a place-based past dug
Up from earth, cemented unna-
Tural to world gate as gargoyle,
Artemisian virgin Dianic pan-
Ic churning the cream of vo-
Yeur big-mind! The arrow a tra-
Veling property line strikes
That hearty space of secrets!
What lust fumes steam-power
The looping song of all time
Watched in passive malice?—”

Surveyor (still at work, cutting off Client’s channeling):

Let thy hand fall from ear, client, cut
That transmission’s current out
Of notice, is but our Control Sy-
Stem feeding back the light
We fed in in digging up round
Noon that bulge in plot’s flat,
HCS is all a ghost of all to come,
And in to come, what was, the
Hair-strands of past found on
Tomorrow’s pillows, look!
I’ve exceeded my height
In stacking these nothing bricks,
We’ll need your ladder, now.

Client (having fetched tall ladder from home):

Climb, Surveyor, and at top edge ins-
Cribe in bleeding chisel-path word,
After Hipparkhos, whose herms’ mut-
Ilation broke distance wide open,
Whose herm-erection made all equi-
Nox sing the axial precession of doors
Of season’s hour, the land’s light’s wobble,
And in whose name mystery resides,
Write, yes, “I AM AN EMPTY ACRE”

Surveyor:

Didn’t take you for a student
Of statue and its geographic
Dosage, though your apotr-
Opaic compulsions lend a
Kinder light to your study
Of the herm and its inno-
Vator— yes, a wise greeting
Or luck-sentence for thy wall!
Weightless ecto-bricklaying
Makes for quick labor, here,
Our last few blocks whisp
Into place, allow a wall to be.

Client:

At distant mountain’s foot,
From up on ladder’s top step,
Surveyor, see a quilt of dusk
Begin its mute stomping march
Along the land to us, publicizing
Advent dire and our altar wall
Just this minute standing done?

Surveyor (grimly, though not without humor):

A test of my dead-masonhood, this—
Let’s behind this new wall sit on stones
And listen for the voice of HCS pron-
Ounce its dark debut to all who live
And me, too.

Client:

I call out now, to what’s that
Name? Your name? I use
No word for, uh, Selenic Gnome!
For lack of your name!
That Guide-Poem face! Urn,
Moon, ghost, crow, mint, slug,
Dream, grail, card, disc, stone,
Stone, stone, stone, stone,
Bless this slab with gen-
Ius of light! I ask with ut-
Ter humble friendship here
As false god-infused devil mind
Lymphs through all edges
And their sleeping guards the
Soft nodes of world’s corpse,
Bless this spectral wall, I beg.

Surveyor:

A light, you see, ensues
In innermost gut of wall,
My spirits’-bricks alive
Like living death so healthy,
Here, the sundown settles
On the world, Horoi Con-
Trol system cracks an eye
On every object’s every angle.

Client (bracing self now against that wall, yearning, childlike):

The blessing of the spectral wall
Has taken full effect on all
Within the land I own or keep,
And douses lines of bound
With light and calm and sleep
To bend all HCS detection ’round
Us.

Surveyor:

The Horoi Control System is active.
I see with my plain pierc’d eye your
Nameless Lunar Sprite at at-
Tention sitting on our wall, keeping
Watch of watchful waking all.
We’re unseen.

Client:

Matter’s matter becomes the joke
Played on its own recitation, like a come-
Dy that ends in frozen laugh: it
Dies where it descends to punchline,
Reaching, like a Bishop etching,
The cold smile of not knowing
The laugh exhales a final breath.
Or put otherwise: see the jowl
Of the old man call itself to notice
By his bad feelings on it, so our
New watcher is its own keeper,
An irony which fuels rather
Than combusts the mind of HCS.
The snake which not eats but
Is and studies its own tail’s scales.

Surveyor:

Last breaths laughed out strain
The air with the stiffness of the
Planetary humor of a new vampire.
I’ve eaten last laughs and cried.
And of snakes, circles, body’s
Jowling and age: I’m but the
Unaging Surveyor whose plane
Lies flat and whose points must
At the grand middle of all converge.

Client:

May have been a misspeech.
But to plumb the depths of metap-
Hor in hour of our ever-broadcast
Feels, to my private heart, an eye
Worth goggling for protection.
Your eye, your special eye,
Which Pain’s Pain plays in,
What, around the bend, sees that?

Surveyor (preparing Pain’s Pain for insertion into left eye):

Small talk in the face of it.
How small, too, our zone
Of tentative safety. Here.            (plunging knife in)
Let us peek out from behind
The blessed spectral wall,
Now pierced orb is full,
Expanding sight of Survey’s Eye.

Client:

What’s seen? All eyes?

Surveyor:

An element-elf of nature is
Embodied there in crook
Of eldest tree in view,
An elemental fairy form
Spies a distant fence
Which now, HCS alive,
Discerns and transmits all.
The living representatives
Which I mentioned flock
To figments of our minds
And to which each thing in
All creation corresponds,
Are all about, all out in
Gangs and lonely pairs,
Startled by commotion
Of new and dark attention.
My subtle eye has rare been
So full of these quiet lights.

Client:

Off there, on hill
At some peak’s shoulder,
A boundary stone long
Meaningless cracks a rough
Eye, notes us not here,
For this wall a nothing makes
Of all this land I tend and am.

Surveyor (quietly, to himself):

Though against the pay
Of my good trade, I know
That no man can be more
Than a drift fixture on land,
And this Control System H,
So sure of land’s mal-
Leability, and too Client’s,
And all’s, assumption of
Private property’s reality,
The secret shadow of
Survey, that all earth
When cut against grain
Will its spirits spew
To make right the offense.
It rallies so sudden.

Client:

What’s that? Land leaks?
It leaks some presence?
I feel a crowd gather all over.
I misheard, or heard else. Must have.

Surveyor:

So you’ve not got
The eye, but have some sense.
Yes, some things inhere for-
Ever in a place, a plain or
Wood or hill, some things
Awake when changes come
And you feel them now, I see
Them, cousins to the forms
You summon with a mind,
Ancienter, and less of friendship
Made, more deeply writ by
Knife of matter’s illusion, its
Depth of other-than-seeming,
So matter is a mask of meter?
Yes, the meter of the animation
Of it all, all life, HCS app-
Roximates this in bad faith,
A mechsuit worn by earth
In monster battle with itself’s
Own god of terrain and situs.

Client:

Who is the god of the forest, of the land?
Pan’s Pan?

Surveyor:

The earth wears an armor.
Gaia’s meat blue and green
Softer than space under shell
Of man’s compulsing waves
Of self mistrust, self control,
HCS the body’s body, which
Cancels and clips off Pan’s
Matted fur, to horror of dad,
Frozen haste now recycled
Like his staff to mark estates.

Client:

I feel a great crowd beyond,
Must puncture, gnaw that
Armor-of-watch now roused,
And disemboweling douse
The world with its celebrated
Death. What luck! Luck’s son.

Surveyor (without Client’s excitement):

Course’s curse corrects the upheave.
Control suggests to spirit freedom system,
Talks ’em into comfort’s castle, locks
The door. I’m watching it happen, smooth
Speech from lips of false-all to ears of
All-is-alive totem gnomes, how dark it is.

Client:

Now I see it, a vision sitting
Up on wall, my Moonlit
Figment real, but some-
Thing must’ve cracked in
Nature’s diviner-bowl for
One without a vision hitting
Upon all that hidden always.
Now I see it looking down
At me, with quiet simple face.

Surveyor:

It knows what I know,
The quick exchange now
Cutting up the floor of
Night, all of earth at it,
Those elemental to it
In tiny war with the built
Dark mirror’s swirling wo-
Ven eye mesh mind-cloth,
It’s plain as heart’s beat
Back’d by beat’s lack,
The Horoi Control System
Lib’ral in its lab’ling “bound-
Ary” encrusts all human ter-
Rain, falling over life with
Heartless scrying, mocking stare.

Client (understanding the situation):

That animate force
Native to the dust
And all the dust com-
Poses poses in defense,
A choir of action in
Struggle with its pr-
Ying twin, a clanging
Dread all on earth,
What will local see?
Unveiled flickers at
Us all an army implied
By HCS undoing veins
In time’s body, spirits
Ever present quiet start
In every voice to shout,
Though lunarsprite silent
Keeps. No word from that.

Surveyor:

HCS in practice,
Past its theory,
See time’s limping
Gait in total public,
Needed some space
To give it its path,
Now time’s just now,
Not never sure what
Was to be will be done.

Client (panicking):

We’re here a long now,
Knelt at foot of Spectral
Wall, that Sprite above us,
Sentry sitting, a scene
Unseen by HCS and in
This privacy not in the game,
We’re out of time, in boundary
Of boundary, in the wall,
Stuck in the wall, paved in,
All time paved into us carved out.

Surveyor (resolutely):

I hear a new eye open,
Soft scuff of boot behind
Us, I know what’s sure
To happen next, the rose
Which is the Survey’s Flower
Doubles as the wick of candle
When inverted, don’t turn
Around to see who trips
Toward us, client, he holds
That rose and is the light
Of land’s dederangement.

Client (turning around):

That familiar figure.
I’ll pose A Question.



What luck

END

7/17 – 11/17 ’23

∩

Ben Roylance owns and operates Apport Used Books. His books include A Talking Skull (the holon project, 2022), AQ Saga (Hiding Press, 2024), and The Horoi Control System (Apport Editions, forthcoming).

PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde

The harder and stronger Palestinians fight for liberation, the more, like lightning bolts of ever increasing luminosity, they bring the relief of the world system into clearer view: the impotence of the United Nations; the imperialist contempt for international law; the complicity of the Arab neo-colonial states with Western capitalism; the fascist racism at the heart of modern European and U.S. capitalism, as murderers and maimers operate in Western capitals; the neo-colonial structures of the Arab and Third World; and the hollowness of Western liberal democracy and its constellation of civil society institutions.

                        —Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I”

This essay takes up the last, reverberatory clause of Ajl’s indictment of Western imperialism in light of the Palestinian fight for liberation: the hollowness of our civil institutions, specifically our cultural institutions. It does this through the case of PEN America, a human rights organization with an alternatively storied and sordid history.

PEN claims to protect the freedom of writers, but is best understood as an exemplar of American cultural imperialism. The contradictions between PEN America’s purported mission and actions became wickedly clear in late January 2024.[1] By this time, even through the blinkers of American news media, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians was unignorable. While in October the press carried water for the IOF by repeating the story that it was unclear who bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (Israel, definitely Israel), killing, by some estimates, 500 Palestinians seeking refuge there, by December major Western outlets like CNN and The Washington Post were reporting that the IOF had left NICU babies to die and rot in Al-Nasr Hospital. South Africa had lodged its case to the ICJ charging genocide and the ICJ would soon find their case plausible. According to Euro-Med Monitor, in early December, after receiving death threats for months, the IOF bombed poet-professor Refaat al-Areer’s apartment, martyring him and his family.

As the West chanced glimpses at this horror, writers organized to demand PEN take a more unequivocal stance on the killing, jailing, and torture of writers and journalists in Palestine. Despite this pressure campaign, the Los Angeles branch of PEN decided to proceed with a conversation between comedian Moshe Kasher and self-identified “Proud Zionist” Mayim Bialik, who, prior to the event had made social media posts opposing ceasefire. Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar and members of W.A.W.O.G. (Writers Against the War on Gaza) interrupted the event. PEN had Jarrar ejected.[2]

PEN’s ejection of a Palestinian writer in favor of platforming a Zionist celebrity opposed to ending the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians punctuated several months of muted responses from PEN.

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[1] PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 PEN centers worldwide which collectively form PEN International. PEN America will be referred to as PEN for the remainder of the essay.

[2] A fuller account of the event. PEN’s statement.

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A Liberal Imperialist in Control: Suzanne Nossel & PEN

PEN’s failures in early 2024 were not the result of cluelessness. Rather, the organization was helmed by an out-and-out imperialist who had already committed to using its humanitarian clout to further U.S. foreign policy interests. Enter PEN’s CEO since 2013, Suzanne Nossel, who can be best understood through a sustained look at her history prior to PEN.

Since graduating from Harvard, Nossel ascended into the highest circles of privilege and power. She began her climbing as an associate at McKinsey & Company, moved on to the Council on Foreign Relations, then served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary under the Hillary Clinton-led Department of State.

As a think tank employee and state official, Nossel assiduously greased the wheels of massively destructive campaigns against Arab nations and wrote apologias when these campaigns failed. She did so through her influential 2004 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Smart Power,” her role as a high-ranking state department employee, testimony as an Amnesty Executive Director, and through articles and op-eds in major outlets like Foreign Policy and The New York Times. Amid allegations of human rights violations, Nossel helped set in motion the catastrophic invasion of Libya, manufacture consent for intervention in Syria, and justify policies relentlessly hostile to Iran.

While one could survey noxious ideas across Nossel’s body of work, her 2004 “Smart Power” represents its most succinct distillation. Why “Smart Power”? It was published in Foreign Affairs, a publication dedicated to hashing out imperial grand strategy, where the U.S. application of force abroad to maintain its position at the head of the world system is a granted. The 2004 timing of the publication was crucial as liberalism tried to form a post-9/11 foreign policy vision. “Smart Power” is widely cited in academic and popular publications (400+ citations in Google Scholar; a Wikipedia entry). A 2009 New Yorker column, riding high on Obama-era triumphalism, includes a fawning profile of this imperial architect: “She’s in her late thirties, she has the strawberry-blond ringlets of a Dickens heroine, and she’s the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch.” The profile ends with a truly cursed quote from Nossel about her soon-to-be boss in the State Department, Hillary Clinton: “‘Hillary was impressive,’ Nossel said a couple of days afterward, in her office, about a third of the way up the Empire State Building. ‘She didn’t gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She’s saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She’ll make smart power cool.’” Hillary Clinton adapted Smart Power as a guiding principle in her role directing the U.S.’s imperial power as the head of the State Department from 2009-2017. Nossel played a crucial role in providing a theory of imperialism in liberal terms.

Nossel’s Smart Power accepts the post-9/11 commitment to U.S. global military hegemony.[3] It rejects the Bush-era naked militarism (think of the invasion of Iraq) for a multilateral approach in which the U.S. is the head of a coalition of subordinate powers (think of the NATO destruction of Libya) and extends its power less visibly by using proxies (think of the massive amounts of arms flowing into Ukraine, Israel, Syria—or the Saudis dropping U.S. bombs on starving Yemenis). It also involves an all-of-the-above approach, using diplomacy, sanctions, culture, etc. to advance U.S. interests. Nossel sees these efforts as complimentary: “A renewed liberal internationalism strategy recognizes that military power and humanitarian endeavors can be mutually reinforcing.” Nossel also accepts the principle of “preemption” i.e. U.S. aggression (think of the Bush Doctrine’s pre-emptive strikes), recasting it as “smart preemption” through language that shades away from violence but does not take violence off the table. In effect, Nossel widens the definition of preemption to involve any number of uninvited U.S. interventions that violate the sovereignty of other states. In sum, Nossel’s “Smart Power” is a crystallization of a post-9/11 liberal re-commitment to global hybrid warfare in think tank addled platitudes.[4] Very cool.

If the dismantling of Iraq and Afghanistan was the outcome of the Bush era, the legacy of Obama and Biden includes the dismantling of Libya, destabilization in Syria and Yemen, and the intensified and world-shattering acceleration of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Nossel’s goal of maintaining global U.S. hegemony that maintains the capitalist order heavily overlaps with that of the neo-cons; the difference is in tactics. Indeed, Nossel’s “Smart Power” may be more pernicious because hiding the exercise of U.S. power through proxies is a powerful way to mystify the U.S.’s relentlessly violent foreign policy.[5]

However, the way Western media consumers receive U.S. imperial activity is far different. Smart Power’s emphasis on “foreign policy that is viewed as liberal” [emphasis mine] has meant replacing George W. Bush on a warship declaring “Mission Accomplished” with a series of humanitarian justifications that in the case of Israel have descended into farce. Nada Elia succinctly describes one distinct flavor of imperialism with a humanitarian face as ‘imperial feminism’: “Such are the consequences of imperial feminism, which presents women’s rights as a Western gift to the benighted Orient, and of pinkwashing, which celebrates Israel as gay-friendly, because its soldiers can fly a Pride flag after torturing Palestinian prisoners.”[6]

The arc of liberal administrations claiming to free Libyans from an Orientalized sovereign and protecting the rights and freedoms of women in Afghanistan in the late 2000s and early 2010s terminates in the blistering contradiction of bombs and aid packages raining down on Gaza.

The unapologetic and unrestrained pursuit of U.S. interests justified by “Smart Power” has been catastrophic for the Arab world. Ali Kadri, a theorist of empire, war, and capital argues that “U.S.-led imperialism in the Arab region pursues a clear policy of state decapitation and depopulation.” Historically, “since the second half of the twentieth century, the number of war and war-related deaths in the Arab Mashreq is in the millions. The number of refugees is even greater. Together, deaths related to war, expulsion from the land, and premature austerity-related-mortality, or deaths occurring long before the historically determined life expectancy, are tantamount to depopulation.” This depopulation campaign is reaching its apogee in Gaza.

Along the way to Gaza there was string of quiet wars, led by liberal imperialists. Foremost for Nossel and the HRC-led State Department was the catastrophic early 2011 intervention in Libya. Here humanitarian discourse was mobilized to preempt “a genocide” for which there was no actual evidence. Nossel herself, as a State Department employee working to craft U.S. policy in relation to the UN Human Rights Commissioned reported to the House of Representatives her office’s work as instrumental in ejecting Libya from the UN General Assembly membership and, ultimately, the U.S.-led NATO invasion of the country. [7] This invasion resulted in NATO bombing civilians. After the gruesome killing of Gaddafi, the state plunged into chaos from which it has not recovered. This chaos includes multiple states committing arms and weapons to various factions, vying for colonial position on Africa’s northern shore; the return of slavery; flooding as the result of post-NATO invasion neglect of crucial infrastructure; and ethnic cleansing, infamously the Tawergha massacre.

Libya should hang from Nossel like an albatross. The veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges cited Nossel’s hiring as executive director in his resignation from PEN: “The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire.”

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[3] “Washington...should thus offer assertive leadership—diplomatic, economic, and not least, military” (131).

[4] Hybrid warfare as defined by the Tricontinental: “a combination of unconventional and conventional means using a range of state and non-state actors that runs across the spectrum of social and political life (Ceceña, 2012; Borón, 2012; Korybko, 2015).  Korbyko (2015) defines the term hybrid war as: “Externally provoked identity conflicts, which exploit historical, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, and geographic differences within geostrategic transit states through the phased transition from colour revolutions to unconventional wars in order to disrupt, control, or influence multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects by means of regime”

[5] Nossel: "Smart power means knowing that the United States’ own hand is not always its best tool: U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals."

[6] Nada Elia, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism Inter/Nationalism & Palestine, Pluto Press, 2023.

[7] In praising Nossel, the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Advancement of Human Rights, wrote: “During her two years in office, she and others were able to return a scrutiny to massive human rights violators such as Iran, Libya and Syria through new mandates to investigate situations. To some extent, they were also able to reduce somewhat the obsessive focus on Israel as compared to other countries, although the structural bias against Israel within the UN system continues.” JBI is actively running cover for genocide, describing Israel’s response to Hamas as “one of the clearest examples of its adherence to the proportionality principle.”

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Imperial Capture: An Insider Account

Nossel’s tenure at PEN has been marked by internal turmoil and the prioritization of Nossel’s imperial worldview.

In 2013, PEN was looking for a new CEO after the newspaper veteran Steve Isenberg announced his retirement. While staff lobbied for a candidate with a literary background, the board chose Nossel, a hawk feathered in blood. The announcement of Nossel’s hiring blindsided staff and polarized the cramped Soho office. Nossel’s ties to the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment and projected presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were not lost to them, though they hoped PEN would be a pit stop on the way to a position in the Clinton administration.

According to a former PEN employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, soon after Nossel’s arrival at PEN she began a unilateral, tumultuous transformation of the direction of the organization.

Nossel’s cleaning house included running out one of the only women of color on staff. She made decisions unilaterally, did little to build relationships, refused staff requests to be paid for off-the-clock labor necessary to continue the organization’s programming, and shortchanged employee benefits. Layoffs were followed by high-profile resignations, including that of the director of advocacy. Nossel and management are currently embroiled in a high-profile battle with its union, PEN America United.

Nossel also transformed PEN’s output. This meant ceasing publishing original works by writers, burying that digital archive, and requesting PEN staff publish links to her editorial writing on international affairs from other websites like Politico.[8] PEN began to reflect Nossel’s imperial worldview and, under Nossel, PEN maintains what Juliana Spahr describes as “a symbiotic relationship with national security interests.” This includes a PEN conference on “The Future of Truth” which featured an ex-CIA director and general, an ex-attorney for the NSA, and a former DOD employee.[9]

Under Nossel, PEN’s literary programming is disintegrating and its advocacy has contorted itself to accommodate the increasingly unpopular foreign policy positions of the Democratic establishment. While Nossel is a particularly risible character, it is unlikely a Nossel-less PEN is redeemable. As documented by Deborah Cohn and Megan Doherty, PEN has historic ties to the CIA and State Department and has served as a vehicle for U.S. soft power abroad.

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[8] At the same time, as chronicled in a 2019 New Yorker story, a white staffer (Antonio Aiello) appears to have been involved in attempt to launch a “congress” composed of minoritized writers meeting in an informal workshop setting. The program was attached to the deep pockets of the Riggio Foundation and shrouded in secrecy, perhaps because one workshop participant was Stephanie Riggio who, unbeknownst to the others, was running the show. Despite the seemingly intentional diverse composition of the workshop, discussions of race and gender were discouraged by the lead white staff member, Jackson Taylor (also in charge of PEN’s prison writing program) who, in response to pushback, banned class discussion before pulling the plug on the project altogether. The purpose of the workshop appears muddled. On one hand, it appears to simply be Stephanie Riggio’s vanity project, a way for her to purchase access to other writers. If you squint hard enough in the initial branding of it as a “congress” you might see PEN blundering its way toward trying to develop low-rent Congress for Cultural Freedom 2.0.

[9] See Spahr’s DuBois’ Telegram, Harvard University Press, 2018, 168.

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Loud Silence: PEN and Genocide

The fact of PEN’s ties to the foreign policy establishment and national security state should be all any writer needs to know to join efforts to hammer the organization to dust. However, it is also important to understand how PEN has used language to weaponize a humanitarian and rights-based discourse to mystify genocide. These distinctions matter because they can be applied to other literary and cultural organizations whose communications confuse the fact of the matter.

PEN’s response has been to defend Israel and Israeli expression first, and then to either stay silent on the matter of Palestinians or present a weak defense of Palestinian cultural resistance. Before October 7th, PEN had regularly issued condemnatory press releases immediately following attacks on any international writing community. It issued such a statement in its email to subscribers on the morning of October 7th. As early as October 13th, Israel’s assault on Gaza was labeled “a textbook case of genocide” by a prominent scholar in Jewish Currents, yet PEN remained silent on the atrocities committed by Israel for months. Their next email to subscribers was on December 27th, requesting year-end donations.

As of the moment of writing of this essay in May, June, and July 2024, even after overwhelming evidence and untold suffering, a boycott of its 2024 literary awards by the awardees that caused the cancellation of the awards ceremony, and a letter signed by thousands of writers and artists, asking PEN “to respond to the extraordinary threat that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians represents for the lives of writers in Palestine and to freedom of expression everywhere,” PEN has refused to use the word “genocide.”[10] It prefers the comfortable liberal framing of a “war and humanitarian crisis.” “War” suggests a symmetrical conflict between two sovereign nations with standing armies. In the broadest terms, what is occurring is, rather, the assault by a settler-colonial state backed by the full might of U.S. imperial power upon an already displaced, rightless Palestinian population. The object of this assault, as has been expressed by Israeli officials and identified by the ICJ, is mass civilian death and the displacement of civilians from Gaza (genocide). If we are to be more specific, Israel has decided to kill as many civilians as possible (genocide) in the belief that this will destroy the base of support for Hamas, which is waging a guerilla struggle for liberation for the Palestinian people. This struggle is supported by the larger Axis of Liberation.[11] In either case, there is a radical asymmetry in power and Israel has decided in this struggle to radically accelerate the process of a genocide which began before October 7th to achieve its ends.

Yet PEN’s “war and humanitarian crisis” is presented without location or agent. The “humanitarian crisis,” beyond genocide, is the famine raging in Gaza, the preconditions of which were created well before October 7th and which has been inflicted upon Gaza by the stranglehold Israel holds on its airspace, waters, and surface. It has included the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. It has included a series of flour massacres in which the IOF shot and killed hundreds of starving Palestinians trying to collect aid from convoys at the Kuwait roundabout.

PEN’s dangerously inaccurate descriptions of the direction and agents of violence in Gaza find their parallel in PEN’s response to Palestine Solidarity activism in the United States. On October 31st, PEN issued a bulletin on “Handling Rising Antisemitism on Campuses,” putting their weight behind a narrative that campus protests are characterized by antisemitism while also calling for campuses to undertake “enhanced security measures.” They did so before making a statement about the more numerous and violent hate crimes against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim individuals as well as the intensifying criminalization of their and their allies’ protests.

On December 7th, PEN wrung its hands over the “Crisis of Polarization and Free Speech,” again working to frame the conflict as symmetrical and the problem as a lack of moderation, rather than that of the historic slaughter of a civilian population by a nuclear-armed settler-state. In this bulletin, Nossel repeats the canard that “the conflict” is eternal: “recognizing the many-sided nature of a dispute that dates back millennia and has confounded generations of diplomats and statesmen.” The conflict is not eternal. It is a political-historical phenomena in which European political Zionism found imperial sponsors in Britain, France, and the United States across the 20th and 21st centuries.[12]

As police began to wield rubber bullets, clubs, and zipties against students seeking to end the genocide via university divestment across the nation, PEN issued a press release condemning the protests and focused on criminalizing speech, alleging “that some protesters taunted [students] with antisemitic slurs.” In this case, PEN links to a news report that quotes protestors as chanting “Long live the intifada,” “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “Killers on campus.” Though it wasn’t always the case, the notion that criticism of Zionism and its adherents or the State of Israel is not antisemitism should be common sense at this historical juncture. However, PEN appears to have adopted those definitions provided by staunch supporters of Israel like the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt that equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians and the freedom of Palestine with antisemitism.[13] In its communications, PEN has often translated statements of solidarity with Palestine and criticisms of the state of Israel with exceptional and isolated cases of antisemitism, inviting readers to buy into the myth, gleefully embraced by the center and right, that campus Palestine solidarity encampments are hotbeds of antisemitism. In doing so, PEN’s “defense” of student freedom of speech has been so feeble as to be meaningless.[14] 

Even as the repression of student protests against genocide assumed historic proportions and PEN spoke out against them in an April 29th bulletin, it still could not help centering the potential hurt feelings of some students in the face of Pro-Palestine/anti-genocide chants: “The fact that peaceful protests may involve rhetoric or slogans that some students and members of the campus community find deeply abhorrent or offensive cannot be viewed as justification for calling in outside police or the National Guard.” Nowhere in this communication are mentions of student demands or the genocide and epistemicide that have fueled them, replacing attention to the dead, displaced, and suffering with attention to the emotional barometer of imperial subjects identifying with an ethnostate.

PEN’s two-step of first centering the feelings of those who don’t like Palestine solidarity protests before expressing concern over the lives of Palestinians and physical safety of students reached farcical levels in early May. After seemingly adopting the ADL’s definition of antisemitic speech, PEN issued a press release on May 1st stating its “concern” over enshrining into law overly broad definitions of antisemitism. PEN is concerned about the criminalization of speech it helped fan. At this point a violent reaction against the student encampments by colleges and universities themselves was already in full swing, culminating most visibly in UCLA authorizing cops to shoot faculty and students with bullets coated in rubber.

PEN’s slow-footed reactions and constant false equivalency might be seen as the product of a hapless and wildly out of touch organization more concerned with the disposition of its donors than with facts on the ground. But it’s also possible that PEN, headed by a liberal imperialist, is engaging in a purposeful strategy of leveraging the credibility of a humanitarian organization to flood the zone with shit in order to muddy the field of the debate.

During the month of February, well after PEN was catching heat for its silence, it tweeted its condemnation of the actions of several nations against writers (“we condemn,” “PEN America Condemns”). It did not use condemnatory language against the state of Israel. It posted or reposted tweets critical of Russia (11), China (6), and Iran (4), more than those of the entity engaged in destroying every university in Gaza (3). It posted summaries of other organizations’ defense of journalists in Gaza. None of its tweets name Israel as a killer of journalists or writers. Rather, these deaths are blamed on the “War in Israel and Gaza.” None of the tweets express that PEN explicitly affirms the defense of journalists in Gaza. PEN names as under threat a number of threatened artists and activists in China, Russia, and Iran. These posts often include pictures of the artists. Nowhere does PEN explicitly articulate its concern for a single Palestinian writer, artist, journalist, or intellectual that is under threat (though they all are) or who has been murdered by Israel. Rather, they include a summary of another organization’s mourning the death of Palestinian visual artist Fathi Ghaben. In an entire month’s worth of communications read carefully and taken at their word, PEN takes no position on the genocide of Palestinians, does not condemned Israel for this genocide, and mourns no Palestinian writer.

Contents of PEN Tweets and Re-posts in February 2024.

This does not reflect the content of links included in the posts.

Black History Month	12
Campus Speech	18
Book and Movie Bans	34
State policy and legislation on speech and education	34
National Policy – Social Media Regulation	3
Human Rights Legislation, United States	1
Libraries are Good	3
Suzanne Nossel Editorial or Article in Non-PEN Publication	9
PEN-associated author boost	8
Disinformation and AI	4
Prison and Justice Writing Program	2
PEN Literary Programing	2
PEN Summary of Programming	1
PEN Statement Defending Jan 31 Ejection	1
Other	5
Russia: Criticism of State Actions	11
China: Criticism of State Actions	6
Iran: Criticism of State Actions	4
Israel: Criticism of State Actions	3
Sudan: Criticism of State Actions	2
Mexico: Criticism of State Actions	2
Vietnam: Criticism of State Actions	2
Thailand: Criticism of State Actions	2
Egypt: Criticism of State Actions	1
United States: Press Freedom	1
PEN Statement on War in Israel and Gaza	1
War in Israel and Gaza – Death of Palestinian Journalists	1
Ukraine: Pro-Ukraine Programming	5
Individual Victims of Repression
Li Qiaochu (China)	1
Ilham Tohti (China)	1
Alexei Navalny (Russia)	3
Vladimir Kara-Murza (Russia)	1
Darya Kozyreva (Russia)	1
Narges Mohammadi (Iran)	2
Sepideh Rashno (Iran)	1
Fathi Ghaben (Gaza)	1

It is unfathomable that a free speech organization that feels compelled to weigh in on international affairs would not dedicate the majority of its communications to denouncing the unprecedented mass killing, jailing, and displacement of Palestinian writers, journalists, and academics. 

Here we might turn to the Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa, killed by Israel in 2024 in April through imprisonment, in regard to the larger structure of human rights discourse as applied to Israel: “This discourse, employed by human rights organizations, concentrates its special efforts in order to prove specific violations considered by the Israeli judiciary and media as the exception to the rule, which is respect for human and prisoners’ rights. The result is that contrary to the pretense of exposing and being transparent, in reality this discourse hides facts and obscures truth.”[15] We know that under an apartheid system within Israel and military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, there is no respect for human and prisoners’ rights; rather, the system is committed to genocide. PEN reflects this centrist and liberal discourse of normalizing the idea that in general Israel is an equitable democratic society marred by a few exceptional incidents. This idea has no connection to reality and the distance grows greater by the day. Palestinian resistance has revealed, again, that Israel is a massively, structurally violent settler society where violence against Palestinians is gratuitous and regular. This same human rights discourse treats signs (even if fabricated) of resistance to this gratuitously violent order as themselves gratuitously violent and not as an exception (as Israeli acts of savagery are treated as exceptional) but rather indicative that resistance itself is systemically illiberal and that those who resist are placed outside of the order of ordinary rights. It is a shame Palestinians are silenced, fired, beaten, jailed, bombed, and killed. But that is what happens.

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[10] On the UN Goldstone report in regard to Israeli war crimes in Gaza during the December 2009 Operation Cast Lead, Nossel criticized the credibility of the report and, generally, the UN Human Rights Council’s attention to Israel, and suggested that Israel should ultimately investigate itself and hold itself accountable for human rights abuses.

[11] See Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I” in Agrarian South.

[12] See Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020).

[13] Nossel explicitly adapts the equation that criticism of Israel equals antisemitism in a 2020 interview with the Jewish Book Council when she labels the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement as antisemitic: “At times, the defense of free speech can be pit­ted against the dri­ve to com­bat anti­semitism; for exam­ple, through laws that advo­cate pun­ish­ing those who sup­port BDS. We are wit­ness­ing a spike in anti­se­mit­ic expres­sion and actions, which is gen­uine­ly alarm­ing.”

[14] Indeed, Nossel’s defense of the speech of Neo-nazis is more thoughtful and nuance-mongering than that of Pro-Palestinians protestors: “The ACLU was crit­i­cized for sup­port­ing the Nazis in their quest to march, but the orga­ni­za­tion ulti­mate­ly won itself enor­mous legit­i­ma­cy by demon­strat­ing that it was pre­pared to apply its prin­ci­ples even in rela­tion to a cause that most of its mem­bers found abhor­rent.”

[15] Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture.”

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PEN, Who Counts As A Writer, & Bourgeois Mind-Rot

Throughout Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and epistemicide of Palestinian writers, scholars, and intellectuals, PEN has stuck to directing its audiences’ attention to writers jailed in countries who oppose the United States’ strategic interests. A related tool PEN has used in service of shifting attention from the ongoing genocide is its Freedom to Write Index, a purported global survey of those targeted for state oppression via their writing. PEN’s Freedom to Write campaign debuted in 2019. The 2023 index itself reports China and Iran as the top two countries with the most writers jailed. It spotlights the Asia-Pacific (152) and Middle East and North-Africa (105) as the regions with the most writers jailed. Is it a coincidence that these are also the regions where the United States has waged the most wars (Middle East and North-Africa) and is, with the Obama-era pivot to Asia, rapidly expanding its military footprint.

PEN reports 100+ writers jailed in each of these regions. The number of reported writers jailed in the Americas? 10. These numbers, to put it mildly, raise questions about PEN’s methodology and who counts as a writer.

PEN’s methodology: “The 2023 Freedom to Write Index is a count of the writers who were held in prison or detention during 2023 because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression. Individuals must have spent at least 48 hours behind bars in a single instance of detention between January 1 and December 31, 2023. We define imprisonment when an individual is serving a sentence following a conviction, while detention is defined as individuals held in custody pending charges, or those held in pre-trial or administrative detention.”

The numbers this methodology reveals reflect bourgeois conceptions of what constitutes a writer and the imperialist agenda of the counters.

For instance, the 2023 index does not include Walid Daqqa, the Palestinian prison writer and thinker cited earlier, jailed by Israel for 37 years until his death in 2024. The great influence of Daqqa’s prison writing contributed to the extension of his sentence, as well as the medical neglect and torture that quickened his death. In 2018, Daqqa, already imprisoned, was brought to trial for writing a children’s book.

Neither does the index include the enormous number of Palestinians arrested for social media posts. 410 were arrested in 2022. Reporting from American outlets in December 2023 found Israel had initiated 250 prosecutions for social media posts, mostly of Palestinian students. For PEN, Palestinian posts aren’t writing and Palestinian posters aren’t writers involved in politically resonant and consequential activity.[16] Given the increase in social media arrests after October 7, it stretches credulity to believe that a mere 17 Palestinians exercising their freedom of expression (PEN’s count) spent more than 48 hours in Israeli jails. In March 2024 alone, Israel held no less than 17 Palestinian journalists in administrative detention.

Moreover, Israel’s apartheid system is such that Palestinians can be held indefinitely without being charged under what is termed administrative detention. B’Tselem: “Since March 2002, not a single month has gone by without Israel holding at least 100 Palestinians in administrative detention.” This is to say, Israel can jail a Palestinian for a look, a word, for being Palestinian. Such an extreme state of well-documented oppression calls for latitude in counting who has been jailed for speech or writing given that it can incite jailing but not a formal charge.

And of our 10 writers jailed in the Americas?

The index posits that there are two individuals from the United States and six in Cuba. Are we supposed to believe that of the 1.9 million individuals the United States’ sprawling prison population, only two of them are there because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression?

What of the RICO and domestic charges leveled against 61 individuals organizing against Cop City? According to the ACLU, “the indictment paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.” Why haven’t any of these individuals been counted? Zines aren’t writing? Advocating collectivism isn’t expression?

What of the thousands of people or protestors in the United States jailed or detained on charges of disorderly conduct, the substance of which is insulting a cop aka “contempt of cop”? Isn’t this political expression?[17]

And what of the waves of legislation washing over a bedrock of pre-existing law criminalizing protest? That makes assembling in public space to provide collective voice subject to any number of criminal charges? As we have seen in the violent, carceral responses to Standing Rock, to the 2020 uprisings, and now to Palestine solidarity, the United States wants people to shut the fuck up and will create that silence—remove the signals and signage—from public space through laws that allow the ruling class to say they are not targeting speech or writing but rather bodies, trespassers, loiterers, and maskers.

Some of the most profound poetry in the United States in the past several months has been the sign poetry of student encampments: banners renaming academic halls “Hind’s Hall” or a bookshelf in a student encampment named “Refaat Alareer Memorial Library.” The police have destroyed these poems and beaten and jailed the poets who wrote them. PEN doesn’t bother to identify or track these writers once they are in police custody.

In the largest sense, the United States has sought to strangulate through law and its enforcers what Kluge and Negt call the proletarian public sphere—one that includes zines, graffiti, signs scrawled on cardboard.[18] By hewing to bourgeois definitions of who counts as a writer, PEN’s erasure of that public sphere and its thousands of writers is part of this assault on a proletarian public sphere.

To get to two, PEN only counts in America writers legible as members of a Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, writers who have access to extensive training and accreditation through publication and, generally, present themselves as a proper subject—a needle’s eye for working class, minoritized writers. A wall for the collectives, for the necessarily anonymous. PEN’s quantification of jailed writers condescends, wildly, to the intelligence of anyone who with some knowledge of the world-beating scope of mass incarceration in the United States and how the speech and writing of working class, racialized, and indigenous groups in the United States are the grounds for criminal charges.

And the thousands of students in the United States arrested on various piddly-shit charges applied in an ad-hoc fashion when we know their real crime was expressing Pro-Palestinian speech? Or even just the 132 students arrested at SUNY New Paltz? Do you think PEN will count them?

And what of the uncounted number of individuals in the archipelago of U.S.-operated black sites? Guantanamo? How would we even know why they are there? They have written. They are writing.

There were two writers in 2023 in the United States jailed for their expression.

Michelle Murphy has a word for these kinds of emotionally charged performances of population quantification: “phantasmagram.” She defines the phantasmagram as such: “The term phantasmagram points to the affectively charged and extra-objective relations that are part of the speculative force of numbers.” And we must look at PEN’s numbers as exactly this: speculative fantasy. And a quantitative fantasy that parades as objective the purely subjective racism, classism, and chauvinism that finds jailed writers quite conveniently in states that have found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. empire for resisting subordination to the U.S.-led global capitalist system.

Yet, even if we were to take PEN’s counts seriously, we could rework them—presto!—to show that Israel leads the world in jailing writers:

According to PEN, China has jailed 107 writers. Iran 49, Saudi Arabia 19, Vietnam 19, Israel 17.

If we consider number of writers jailed against total population size we find that Israel leads even PEN’s fantasy world in writers jailed per capita.[19]

Such analysis is absent from PEN’s report.

Historically, human-rights groups’ distortions of scales of oppression have helped manufacture the popular consent for war on these countries. We might think of the presentation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya as unique and intolerable locations of oppression in need of U.S.-led intervention: the U.S. bombed the women of Afghanistan to save them. While many nations have jails and militaries and are linked to the accumulation of capital in one way or another, Kadri reminds us that “the power to which war is foundational in financial and ideological terms is the U.S.”[20] PEN’s work mystifying this fact through its incessant pointing away from the U.S. and Israel paves the way for further hybrid wars and the continuation of the campaign of extermination the U.S. is backing against Palestinians.

---

[16] Note PEN’s willingness to identify an anti-state poster in Russia as a writer worth defending.

[17] Lopez, C. E. (2010). Disorderly (mis)conduct: the problem with contempt of cop arrests. Advance: The Journal of the ACS Issue Groups, 4(1), 71-90.

[18] See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

[19] China 107/1,412,000,000 = 7.57790368e-8
Iran 49/88,550,000 = 5.53359684e-7
Saudi Arabia 19/36,410,000 = 5.21834661e-7
Vietnam 19/98,190,000 = 1.93502393e-7
Israel 17/9,558,000 = 0.00000177861

[20] Kadri, Ali, “Imperialism with Reference to Syria.” Springer, 2019, 31.

---

The End of PEN(s): Cultural Imperialism & Writers in the Imperial Core

In the face of fierce organizing, PEN has buckled but not broken. The determined, principled actions against PEN by writers and activists have caused it to cancel its 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony and World Voices festival.

PEN has drawn such intense criticism because Palestinian resistance has shown us how profoundly it is failing its purported mission, its prominence as a literary organization, its considerable budget, and because Nossel is a particularly detestable operator.

In this time Nossel has only doubled down, continuing to theorize strategies for waging cultural imperialism in a February 2024 Foreign Affairs article entitled “The Real Culture Wars.” Without a word for Palestinians, Nossel recommends a strategy for which the U.S. and compliant civil institutions avoid direct export of U.S. culture but, rather, enlist compatible artists and intellectuals embedded in those societies over which the U.S. seeks influence. Following the U.S.’s strategy of war by proxy, Nossel advocates cultural imperialism by proxy—divide and conquer. Nowhere in the article does Nossel eschew violence and her language is self-consciously, chauvinistically militaristic, framing culture as playing a leading role in a global battle of Western democracies (beating the shit out of their students) against Orientalized Eastern totalitarians (Russia, China, Iran, Russia): “Western governments should recognize that culture creators are part of the infantry of antiauthoritarianism. U.S. embassy personnel should make a point in developing relationships with key cultural figures.” Global cultural war with shades of millenarianism.

We need to be honest with ourselves here and ask why it took such rank hypocrisy in the face of a world-cleaving genocide for PEN to draw fire from the literary community. Years before October 7th, PEN’s emphasis had already shifted to align with the priorities of liberal imperialism. There was little outcry.[21]

Why? First, I think this speaks to the hegemony of liberal-imperial ideology over these elite cultural leadership positions. Second, discussions of cultural imperialism are muted within literary circles: we have not taken seriously the relationship between cultural production, human rights discourses, and the reproduction of the United States’ imperial power. 

Through Nossel, PEN represents an example par excellence of a larger literary non-profit industry that is a hand-servant of liberal imperialism and, in some cases, partially constituted by the violence-directing wings of the state. Their modes of operation include active suppression of radical voices, the weaponization of humanitarianism in service of national war-making projects, and constituting politically feeble theatres of conversation in regard to what constitutes national and international literature.

Whereas we may be more resistant to shallow weaponizations of identity politics in the realm of politics (having an Arab University President crack down on Pro-Palestinian students, as in Columbia’s case, for instance) to maintain a violent status quo, can we say same of our cultural institutions?

It is not enough to give them a pass because they hold up writers from other countries without being curious about how and why they select these poets and how to situate these poets, their poetics, and their politics both within their context and a larger context of international relations. This requires us to know something about the interaction of cultural production, reception, and states.

Here a brief illustration by way of the Latin American literary boom might be useful. As Deborah Cohn and Juliana Spahr have documented, private foundations, the CIA, State Department, cut-outs like the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and literary non-profits like PEN collaborated in the 1960s, mobilizing significant resources to create cultural arenas that both promoted and depoliticized the work of Latin-American authors. Though individual writers did not always stick with the program, such cultural diplomacy was sponsored by the State as part of a cold-war effort to pull authors out of the orbit of Spanish-language publishing networks with more radical politics, particularly those associated with the spirit of the Cuban revolution. State and foundation dollars funneled to organizations like PEN would help soften the attitudes of Latin American authors towards the United States and counter the influence of organizations like the Casa de las Américas, a Cuban state-sponsored foundation that disseminated a new wave of Latin American literature with a revolutionary and de-colonial bent.[22]

This is not a thing of the past. The journalist Chris Hedges recognized that Nossel’s PEN was symptomatic of “the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.”

Yet in our present moment, Spahr has noted the increasing willingness of writers supposedly operating autonomously from the larger literary establishment to take state money and participate in state-sponsored international events. Establishment writers like Victoria Chang, Dianne Seuss, and Li-Young Lee have their poems appear alongside articles justifying the killing of Palestinian children as lawful in The Atlantic. Poet Laureates lay low.[23]

Given the liberal establishment’s commitment to genocide in Gaza, ambivalence about the relationships between writers, the state, and literary and human rights organizations must give way to direct, forceful criticism of organizations and poets doing the work of empire or allowing publications to use their work as a fig leaf over genocidal or imperial discourse.

So, as writers, how do we do this? Fargo Nissim Tbakhi outlines a series of actions for writers to take in his trenchant “Notes on the Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” They are very good. Do them.

In addition, we should approach literary organizations with a well-earned skepticism and have a clear and common-sense set of criteria when judging whether or not an organization can be trusted to not coopt our cultural labor into acceptance of an intolerable imperial order.

What to do will always be an open-ended question as strategies are tested, as conditions and capacities change. In the meanwhile, the following is a list of questions to ask of cultural organizations to try to determine where they stand and what actions to take and demands to make in relation to them:

• The basic stress-test: Where does the organization stand on Palestine?

  • If it has made statements, has it gone beyond both-sides condemnation?

  • Has it identified Israel’s conduct as genocide?

• Has the organization signed onto the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli (PACBI)?

• Does the organization maintain ties to Zionists?

• Does the organization platform Zionists?

• Does the organization platform Palestinians?

• Does the organization receive funding from the state or major foundations? What are the politics of those foundations? Who sits on the boards of those foundations? What characterizes their political donations? What are their other institutional links and loyalties?

• Does the organization, through its pensions, retirement funds, and/or foundations, have investments in Israel (like Israel Bonds), Israeli companies (like Elbit Systems), or the military industrial complex (Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc).

• If the organization has an international dimension:

  • Does its internationalism converge or diverge with U.S. state policy?

  • How does it characterize the United States’ role in international affairs? Is it able to criticize U.S. militarism and hard power?

  • If it criticizes states or state actors in the name of human rights, what is the balance of that criticism? Is it focused disproportionately on those political formations of countries the United States is actively involved directly or through proxies in sanctioning (Venezuela, Iran), bombing (Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, etc.), or manufacturing the consent for conflict (China)? Does it account for human rights abuses done by the U.S., Israel, or other junior partners in the U.S.-led order (Canada).

  • If it platforms dissident writers, does it do so only to feature writers whose discourse centers on criticizing state entities opposed to U.S. strategic interests while remaining mute on the colonial and imperial violence of the U.S. led imperial order? Do they platform writers opposing ongoing settler-colonial violence within the U.S., Canada, Israel, or British or French colonies?

  • If it hosts conversations or conferences:

    • Do these depoliticize cultural production? Do they evaporate the political i.e. depoliticize issues in attention to universalism?

    • Do these create space for decolonial, anti-imperial, socialist, anarchist, or communist ideologies?

Let’s push our stress tests further to that wide swath of literary organizations busy being silent. Here, I am thinking in particular about those organizations that constitute their “voices” through the writers they make their face via literary reading and speaker series, city and regional literary organizations, conferences:

• Do they feature authors who speak to stress-test issues like Palestine? Or anti-imperialism or actual decolonial or left-revolutionary movements? Or do they only feature authors who say it’s all very complicated? Or authors who are rigorously silent on issues like this?

• Do they feature Palestinian authors?

• If the organization has a more local orientation, what are the stress test issues in your community that involved the interlinked webs of carceral and imperial power? Police abolition is one such instance given the well-documented connections between the IOF and various police and sheriff’s departments across the United States.

As writers, it is not enough to simply get Nossel fired or to stain PEN’s reputation, though that’s a start. We must continue to identify, critically debate, and counteract the instantiations of cultural imperialism where they appear in our spheres of action.

A major power of the avant-garde is its capacity to recognize when a new break with the conventional order is warranted and to make that break, hard and complete. In the lightning flashes of Palestinian resistance, the time for that break is now.

Historically, organizations like PEN worked to create prestigious discourse networks defined against revolutionary-spirited publishing houses like Casa de las Américas. Our break with PEN and the PENs of the world must be hard and complete. In that rift, what’s to be done is an open and thrilling question. But let me propose that whatever we do must be finely attuned to the political, economic, and social dimensions of our emergent moment in its multiple scales and geographies. Let me propose that we create new cultural networks allied with revolutionary and liberatory politics in general and Palestinian resistance in particular; that we break down the firewalls that quarantine the so-called literary from the political; that we recognize, strengthen, and expand existing publishing and cultural-political networks already doing this work. And through it all, we must be more than writers. We must read and write in a dialectical relation with political action and the reproduction of that action.

We owe it to the decimated universities and libraries in Gaza, to the massacred writers, academics, journalists, street-artists, prison writers, those inscribing and reinscribing on the surface of their consciousness those burning words they would speak or write if their bodies were freed. We owe it to Palestinians keeping the evolving flames of their culture alive in the diaspora, the tents of Rafah and encircled camps and villages in the West Bank. We owe it to the wider resistance struggling to liberate Gaza and all of Palestine from an occupation that has taken selfies of itself burning libraries and turning Palestinian universities into military bases and torture houses. We owe a robust anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and (really) decolonial literary culture fighting for the liberation of all to the writers not yet born in a still undecided future.

---

[21] I took PEN’s righteous posturing at face-value when an editor for them solicited and published poems from me eight years ago for their now-defunct poetry series.

[22] See Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War, Vanderbilt University Press, 2012; Juliana Spahr, DuBois’ Telegram.

[23] U.S. poet Laureate Ada Limón has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide. Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate and who performed a poem at Biden’s inauguration, has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide.

---

∩

Joe Hall is a writer and educator. His books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (Black Ocean 2023) and People Finder, Buffalo (Cloak 2024). Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean, Postcolonial Studies, mercury firs, Best Buds! Collective, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. In Buffalo, he has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers.

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.

∩

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

∩