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[1] “Though smaller, relatively, than other anti-austerity campaigns by university students in London or Puerto Rico, the events of 2009-2010 at university campuses in California are some of the most vigorous examples of rebellion in the US in recent years – indeed, they were, until the unfolding events in Wisconsin, probably the only significant resistance to the crisis yet visible in the US.” Jasper Bernes, “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor,” in Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noys (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2011), 164-165. For anarcho-communist communiqués from the struggles, see After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California (2010). For Lyn Hejinian’s perspectives as an organizer at the University of California, Berkeley, see “Amor Fati,” in Ted Pearson et al., The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, part X (Detroit: This Press, 2010), 57-102; “Two Totalities of Crisis,” Remaking II: Long Revolution (blog), December 15, 2011, https://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2011/12/two-totalities-of-crisis.html; and “Wild Captioning,” in Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), 249-266.

[2] See “The 95 Cent Skool,” The Poetry Foundation, July 28, 2010, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/54752/the-95-cent-skool, for links to the 95 Cent Skool’s announcement and Rebecca Wolff’s critique in Fence; and Brian Ang, “A Report on the Durruti Free Skool,” Lana Turner Journal (blog), August 19, 2011, archived April 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20160430011440/https://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/angreport2.

[3] This, eds. Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten, 1971-1981; L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, 1978–1982; Eclipse, ed. Craig Dworkin, 2002–present, https://eclipsearchive.org; Try!, eds. David Brazil and Sara Larsen, 2008-2011; With + Stand, ed. Dan Thomas-Glass, 2008–2011, https://withplusstand.blogspot.com; and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, eds. Calvin Bedient and David Lau, 2008–present.

[4] “There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary: it’s a question of doing everything possible to make using them unnecessary. An insurrection is more about taking up arms and maintaining an ‘armed presence’ than it is about armed struggle.” The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 128. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), xiii. Slavoj Žižek, “Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe,” Democracy Now!, October 18, 2010, https://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/18/slavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti. Giorgio Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 82. “This shock of 1914 was - to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms - a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement which accompanied it…. Through this moment of despair, the Lenin who, via a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution, was born.” Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, by V.I. Lenin (London: Verso, 2002), 4.

[5] ARMED CELL 1: David Lau, Jeanine Webb, Roger Farr, Dereck Clemons, Ara Shirinyan, Wendy Trevino, Dan Thomas-Glass, and Brian Ang, with cover images by Paul Chan, first distributed at the Durruti Free Skool, Berkeley, August 12-14, 2011. Invisible Committee, “Find Each Other,” in Coming Insurrection, 97-102. All issues of ARMED CELL are at https://armedcell.blogspot.com.

[6]

2010 included the statewide March 4 protests that spilled out of campuses into their cities, a strengthening sense of other struggles produced by the economic crisis, and a migration of radicalized participants in the university protests to Oakland, including myself, drawn by its proximity to the actions at UCB and the Oscar Grant movement. Participants who were also poets produced politicized poetry projects influenced by these struggles, including July’s “95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics” organized by Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, an organizer of the originating walkout among many contributions, and an Oakland house reading that I organized in October by Jasper Bernes and David Lau, both participants in the protests. The reading drew an audience of fellow participants and Bay Area poets; Bernes read from We Are Nothing and So Can You and Lau read “Communism Today” and the other poems that I would publish in ARMED CELL. The reading provided experiences of recent struggles through poetic form: fellow participants were provided formal reflection through recognition of shared references, while Bay Area poets, who largely wouldn’t be involved in post-crisis struggles until the Occupy movement, were provided recent political experiences through formal expertise. Many participants and poets met for their first times: the reading was productive of the collective bonds among groups that would contribute to Occupy Oakland.

Brian Ang, “Post-Crisis Poetics: David Lau’s ‘Communism Today,’” in ARMED CELL 5, ed. Brian Ang (2013). David Lau, “Communism Today,” in ARMED CELL 1, ed. Brian Ang (2011). “We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement,” in After the Fall, 5.

[7] Brian Ang, “Manifesto #3: Poetry and Militancy,” in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 4, eds. Calvin Bedient and David Lau (2011), 82-83; “Manifesto #3” was added by the editors, with other manifestos from Josef Kaplan and Marilyn Chin. Poetry is not Enough is a pamphlet of poems I published with Joseph Atkins, Tiffany Denman, and Jeanine Webb after the 95 Cent Skool, its title being a slogan I drew from the 95 Cent Skool’s values. The slogan then lended itself to the name of a poetry and politics discussion group consisting of me, Atkins, Aaron Begg, Dereck Clemons, Denman, Erin Steinke, Wendy Trevino, and Webb; Clemons, Trevino, Webb, and I would be in ARMED CELL 1 and Begg would be in ARMED CELL 2. See Wendy Trevino, “The ‘We’ of a Position,” POETIC LABOR PROJECT (blog), October 28, 2011, https://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/wendy-trevino.html. See also Jeanine Webb, “Our Occupations (after the Occupations): Jeanine Webb,” The Poetry Foundation, April 30, 2012, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/64080/our-occupations-after-the-occupations-jeanine-webb.

Beginning in 2010, after the first wave of the California student occupation and protests which had their inception in 2009, some of my friends and I began to meet and discuss a poetic praxis supplemented by real direct action and theory of political economy. A poetic praxis that aligns itself with labor. A poetic praxis that, in the tradition of the Situationists, recognizes that Poetry is not Enough, by itself, to change the material. A poetics which seeks to envision and confront the collective future, to share both poems and disagreements and actions in a real politics of friendship.

See also Steven Zultanski, “Wendy Trevino’s New Collection of Poems Insists that Culture – and Perhaps Especially Poetry – is Not Enough,” Frieze, September 20, 2018, https://www.frieze.com/article/wendy-trevinos-new-collection-poems-insists-culture-and-perhaps-especially-poetry-not-enough.

The focus on interpersonal connectedness in post-Occupy, post-crisis poetry – and at the centre of Wendy Trevino’s new collection of poems, Cruel Fiction, which was published this month by Commune Editions – is not a sentimental celebration of abstract unity, nor a daydream about an undefined different world lurking within our own…. The urgency of such a project, in the face of state violence, is why Trevino adamantly insists that culture – and perhaps especially poetry – is not enough, even though it is a way to represent our latent potential to ourselves.

[8] See “*** WORKING *** WRITING *** FIGHTING *** : SEPTEMBER 4 in OAKLAND,” POETIC LABOR PROJECT (blog), August 31, 2011, https://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/08/working-writing-fighting-9411-in.html.

[9]

[T]o grasp the three logics behind the slogan “OCCUPY EVERYTHING DEMAND NOTHING,” I want to travel backward to one of the immediate and domestic roots of the Occupy movement – specifically the US student occupation movement that began in New York in late 2008 and peaked in California in 2009. One reason for such a return is that communities of struggle which formed in those situations would contribute significantly to #OWS [Occupy Wall Street] and especially #OO [Occupy Oakland]; that the two epicenters of the Occupy movement would appear precisely in the places of the two student occupation waves is manifestly significant. But another reason to return is that the mythical moment of inception for the Occupy movement—Adbusters’ call—itself drew heavily from the experiences of 2009 at the University of California, and from a single document circulating in that moment.

Joshua Clover, “The Coming Occupation,” in We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, eds. Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 95.

[10] See “Scores of Poets Report on Occupy Oakland,” The Poetry Foundation, November 1, 2011, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/62296/scores-of-poets-report-on-occupy-oakland-, which includes links to reports by me and David Lau, Andrew Kenower’s recording of a poetry reading, and David Brazil on San Francisco Bay Area poets’ involvement. I read Lau at the reading:

Hi, I’m Brian. The poem I really wanted to read today was a poem by Amiri Baraka called “Against Bourgeois Art” but my printer, I don’t have a printer, I couldn’t find a printer to print it out so, I can’t remember my password on the iPad either so, I need a laptop, but I went to the [Occupy Oakland] library and I was really surprised to find the poetry journal that I edit in the library, so I’ll read something from this journal called ARMED CELL. And the poem I’m going to read is by my friend David Lau, he’s a poet from Santa Cruz. We got to know each other over the last couple years in student movement things. This poem is called “Money Shot Through Glass Crane Floor.”

Andrew Kenower, “Group Poetry Reading - Oscar Grant Plaza - 10.16.11,” recorded October 16, 2011, a voice box, archived April 6, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20120406115953/https://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/2011/10/group-poetry-reading-oscar-grant-plaza-101611.html, 29:39.

[11] Roger Farr, “Six Bay Area Poets with Varying Degrees of Affiliation with the “Six Bay Area Poets with Varying Degrees of Affiliation with the 95 Cent Durruti School of Social Poetics” Durruti School of Social Poetics,” The Capilano Review 3.18 (2012), 59.

[12] ARMED CELL 2: Josef Kaplan, Aaron Begg, Cecily Nicholson, Brian Ang, David Lau, Stephen Collis, Laura Elrick, and Tom Comitta, with cover images by Daniel Marcus, first distributed at the Josef Kaplan, Brian Ang, and Laura Elrick reading for The Multifarious Array, New York City, January 20, 2012.

[13] “Community and its Discontents” with Brian Ang, Anne Boyer, and Linh Dinh, panel organized by Josef Kaplan, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, New York City, May 7, 2012; “Totality and Method,” talk presented at Unnameable Books, New York City, February 26, 2013, organized by Genji Amino; and “The Oakland Commune: Poetry, Politics and the Police” with Brian Ang, David Buuck, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr, panel organized by Stephen Collis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, April 12, 2013.

[14] ARMED CELL 3: Steven Zultanski, Maya Weeks, Eric Linsker, Nicholas Komodore, Jeff Derksen, Brian Ang, and Lyn Hejinian, with cover images by Coupe L’état, first distributed at the Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s conference, University of Maine, Orono, June 27 to July 1, 2012. ARMED CELL 4: Maya Weeks, Joe Luna, Brad Flis, Brian Ang, Danielle LaFrance, and Genji Amino, with cover images by Coupe, first distributed at the Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Clover, and Brian Ang reading at the Studio One Art Center, Oakland, February 1, 2013.

[15] Brian Ang, “Textuality and Annihilation: Joshua Clover’s ‘Gilded Age,’” in ARMED CELL 1, ed. Brian Ang (2011); Brian Ang, “From Pre-Symbolic to Totality: On Method” and “Totality Canto 8,” in ARMED CELL 2, ed. Brian Ang (2012); Brian Ang, “Language Writing and the Present,” in ARMED CELL 3, ed. Brian Ang (2012); and Brian Ang, “Democracy is not for the People,” in ARMED CELL 4, ed. Brian Ang (2013). Josef Kaplan, Democracy is not for the People (New York: Truck Books, 2012).

[16] ARMED CELL 5: Wendy Trevino and Dereck Clemons, Brian Ang, Eric Linsker, David Lau, Katy Bohinc, and Alejandro Ventura, with cover images by Kern Haug, first distributed at the Brian Ang and Kern Haug drums and text performance at the Breathing Works installation, New York City, August 9, 2013. Ang, “Post-Crisis Poetics: David Lau’s ‘Communism Today.’”

[17] See “After the Crest, part I: What to Do while the Dust Is Settling,” CrimethInc., September 9, 2013, https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/09/after-the-crest-part-i-what-to-do-while-the-dust-is-settling, on post-crisis struggles in Oakland, Barcelona, and Montréal. The reflection on Occupy Oakland was written the same month as ARMED CELL 5’s publication; see Some Oakland Antagonists, “After the Crest, part II: The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,” CrimethInc., August 2013, https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/10/after-the-crest-part-ii-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oakland-commune.

[18] Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 5: Arts of the City conference, Wayne State University, Detroit, October 3-6, 2013. Josef Kaplan, “from Ex Machina,” in ARMED CELL 2, ed. Brian Ang (2012). “Learning from Oakland: Occupy Poetics” also included Sara Larsen, “The Praxis of the Commons: Poetics, the Public School, and the Polis/ce of Oakland” and David Lau, “Poetics in a Wave of Struggles: Passages and Limits of Contemporary Bay Area Practices.” “Learning from Oakland: Occupy Poetics” was part of a trio of panels organized by Watten, the other two being “Learning from Berlin: Hybrid Strategies” with Natasha K. Foreman; Damir Cavar and Malgorzata E. Cavar; and Uljana Wolf; and “Learning from Shanghai: Sinofuturisms” with Jonathan Stalling, Matthew Hart, and Barrett Watten. See Barrett Watten, “Event 39: Learning from X (ASAP),” barrettwatten.net, September 19, 2013, https://barrettwatten.net/events/event-39-learning-from-x-asap/2013/09. The conference was the same weekend as the Poetry and/or Revolution events in California, gathering Jasper Bernes, David Buuck, Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Jill Richards, Juliana Spahr, and Wendy Trevino from the San Francisco Bay Area and Sean Bonney, Jennifer Cooke, Danny Hayward, Francesca Lisette, Marianne Morris, and Keston Sutherland from the United Kingdom; see revolution and/or poetry | october 3, 4, and 5th, https://revolutionandorpoetry.wordpress.com.

[19] Visual Activism symposium, Brava Theater, San Francisco, March 14-15, 2014; see “Visual Activism,” SFMOMA, https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/visual-activism. See also Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Poetry and Politics in Five Pieces,” Occupy 2012 (blog), May 8, 2012, https://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/05/08/poetry-and-politics-in-five-pieces, on Joshua Clover, Thom Donovan, Anne Boyer, Brian Ang, David Buuck, Anelise Chen, Jeanine Webb, Lisa Robertson, and Ana Božičević.

[20] Barrett Watten, “Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia, From Leningrad to Occupy,” in Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, eds. David Ayers et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2015), 112-115.

[21] ARMED CELL 6: Jasper Bernes, Barrett Watten, Natalie Knight, Bill Marsh, Carrie Hunter, Aaron Winslow, and Stephen Voyce, with cover images by Mayakov+sky, first distributed at the Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 6 reading at the Studio One Art Center, Oakland, January 26, 2014. Barrett Watten, “Note to Zone,” in ARMED CELL 6, ed. Brian Ang (2014). See also Barrett Watten, “Collective Autobiography: The Grand Piano and the Politics of Community,” in Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 136.

A better end of The Grand Piano after publication did occur, however, with two performances in the Bay Area in November 2011. Coinciding with the upsurge of political activity around the Occupy movement at Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, the events reinterpreted the collective practice of The Grand Piano through forms of collective participation in these events. Many younger writers interested in The Grand Piano were active in the Occupy movement, which guaranteed the Bay Area performances would be received in present terms rather than as a monument to the past.

Jasper Bernes, “from We Are Nothing and So Can You,” in ARMED CELL 6, ed. Brian Ang (2014). See also Jasper Bernes, “Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy,” The New Inquiry, September 17, 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/square-and-circle-the-logic-of-occupy.

[22] David Lau, “Avant-Garde Cooptation,” The Poetry Foundation (blog), April 7, 2014, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/70242/avant-garde-cooptation. On post-crisis Russian avant-garde poetry, see Marijeta Bozovic, Avant-Garde Post–: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023), which quotes Lau’s passage on 63. On post-crisis United Kingdom poetry, see the Poetry and/or Revolution United Kingdom participants above. On an activist poetic avant-garde’s emergence in the Bay Area, see Hejinian, “The Sneeze,” in Allegorical Moments, 188-219. Lau’s journal Lana Turner would publish an Avant-Garde Forum later that year, its most well-known piece being Cathy Park Hong’s anti-avant-garde “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.”

[23] See Ang, “Language Writing.” See also Brian Ang and Caleb Beckwith, “Brian Ang with Caleb Beckwith,” The Conversant, November 2016, archived September 7, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20170907101221/http://theconversant.org/?p=10688.

To compare these social bonds with the Language writers, they came of age during the Vietnam War’s political crisis and that period’s civil rights and university struggles, influencing their political critiques of language and reference related to the government and the media’s administration of information, and matured into an recognizable, organized group in the post-1973 economic crisis period; the 2008 crisis crystallized the stagnation of systemic capital accumulation since that crisis. Also comparable are the New American poets’ emergence in the post-World War II period and the Objectivists’ emergence in the post-1929 economic crisis period. Magazines such as This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were significant in connecting the Language writers’ multiplicity of aesthetics and social groups, with concentrations emerging first in San Francisco and then New York and with extended influence in Vancouver, similarly developing plural, overlapping solidarities; the dialog with Language poetics in ARMED CELL reflects these common concentrations, and I’ve published Language writers in it as an engagement with their prior poetics toward investigating a poetics adequate to the present, as the Language writers published and engaged prior writers and poetics toward investigating a poetics adequate to their time.

ARMED CELL 7: Joshua Clover, Angela Hume, Dereck Clemons, Olive Blackburn, Ted Rees, and Kenneth Goldsmith, with cover images by Mayakov+sky Platform, first distributed at the East Bay Poetry Summit, Berkeley and Oakland, July 2-6, 2014. ARMED CELL 8: Anne Lesley Selcer, Sean Bonney, Donato Mancini, Sara Larsen, Bruce Andrews, and David Buuck, with cover images by Mayakov+sky Platform, first distributed at the Brian Ang, Donato Mancini, and Anne Lesley Selcer reading at La Commune Café and Bookstore, Oakland, February 27, 2015.

[24] Brian Ang, “A response by Brian Ang,” in “Can poetry have a socio-political impact?” Quick Question, Jacket2, ed. Katie L. Price, February 11, 2015, https://jacket2.org/commentary/can-poetry-have-socio-political-impact. The other respondents were Charles Bernstein, Michael Helsem, and Rachel Zolf.

[25] See “About,” Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015, https://berkeleypoetryconference.wordpress.com/about, and Heriberto Yépez, “La crisis de la poesía gringa se expande / Heriberto Yépez,” Venepoetics (blog), June 6, 2015, https://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2015/06/la-crisis-de-la-poesia-gringa-se.html, which includes a chronology leading to the cancellation; Yépez was the first to pull out of the Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015.

[26] See “A Description of the Conference,” CROSSTALK, COLOR, COMPOSITION: A Berkeley Poetry Conference, June 1, 2015, https://crosstalkcolorcomposition.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/a-description-of-the-conference. Of the original twenty-four invited participants to the Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015, eighteen did not become part of Crosstalk, Color, Composition: Anne Boyer, Joshua Clover, Timothy Donnelly, Graham Foust, Peter Gizzi, Cathy Park Hong, Fady Joudah, Aaron Kunin, Mark McMorris, Fred Moten, Christopher Nealon, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Vanessa Place, Claudia Rankine, Ariana Reines, Juliana Spahr, Simone White, and Heriberto Yépez. Six originally invited participants to the Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015 became part of Crosstalk, Color, Composition: CAConrad, Judith Goldman, Duriel Harris, Javier Huerta, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ronaldo Wilson. Eleven new participants became part of Crosstalk, Color, Composition: Brian Ang, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Tonya Foster, Roberto Harrison, Douglas Kearney, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Hugo García Manríquez, Farid Matuk, Craig Santos Perez, giovanni singleton, and Truong Tran. See “Participants,” Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015, May 1, 2015, https://berkeleypoetryconference.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/participants.

[27] “Seminars,” CROSSTALK, COLOR, COMPOSITION: A Berkeley Poetry Conference, June 1, 2015, https://crosstalkcolorcomposition.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/seminars.

[28] See “Post-Crisis Poetics seminar texts,” ed. Brian Ang (2015), https://crosstalkcolorcomposition.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/brian-ang-post-crisis-poetics-seminar-texts.pdf.

[29] Brian Ang to Charles Altieri, email, June 25, 2015, in response to his request for my text. UC Berkeley recorded the seminar but I have not been able to access it.

[30] Heriberto Yépez, “Confession and Testimony: on the New Berkeley Poetry Conference,” Lana Turner Journal (blog), June 18-20, 2015, archived January 2, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20170102202516/http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/confession-and-testimony-on-the-new-berkeley-poetry-conference.

[31] Heriberto Yépez, “La conferencia de poesía en Berkeley / Heriberto Yépez,” Venepoetics (blog), June 28, 2015, https://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2015/06/la-conferencia-de-poesia-en-berkeley.html.

[32] ARMED CELL 9: Rob Halpern, James Yeary, alex cruse, Judith Goldman, David Lau, and Steven Seidenberg, with cover images by Ethan Rafal, first distributed at the Brian Ang, alex cruse, and David Lau reading for Hearts Desire, Omni Oakland Commons, October 10, 2015. Brian Ang, “Post-Crisis Militant Word,” ARMED CELL (blog), October 14, 2015, https://armedcell.blogspot.com/2015/10/post-crisis-militant-word.html. See Jeff Derksen, “The Militant Word,” Post-Crisis Poetics, ed. Brian Ang, April 5, 2017, https://postcrisispoetics.blogspot.com/2017/04/jeff-derksen-militant-word.html.

[33] Poetics and Precarity, eds. Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), includes the conference’s schedule, seminar topics, seminar participants, and seminar paper titles on 206-215.

[34] ARMED CELL 10: Brian Ang, alex cruse, Anne Lesley Selcer, Cassandra Troyan, Maya Weeks, and David Lau, with cover images by alex cruse, first distributed in Brian Ang and Jeff Derksen’s “Post-Crisis Militant Word” seminar at the Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years conference, University at Buffalo, April 9, 2016. Brian Ang, “Post-Crisis Poetics,” in ARMED CELL 10, ed. Brian Ang (2016).

[35] Ibid. See Lau, “Communism Today”; Kaplan, “from Ex Machina”; Ang, “Totality Canto 8”; Steven Zultanski, “from Untitled Poem for Police Log and Minute Hand,” in ARMED CELL 3, ed. Brian Ang (2012); Maya Weeks, “from Eastbound/Northbound,” in ARMED CELL 4, ed. Brian Ang (2013); Wendy Trevino and Dereck Clemons, “A BEGINNING...” in ARMED CELL 5, ed. Brian Ang (2013); Bernes, “from We Are Nothing”; Joshua Clover, “Questions of the Contemporary,” in ARMED CELL 7, ed. Brian Ang (2014); Anne Lesley Selcer, “An accelerated alphabet…” in ARMED CELL 8, ed. Brian Ang (2015); and Rob Halpern, “Hoc Est Corpus,” in ARMED CELL 9, ed. Brian Ang (2015).

[36] Ang, “Post-Crisis Poetics.”

[37] See Sean Bonney, “SoSe 16: Post-Crisis Poetics,” April 21, 2016, https://archiv.vv.fu-berlin.de/ss16/en/lv/0024d_MA120/279492/217112. See also Sean Bonney and Stephen Collis, “We Are An Other: Poetry, Commons, Subjectivity,” in Toward. Some. Air.: remarks on poetics of mad affect, militancy, feminism, demotic rhythms, emptying, intervention, reluctance, indigeneity, immediacy, lyric conceptualism, commons, pastoral margins, desire, ambivalence, disability, the digital, and other practices, eds. Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2015), 282-293. Bonney, 287: “I can’t speak for others, but I didn’t see how my writing could stay the same after 2008: the crisis, the Arab Spring, the ‘era of riots,’ the rise of the non-subject.” Collis, 289: “Regarding the ‘avant-garde’ in the post-2008 moment, I am stumped by some poets maintaining (the old Adornian idea) that we can ‘resist by form alone.’” In De’Ath’s PhD thesis, she writes, “The concept of crisis in contemporary poetry is a central topic in politically salient and pivotal studies by Christopher Nealon, Ben Hickman, and Jasper Bernes; as well as many essays by Joshua Clover…As yet, relatively little attention has been paid in Anglophone poetry criticism to how economic crisis figures in poetic work by, or about, non-cis-male or racialized people.” Amy De’Ath, “Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics” (PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2017), 27, https://summit.sfu.ca/_flysystem/fedora/2025-07/etd10106_ADeAth.pdf. Regarding the latter, this essay demonstrates the centrality of economic crisis in my and David Lau’s works. See also David Lau and Brian Ang, “Crisis, Struggles, Poetry: David Lau interviewed by Brian Ang,” in Tripwire 13: Dialogues, ed. David Buuck (2017), 73-78.

[38] ARMED CELL 11: alex cruse, Paul Ebenkamp, Cheena Marie Lo, Andrew Joron, David Buuck, Andrea Abi-Karam, and Brian Ang, with cover images by alex cruse, first distributed at the David Lau, Brian Ang, and Molly Bendall reading at the Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles, October 29, 2016. The issue included my piece “ARMED ASSEMBLAGE CELL CONSTRUCTION” which quoted from every contributor in each of ARMED CELL’s eleven issues at that time; it would form part of my piece “Writing the World-System” in the Post-Crisis Poetics series. Ang and Beckwith, “Brian Ang with Caleb Beckwith.”

[39] Post-Crisis Poetics, ed. Brian Ang (2017), https://postcrisispoetics.blogspot.com. Blackburn, Clemons, cruse, Derksen, Halpern, Hunter, Kaplan, Komodore, Trevino, Troyan, Webb, Zultanski, and I were contributors to ARMED CELL; Chen, Dimos, Eisen-Martin, Harrison, Iijima, Leong, Low, Marshall, Nealon, Perez, Roberts, Sogumi, and Stewart had not been contributors; and cruse, Derksen, Dimos, Iijima, Komodore, Marshall, Stewart, Webb, and I were participants in the “Post-Crisis Militant Word” seminar.

[40] Josef Kaplan, “Friends Forever,” Post-Crisis Poetics, ed. Brian Ang, April 12, 2017, https://postcrisispoetics.blogspot.com/2017/04/josef-kaplan-friends-forever.html.

[41] Steven Zultanski, “Steven Zultanski,” Post-Crisis Poetics, ed. Brian Ang, April 25, 2017, https://postcrisispoetics.blogspot.com/2017/04/steven-zultanski.html.

[42] ARMED CELL 12: Shane Book, Zack Haber, Danielle LaFrance, Michael Leong, Emji Spero, and Caleb Beckwith, with cover images by Mayakov+sky Platform, first distributed at Desert Poetry, Landers and Joshua Tree, April 7-9, 2017. Of ARMED CELL’s most consistent sources of contributors from New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Vancouver, contributors from New York City were Genji Amino, Bruce Andrews, Katy Bohinc, Laura Elrick, Kenneth Goldsmith, Josef Kaplan, Eric Linsker, Aaron Winslow, and Steven Zultanski; contributors from the San Francisco Bay Area were Andrea Abi-Karam, Brian Ang, Caleb Beckwith, Aaron Begg, Jasper Bernes, Olive Blackburn, David Buuck, Paul Chan, Dereck Clemons, Joshua Clover, Tom Comitta, alex cruse, Paul Ebenkamp, Zack Haber, Kern Haug, Lyn Hejinian, Angela Hume, Carrie Hunter, Andrew Joron, Nicholas Komodore, Sara Larsen, Cheena Marie Lo, Daniel Marcus, Mayakov+sky, Ethan Rafal, Ted Rees, Steven Seidenberg, Anne Lesley Selcer, Emji Spero, Dan Thomas-Glass, Wendy Trevino, Cassandra Troyan, and Maya Weeks; and contributors from Vancouver were Shane Book, Stephen Collis, Coupe, Jeff Derksen, Roger Farr, Natalie Knight, Danielle LaFrance, Donato Mancini, and Cecily Nicholson.

[43] See Brian Ang, “A Report on Can Art and Politics Be Thought?” Lana Turner Journal (blog), June 9, 2011, archived April 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20160430031209/http://lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/angreport. Clover’s presentation was published as “Georgic for the World-System,” in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 5, eds. Calvin Bedient and David Lau (2012), 156, 158. My and Clover’s common concern with and different approaches to totality would lead to his Red Epic (Oakland: Commune Editions, 2015) and my The Totality Cantos (Berkeley: Atelos, 2022). For a reflection of commonalities and differences, see Joshua Clover and Brian Ang, “A Conversation: Joshua Clover and Brian Ang,” January 21, 2013, https://studioonereadingseries.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-conversation-joshua-clover-and-brian.html.

[44] In her piece for The Totality Cantos’ release event, Hejinian wrote, “I would propose that The Totality Cantos is a prolonged and indefatigable act of rebellion, carried out in the sphere of aesthetics (insofar as we limit ourselves to calling the work a poem) and, despite the foregrounding of the work’s formal structure, informed by ideas closer to anarchism than to, say, revolution, which virtually always culminates in the formation of a powerful and usually autocratic state”; a contentious claim. Lyn Hejinian, “Lyn Hejinian on Publishing The Totality Cantos,” August 20, 2022, https://totalitycantos.net/eastwind.html#hejinian.

[45] Ang, “Preface: Totality and Method,” in Totality Cantos, 9-11. On Braxton, see Brian Ang, “Trance Sequence: On Anthony Braxton and Method,” presentation at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, March 23, 2012, https://litseen.com/brian-ang. On these concepts, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo Navis, 2012), Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001). I am not the first to use the term assemblage poetics but I believe I am the first to begin developing it. See Bryan Thao Worra, “Asian-American Assemblage Poetics @ &NOW Festival of New Writing 2011: Tomorrowland Forever!” On The Other Side Of The Eye (blog), October 13, 2011, https://thaoworra.blogspot.com/2011/10/asian-american-assemblage-poetics.html.

[46] Brian Ang, “Assemblage Poetics,” Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry 36: Art, ed. Jessica L. Wilkinson (2022), 147-154, 156-158. See Ang, Totality Cantos; Caleb Beckwith, Political Subject (New York: Roof, 2018); a.j. carruthers, AXIS Book 1: Areal (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2014); Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2023); alex cruse, CONTRAVERSE (Oakland: Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017); Paul Ebenkamp, Late Hiss (Reno: Black Rock Press, 2021); Angela Hume, Interventions for Women (Oakland: Omnidawn Publishing, 2021); Carrie Hunter, Vibratory Milieu (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021); Michael Leong, “from Disorientations,” in ARMED CELL 12, ed. Brian Ang (2017); and Divya Victor, CURB (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021). My, Beckwith, cruse, Ebenkamp, and Leong’s practices were published in ARMED CELL; Comitta, Hume, and Hunter were contributors to it; cruse, Hunter, Leong, and I contributed to the Post-Crisis Poetics series; and carruthers and Victor had not been contributors.

[47] Assemblage Sampler, ed. Brian Ang, 2023, https://totalitycantos.net/sampler.html. Brian Ang, “Multiaxial Poetics,” in Assemblage Sampler, ed. Brian Ang, 2023, https://totalitycantos.net/sampler.html. Brian Ang, “Totality of Music” and “From A Thousand Records: 151-165,” in Assemblage Sampler, ed. Brian Ang, 2023, https://totalitycantos.net/sampler.html#ang.

[48] a j carruthers, “How AXIS may relate to Brian Ang’s The Totality Cantos and the idea of an ‘assemblage poetics,’” in Assemblage Sampler, ed. Brian Ang, 2023, https://totalitycantos.net/sampler.html#carruthers.

[49] David Lau, “Avant-Garde Then and Now: 2023 Poetry Chronicle,” in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 16, eds. Calvin Bedient and David Lau (2024), 130, 133-134. Lau and I have been consistent proponents of the avant-garde. See Brian Ang and Cheryl Truong, “Interview with Cheryl Truong for Eastwind Books of Berkeley,” 2022, https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p4217/The_Totality_Cantos.html. “Avant-garde means opening new possibilities. I’m not satisfied with the way things are, so that’s a permanent task.” See also Brian Ang and Alex Abalos, “The Totality Cantos: Brian Ang and Alex Abalos on the Avant-Garde,” August 20, 2022, https://totalitycantos.net/eastwind.html.

[50] carruthers, “How AXIS may relate.” See also Brian Ang and a.j. carruthers, “Totality, Axis, Music, Assemblage,” Tripwire 21: Dialogues, ed. David Buuck (2025), 280-300. Toward assembling a global critical poetics, to add to the resources on post-crisis Russian and United Kingdom poetries above, for post-crisis Australian poetry, see Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, eds. Daniel Benjamin and Claire Marie Stancek (Artarmon: Giramondo; Berkeley: Tuumba, 2016); for post-crisis Irish poetry, see Robert Kiely, Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and Irish Literature (punctum books, 2020); and see also Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis, eds. John Cunningham et al. (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017). For American books that were considered, or collected works that were, in my “Post-Crisis Poetics” and “Assemblage Poetics” pieces, see Josef Kaplan, Democracy; Joshua Clover, Red Epic; Jasper Bernes, We Are Nothing and So Can You (Oakland: Commune Editions, 2015); Rob Halpern, Common Place (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015); David Lau, Still Dirty: Poems 2009-2015 (Oakland: Commune Editions, 2016); alex cruse, CONTRAVERSE; Caleb Beckwith, Political Subject; Anne Lesley Selcer, Sun Cycle (Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019); Carrie Hunter, Vibratory Milieu; Paul Ebenkamp, Late Hiss; Divya Victor, Curb; Angela Hume, Interventions; Brian Ang, Totality Cantos; and Tom Comitta, Nature Book.



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