Searching for the Commons through Precarity and Crisis: American Poetics since 9/11

   


            Over the last twenty-five years, we have lived through a long slow professionalization of poetry that has coincided with U.S. economic decline and the gradual rise of post-9/11 fascism. For us, the contemporary poetry that matters tries make sense of the history of the recent past, a past that’s been propagandized, memory-holed, and co-opted to the point it can be difficult to remember, much less reconstruct a historical narrative about these times and their psychic darkness. As we map in this essay, this kind of political poetry wasn’t always so easy to find or to read because of how deeply the Cold War cultural politics that prevailed in the U.S. since our childhoods divorced emotional expression from politics in art. This essay tracks key moments in our lives as poets during a quarter century, looking for the major shifts that led us to this perilous current moment. We look at the various forms that privatization has taken in American life since 2001—hypergentrification of cities, the hollowing out of universities, the commodification of identity, the use of social media as a tool for surveillance and manipulation—and its effects on poetry. [1] We cover a lot of ground in hopes of making connections between disparate time periods, but also because these moments reflect our conversations over the last twenty years. We met in a creative writing M.A. program in Philadelphia in 2005 and have been talking about poetry and politics ever since. One of us grew up in Queens and one of us in Philadelphia, and both of us were influenced early on by the avant-garde and experimental strains of 20th-century US poetry, particularly DIY aesthetics.

Though much of what we write here is bleak, we hope this memory work can uncover not only the horrors we’re moving through but the ruptures that open opportunities for other ways of feeling, writing, and living beyond the exhausted bankrupt liberalism that we’ve been told for much of our lives is the only viable option in art and in life. In the world we grew up in, poetry was largely considered irrelevant and a pastime for some rarified corner or the upper classes. The predominant logic was: if you’re a poet, you should only write and talk to poets, those who can understand the narrow codes and conventions of the genre, and be happy with that insularity and cultural irrelevance. It was considered gauche to write political poetry if you were a serious literary poet. Though the last two decades have unmoored the culture we grew up in as the children of baby boomers and markedly deteriorated the conditions for surviving, let alone making art in this country, the crisis has also represented a definitive break between poetry’s twentieth-century past and its present.




The planes had already hit the towers by the time I went to the campus center to watch the clips on television. Footage of the second plane exploding into the south tower as the north tower was already falling played on a loop all day and many days after that. Everyone watched it play again and again as if hypnotized. I remember thinking in a panicked haze that nothing would be the same after this. And indeed, everything was very different after that. George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani suddenly became national heroes and wars were launched in Afghanistan and Iraq despite the fact that little evidence linked the attack to any nation. So-called compassionate conservatism gave way to the torture memos. Every person with a foreign accent could now be a suspected terrorist and any person in any country in the world could be kidnapped and brought back to the U.S. to be tortured. Around 2002, my stepdad was driving me back to school and we were listening to a story about the U.S. not being able to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and I said, “is this the stupid war you wanted?” He retorted, “war is great for the economy.” It was the beginning of my understanding that war was in fact its own reason. I also remember the hippest kids at my fancy liberal arts college dressing and acting like Reganites in those years. Violent untruths were in the air and most people were acting like it could never touch us. I remember my mother and stepfather calling everyone weird. My mother would scrunch up her nose and say “X is weird…” and my stepfather would say “they’re a total mental patient.” To be normal was the norm and to fall in line was good. Every time I came down to Queens from school, all my old haunts like Dojo were gone and it felt like increasingly there were no real places to be. Britney Spears was always on the radio and she seemed hopelessly bland and blank to me. I didn’t know until later that she was just dancing in a gilded cage like so many public figures of that era.

In 2002, Amiri Baraka was lambasted by the mainstream media for his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a long poem that lists atrocities carried out by the U.S. around the world. Baraka had performed the poem at the Dodge Poetry Festival that fall, and it became instant fodder for the jingoistic post-9/11 media, which fixated on a few lines from the poem that insinuated that Israel may have known about the attacks on the World Trade Center before they were carried out. Liberal and conservative journalists alike accused Baraka, who at the time was the poet laureate of New Jersey, of antisemitism. Baraka defended himself on CNN as Connie Chung tried to grill him. The governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, demanded that Baraka resign as the poet laureate. He refused, and so New Jersey eliminated the position of poet laureate.

The attacks on Baraka felt very personal. I was twenty-three and had just fallen in love with poetry a few years before, in college, where I read Baraka for the first time. Poetry opened up my sense of what’s possible, and the history of the Beats and the New York School and the Black Arts movement had captured my imagination. Those writers were legendary to me. And suddenly these bootlicking columnists were trashing one of the greatest poets of all time. I wrote to a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer who had joined in the chorus against Baraka, and we argued back and forth over email. I wanted to know why these so-called journalists were insisting that any criticism of the US was simply because some people “hated freedom.” The answer, of course, was that the journalists were racist and their job was to normalize state violence. I was naïve. Part of me still believed in the inherent goodness of the USA that is taught in school, so in the early 2000s I was shocked by Afghanistan, Iraq, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib. I hated George W. Bush and thought his supporters were idiots. But like most people, I knew hardly anything of the imperialist history in that Baraka poem.

I admired how Baraka stood up for himself in that climate, how he absolutely refused the terms of the pundits and politicians. He kept telling people to look back at the poem, to read the poem, to think. In that moment, he suddenly had a larger platform than most poets, even of his caliber, ever do in this country—and he used that moment to convey the truth and to show poets how to be. And that type of poem, which engages history while questioning political norms, was what I was looking for. Luckily, I continued to find it in the Philly poetry scene of the 2000s. Through my 20s, I realized that I was learning more about history from talking to poets in bars and coffee shops and apartments than I had ever learned in school. And so I began to understand more clearly the Cold War indoctrination of US education. In other words, it was both poetry and the social sphere of poetry that helped me see outside of the culture I was in. Poetry taught me how to analyze propaganda.




By the time we started publishing our work in the 2000s, experimental poetry was in the process of being institutionalized through anthologies like American Hybrid (2009). The Language injunction to use poetry to explore the nature of language itself had become a kind of dogma if you moved in certain circles. While we were initially drawn to experimental poetry precisely because we wanted to explore the nature of language, we wondered why matters of lived political struggle ended up feeling so alien to the “post-avant” poetry of the period or why discussions of politics were so quickly grounded in matters of personal virtue. [2] Because modernism still felt somewhat relevant and alive then, there was a huge critical hunger for poetic movements and groups though no very significant vanguard group emerged. We would hazard to guess that this lack of recognizable poetic movement was partially because in the twentieth century cities had been the great grounds for the creation of such vanguards. In the 2000s, cities were being gentrified beyond recognition and the eccentric community that cheap apartments within walking distance from your friends could foster was becoming a pipe dream.

The experimental poetry of the late 90s and 2000s, what is sometimes referred to as post-avant, was marked by a kind of impersonal and referentially-dense opacity that I couldn’t quite connect to. I knew I liked poetry and went to lots of readings but there wasn’t a lot of work I felt connected to. I was waiting for something to speak to me in a way that constellated my sense that something in daily life was not right with a sense that experiment was a necessity for describing what was going on, rather than a dogma. A former teacher came to visit my M.A. program in Philly as a guest speaker and said she was disappointed at how conventional my writing had become. At the time, I was struggling with being tossed into the precarity of the real world on a stipend that didn’t fully pay my rent and really wanting to narrate how adrift I felt, but not being able to square this desire with the experimentalism of the work I admired when I was an undergrad. For a few years, the sense that I had disappointed my former teacher haunted me. But when I look back, I realize that there just weren’t a lot of poets in school who could teach me what I wanted to do. The notion of apprenticeship within an institution felt like a dead end. Around this time, I started going to a lot of readings in Philly and experiencing what a DIY literary scene was like. There were poets of multiple ages, there were poets on the verge of homelessness, there were poets saying really untoward things, there were poets saying really right-on things. It was not a utopia by any means, especially for a young woman poet. And yet, there was more room for play than inside an institution. While I was still waiting for someone’s work to sweep me up, I was getting more interested in the work of my peers and seeing their work grow and change from reading to reading.




In 2007, the year before the economy crashed, the air was crackling with fear. There was a sense that a really big crisis was coming for many months. I had just gotten out of the MA program and work was scarce. I was supporting myself and my boyfriend and I felt that if I didn’t get a full-time job, things were going to get hairy. I took the train from Queens to Manhattan every day to work temp jobs, shuffled from one midtown office to the next. The buildings I temped in felt moderately less cheery than tombs but sometimes under those fluorescent lights, I’d squeeze out a poem on company time. By the time Barack Obama swept onto the national political scene, the crisis was in full tilt and huge swaths of the country were being foreclosed on. The war economy and its cheap mortgage rates had bottomed out into a crisis bigger than the Great Depression. The full-spectrum dominance that the Republican party had exercised post-9/11 was corroded by growing dissatisfaction with the economy as the government bailed out the major banks from the subprime mortgage crisis in September 2008.

Much of the poetry world during the time of the 2008 crisis was obsessed with crossing over into the mainstream. It seemed that poets who had once scorned publications like The New Yorker were now eager to get in. In 2010, Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Versed and suddenly the culture of literary prizes seemed to become good again, at least in the discourse of the tail end of the poetry blog era. There was a sense that institutions, even ones that had risen from a DIY ethos, were becoming more important than ever before and to be unaffiliated with one was to exist as something akin to a hungry ghost wandering the city’s icy streets in winter. In those years, I walked the streets of the city, unaffiliated, the loneliness howling through me. After six years away from New York, it felt that everything I had liked about the city–the ability to talk to strangers and end up in weird but interesting places–had been surgically removed. I would try to go to readings but paying the cover and then getting there only to find no one to talk to and a long train ride back to Queens mostly felt pointless. I was looking for community but often it felt like even the people I knew before moving away were too walled off to talk to even when I did run into them. When an event like the book release party for My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer was held at the Poetry Project in 2009, I attended as part of a packed house. Though the atmosphere was as unfriendly as ever, the genuine excitement about Spicer’s work and how transgressive it felt after all those decades was palpable. The wild gay world of the San Francisco Renaissance, anchored by bars and parks and the public university, seemed like another imperfect yet much richer universe. In those years, I constantly wondered whether poetry’s history would always feel so much more interesting than its present.




For many of us, the Occupy movement was an education like no other. On September 17th, 2011, I happened to be in Durham, North Carolina to give a reading at Duke and hang out with my friend and co-author. At the bar after the reading poets briefly speculated what might come of the occupation of Wall Street, which had begun that day. None of us knew how rapidly it would intensify and spread across the country, the world. When it started in Philly, maybe two weeks later, I was struck by the carnivalesque atmosphere. Art and music seemed naturally a part of the action. A creative impulse underlay the insistence on claiming public space and building democratic assembly. Banks and roads and ports were shut down across the country, city council meetings and bourgeois dinners were disrupted by flash mobs. And there was no end to the event. It was ongoing. The “people’s mic” might erupt at any moment. Every day offered a surprise that spilled into the next. Pamphlets and poems and PDFs were passed around, the Situationists and Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. Social media stoked the flames. Political education and class consciousness spread very quickly. “The 99 percent” became a household term.

The Occupy movement seemed to have arisen spontaneously out of nowhere. Of course, it was in many ways an extension of the Arab Spring that year, a reminder that the economic downturn was global and despite the particulars of unrest in each place, capitalism was an ongoing crisis that needed to be met with international solidarity. For the first time in our adult lives, the world felt like it had been cracked open by the encampments. It was hard to know whether they would come to any concrete political gains but to see young people all over the world so disgruntled with the existing order meant that we had so much more powerfully in common with each other and with people in other countries than we thought. For a time, just the fact of so many people being in the street together as a mass seemed incredibly novel and broke through the extreme isolationism and alienation that seemed unbreakable during the Bush years.

And so in the fall of 2011, lines were drawn in US poetry scenes. You could not ignore what was happening. The class differences usually obscured by industry professionals were laid bare, and it made some people uncomfortable. One night in early November, I was in Brooklyn to read at Pete’s Candy Store with David Blair and Anne Boyer, who’d published a wonderful and prescient chapbook earlier that year called My Common Heart, shared widely that fall (the chapbook actually included a poem called “Preoccupation”). The reading was hosted by Dottie Lasky and Thom Donovan, who I hung out with that night, talking for hours about Zuccotti Park and poets and social class, Philly and New York. Earlier at the bar, a friend of a friend had said she thought the encampment needed to end, that it was just time to be over, without really explaining why beyond “they’re getting in the way.” An argument ensued about the necessity of the occupations and the purpose of protest. The disagreements about Occupy were often a matter of class. Those who couldn’t see economic injustice would either ignore or deride the movement. A few weeks later, just days after NYPD had destroyed the encampment, Filip Marinovich, aka “Wolfman Librarian,” came down to Philly and, wearing a bathrobe, gave an incredibly moving reading about Zuccotti Park at Chapterhouse Café (a series I used to host with Stan Mir). The room was electric, people were in tears. Poetry, at that point in my life, was everything, and I was learning that nothing in the world had to be the way it was. Poetry and politics were inseparable. The poetic was not restricted to writing and performance, and the desire for a new world was the desire for poetry.

The movement fed poets and artists in incalculable ways. We enjoyed in particular the disruption of liberal decorum—how angry people were that rich people’s dinners were ruined! If capitalism and its hierarchies were indefensible, why defend them? Decorum is a fundamental feature of class war and a core value of the Democratic Party—its function is to erase history and to erase working class experiences. We’ve seen this decorum in how they’ve honored mass murderer George W. Bush, for example, and in how the mainstream media has complied with that narrative. We see it right now in the Dems’ bootlicking of Donald Trump. Since 2016, their main concern with Trump actually seems to be that he’s rude. What is the role of poetry in a society in which history is continually obfuscated and erased? What is the role of poetry in the context of a state-friendly media that serves the rich at the expense of working-class people? The Occupy movement led more poets to engage with these questions.




In the following years, we became increasingly fed up with the university as an institution of liberal decorum—that is, as a place of labor exploitation and elitism. When an organizer from AFT approached me at Temple University, I said sure, why not. At that point I had been adjuncting at multiple colleges for eight years and had begun to face the dead-end reality of the work, which was also becoming more and more unstable. The union trained me and from 2013 to 2016, most of my time was spent organizing adjunct unions in Philly. 1400 adjuncts at Temple unionized in 2015. The experience utterly changed my life. And it changed the way I wrote. Thousands of organizing conversations with workers had informed my poetics. I became more interested in language that drove a wedge between bosses and workers, and more interested in language that helped form solidarity.

In 2014 the journal Tripwire resumed publishing, and it was exactly what I was looking for. In Issue 8, I read poems by Wendy Trevino and Oki Sogumi for the first time in a section called “Reports from Oakland.” One poem by Trevino was a rewriting of Frank O’Hara’s poem that begins “Lana Turner has collapsed!” Trevino’s version begins, “Santander Bank was smashed into!” and rolls with the same phrasing and cadences as the original but grounded in a narrative of the political present: “there were barricades in London/there were riot girls drinking riot rose/the party melted into the riot melted into the party.” The poem made me laugh with its playful pushing of poets into the streets. Tripwire routinely features such poetry. It remains one of the few poetry mags based in the U.S. that focuses on collective political action and leftist thought from poets around the world (PDFs of back-issues are available for free). In 2018, Commune Editions published Trevino’s book Cruel Fiction, a poetry that connects material struggle, pop cultural reference and historical analysis, which has inspired multiple generations of people inside and outside of the poetry world, offering a model of political writing that can address the layered bullshit of our times. The book leveled a critique—from an anarchist vantage point—of the liberal identity politics that can act as a roadblock to political change. It was part of a surge of leftist poetry in the mid to late 2010s, as social media helped like-minded people find each other while staging a battleground for ideological differences.

At the same time, major money had entered American poetry in the form of Ruth Lilly endowing the the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation with a one-hundred million dollar bequest. Headed by CIA consultant and Kenya counterinsurgency expert Henry Bienen, the Poetry Foundation with its infusion of pharmaceutical money created a new class of poetry superstars with diversity as its watchword. Unfortunately, it was a version of diversity markedly absent of class analysis. Like anyone, poets can be bought off, especially those who work in academia and arts nonprofits. And so they can be trained to seek out and reward and publish political writing that argues for investment in individual identity and individual behavior (the brand) as the correct path to social change. Cultural identity is folded neatly into the same old American libertarian ideology, and problems of racism and sexism are reduced to a matter of changing one’s attitude. In poetry journals with widespread circulation (Poetry Magazine, for example) you can now find more diversity and even poems that express liberal “resistance” to Republican Party values, but you are much less likely to find anti-capitalist writing or anything that focuses on collective action. The mainstream literary world tends to mimic the larger political and cultural trends.

Social media has exacerbated this problem, since there is increased pressure to adhere to the careerist model and not take risks. Parallel to there suddenly being some real money in poetry, the internet helped individual poets build platforms based on commodified personas that would have once seemed unthinkable to the interior and largely private life of writing. As the surveillance state ramped up in the decade after 9/11, so did American individualism. And so individual artists learned to surveil themselves and others. The internet put up an array of mirrors, the careers all looking back at themselves: watch what you say. Keep watching, keep checking your phone. In the 2010s, social media changed poetry in many ways and quickly. Building a brand online became a peer pressure, especially for younger poets. The more followers on twitter, the greater the pressure to speak on behalf of the brand. Paranoia spread easily. Some poets attacked others in a liberal self-righteousness to build their own careers. More time was spent on the apps, and therefore less on reading and writing, less on community. The word “community” even started to feel silly.

The combination of material advancement becoming possible for a handful of poets, the ability to build an online persona, and an increasingly reactionary political climate in the U.S. created a toxic stew for the “poetry community,” which became unprecedentedly online. When Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016, after defeating Bernie Sanders in the primaries, exhorting people to vote for her because she simply wasn’t Trump or because she was a woman, lines were drawn between liberal poets who believed that Clinton was the only way forward and poets who no longer wanted to buy into the sclerotic two-party system that was clearly anti-worker. These debates played out in Facebook and Twitter arguments that often turned ugly with liberal pro-voting poets calling leftist poets naive harbingers of their own doom at best and misogynists at worst. The elections also coincided with the takedown of Conceptual poets like Kenny Goldsmith and Vanessa Place for their disrespectful appropriation of racialized violence by the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo. While the anonymous group of poets of color levied valid critiques against Conceptualism’s race play, the Coalition also used their platform to systematically attack other leftist poets of color who disagreed with them and in doing so built highly visible careers for themselves. Many white liberal poets enjoyed and promoted the Mongrel Coalition’s ritual humiliation as an expiation of their white guilt. While the Clinton-Trump race and the poetics debates of that era may seem totally disparate, both events spoke to an increasing ideological convergence between the political sphere and the cultural sphere in the idea that identity was a thing that could be bought and sold on the market. Your ability to get your work read and to survive felt increasingly contingent on selling yourself, not just as a charismatic online persona but as a representative of a given identity group. The drive towards increased racial, ethnic, and gender representation that so many of us had clamored for for so long, now appeared as a repressive drive to elect a few representative minorities and shower them with prestige and money, while U.S. households of color slipped further and further into poverty and fascism quietly gained strength in the background with no meaningful political organizations to fight it. Looking back, it also becomes clear that a certain brand of representation became a tool of counterinsurgency within online communities, the virtual spaces that we increasingly inhabited over being with each other in person.

In early 2017, I attended a union rally in the wake of my graduate student union’s failed bid to unionize. Duke hired union-busting law firm Proskauer Rose to challenge over half of ballots cast in favor of unionization and successfully had the ballots invalidated by a Trump-appointed judge at the National Labor Relations Board. We were about a year into the Trump presidency and I had alienated many older friends online and in person by openly refusing to vote for Clinton on the grounds that she and the Democratic Party had nothing to offer working-class people. I had been the target online of extraordinary vitriol for my position and it had started to bleed over into my real life. I ran into my older poet friend, who was a part of the adjunct union. We were standing in a group talking when he said, “you know, I am just sad that because of people like you, my son has no future.” I responded that I didn’t think it was appropriate for him to take out his political frustrations on me and walked away. He followed me, grabbed my leather jacket, and screamed in my ear that I was the reason that all of this was happening. He shook me with such alarming force that the fast-food union members who were at the rally doing solidarity for SEIU asked me if I wanted them to kick his ass. I didn’t know what to say as we had been friends for many years so I told them to just let him go away. We never spoke to each other again. That incident crystallized for me the degree to which social media had become a technology for driving even people who knew each other well and wanted a lot of the same things apart. My former friend had become convinced that because I disagreed with him, I was the enemy rather than the plutocrats manipulating the economy and the media.

The influence of corporate money in poetry has often been invisible, undermining the revolutionary potential of poetry, as writers such as Juliana Spahr have pointed out. [3] For the rich, poetry is a kind of soap. They use it to launder the brand. For example, the nonprofit press Milkweed Editions used to hold an annual poetry contest called The Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, which offered $10,000 and book publication. Ballard Spahr is a law firm that universities, including Temple, have hired to combat unionization efforts. When some of us began tweeting this fact several years ago (and annually reminded people), many were surprised and infuriated. After a few years of silence, Milkweed stopped holding the contest. It was a reminder that most poets are workers and when we recognize ourselves as such, we can act in solidarity. Since the late 2010’s we have seen an increase in the popularity of class-conscious poetry and poetry about the drudgery of work, evident in politically focused magazines such as Prolit and Protean and small presses such as Dead Mall Press. A generation of younger poets has been writing against the unsustainable conditions of part-time, temp and gig work, and questioning the conventional scams of the poetry world (the prevalence of contests, having to pay money to submit work for publication, and the cost of MFA programs, to name a few). Alongside the recent rise of autonomous leftist presses since around 2018, there has also been an increased drive for mainstream literary production to ape the language of anti-capitalist critique. Everywhere that something autonomous and real springs up, the system is there waiting to replicate that thing and sell you back a fake version of it, thinking you’ll never notice the difference.




In the fall of 2019, at Temple, I taught a course called “Writers at Work.” It was an upper-level undergraduate course for English majors, and I was excited to teach it. The course had been taught previously by another professor who focused on bookmaking. I was allowed to design the course however I’d like within loose parameters, so I made the class about the working lives of poets and fiction writers, hoping to offer students a chance to read and talk and ask questions about what’s usually left out of literary discourse. Here is the course description from the syllabus:

“This course will focus on how poets and creative writers survive and produce under capitalism. We will look at ways that writers have navigated institutions, formed communities, and made a living in order to write, publish and distribute their work. We will read interviews, essays, lectures and poems about artistic process and influence, and we will discuss common difficulties that writers face, not only in terms of craft but in terms of social and political realities. Specifically, we will study the work and lives of some poets who’ve been part of The Poetry Project community in New York; writers’ recent struggles within universities; and the poetics of storytelling. Students will write short critical responses to the texts and think through their own aesthetic processes, collaborating with classmates and experimenting with their own creative projects.”

The anthology What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009), edited by Anselm Berrigan, was very useful. But we started with Sesshu Foster’s essay “How is the Artist or Writer to Function (Survive & Produce) in the Community, Outside of Institutions?” which poses the key question and does in fact offer some answers. Among his answers is to develop community with people who already live where you live and who are not necessarily also writers. Foster encourages us to reject the careerist model of trying to use others as stepping stones: “your aesthetic process is a transformative activity; it’s not an economic transaction that you purchase with a university degree.” Instead, learn from the people around you, learn from your elders. Find out how people relate to one another and join them. 

And so, teaching this class, I was in a professional context offering advice to students on how to avoid the professionalization of the field, which, I warned, would eventually throw them under the bus. And throw me under the bus it did after that semester ended. Temple cancelled my Spring classes, including the next section of Writers at Work, which the English department gave to a full-timer. I found out from a student who had signed up and saw later that my name was removed from the course catalog. Days later an administrator from the same department emailed me that I needed to address a grade dispute from the previous semester—in other words, the administrator was expecting me to work for free. I posted a thread on Twitter about the situation and it went viral. The English department pleaded with me to come in for a meeting. I asked if they would be paying me. They said no. I said I don’t work for free, put the check in the mail. They didn’t pay me. I taught at Temple for fourteen years (and in higher ed for eighteen years, finally losing all my classes at other schools in 2023).




Two months after Temple cancelled my classes, the COVID-19 pandemic began. I, we, all of us (except the wealthy) were fucked. The government’s response to—and exacerbation of—the death and disaster wrought by the pandemic is a testament to the power of capitalism. Since 2020, in just about every way, life has gotten worse for working class people while the parasite class of billionaires has gotten richer off our backs. A moment of possibility erupted in the George Floyd uprisings which, you could argue, put an end to Trump’s first term before the Dems then pushed hard right. After Biden’s election, the Democrats forced a “return to normal,” kicking people off Medicaid, cutting unemployment benefits and squeezing labor, while inflation skyrocketed. They could not be bothered to even raise the minimum wage. They could not be bothered to defend Roe vs. Wade. You may have noticed that no one from the 2020 uprisings was pardoned, despite the liberal rhetoric of antiracism. And in his final year in office, Biden helped Israel carry out its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, while cracking down on dissent at universities, paving the way for Trump’s return.

We can barely grasp now the psychological effects of these last few years, the impact of deepened isolation and privatization, and, of course, the difficult years to come. As universities now cave to fascism and knowledge itself comes under greater attack, it should become clearer than ever that we need to build stronger communities independent of liberal institutions and find new ways to distribute writing that tells the truth of what we’re living through.




Though the past two decades have brought incalculable losses, we believe that the crisis also represents an opening for a different kind of poetry and for ways to do poetry differently. If the rampant privatization of the last decades left us with a thinner and thinner social safety net and few ways of even making sense of the economic and social processes that have left us so bereft, poetry is a place where we can make sense of what’s happening to us. Indeed, the work we hope to do and are most interested in by contemporary writers is work that tracks the economic, political, and psychic fissures within the recent historical past that led up to this moment. If the drive towards privatization that has characterized so much of American life in the twenty-first century also demanded extreme individuation on a psychic level, we are interested in poetry that breaks open individuality to think inter-subjectively and collectively.

We have always been wary of the separation between politics and poetry that the term “political poetry” implies, as well as its implication that poets who aren’t explicitly invoking politics aren’t doing “political” writing, that you have to wave some kind of flag to do political writing. But maybe in the wake of the crisis, political writing can be reconfigured as a practice that can capture what Sesshu Foster calls “the life of the mind [as] a collective dreaming.” [4] This kind of collective thinking/dreaming does not separate out how we perceive from how we work from how we live from how we love from how we resist and are ruled. We are deeply inspired by writings such as Tongo Eisen-Martin’s oneiric jazz poetry; Zaina Alsous’ evocative lyric of Palestinian exile; Oki Sogumi’s creaturely gooey musings; Joe Hall’s explorations of labor and nature; Asiya Wadud’s elegant meditations on migration; Marwa Helal’s questioning of the boundaries of the Latin alphabet. For us, the commonality between these writers is not in the formal qualities of their writing so much as their use of writing to explore subjectivity and collective life in the current conjuncture. This poetry differentiates itself from a lot of internet-driven memoiristic contemporary poetry and prose in that the lyric “I” connects the self into the world rather than reifying the self.

In practical terms, poets need to keep making public space for poetry. In the wake of the crisis, we’ve seen a rise of well-curated reading series outside of major cities. The poets reading at series Albany’s Salon Salvage, Buffalo’s Greenspace, Kingston’s Dog Park, New Orleans’ soon-t0-be-defunct Splice, and Durham’s Paradiso are just a sampling of the DIY cultural organizing that’s happening in poetry right now. These series tend to feature anti-capitalist writing with a more experimental bent. There is an acknowledgement that cultural organizing and political organizing are equally important but also different by necessity. Reading series do important work in an atomized, isolated world of bringing people back together and of putting them in dialogue with each other in a way that’s not mediated by a computer screen. Readings are a place of social possibility, where organizing can begin or spread. Poetry readings have also been some of the most meaningful and memorable parts of our lives. While publishing and distributing work remains important, the branding aspect of contemporary small press poetry can be a bit tiresome. Additionally, it is harder than ever for many poets to publish their manuscripts as the scarcity of the main economy has crept further into publishing. Readings, by contrast, offer anyone, published or unpublished, the opportunity to showcase their work to an attentive audience and create new ways of spreading poetry. We hope that poets continue to organize more regional reading series, continuing to build networks of solidarity that are combined with aesthetic practice, and showing that you don’t need to live in New York City to have a meaningful literary life.

I have joked with friends that we should add “Error 404” to our bios in the list of publications. Most of the work I’ve published online over the last twenty-five years is no longer there. This is mainly because people have to keep paying for their websites to exist, and poets, well, you know. You have to pay rent for webspace. You have to pay to exist in just about any space at this point in time. It does not have to be this way, but it has been this way for a long time and people are resigned to it. But if public spaces of any kind continue to disappear, there can be no culture. If there is no place for a “we” to exist, there will be no “we” to remember what happened. We’ve already been living through this process: gentrification and the privatization of everything public, which is why it’s become harder to remember recent history. While the internet has provided avenues for like-minded artists to find each other across distances, it has also sped up capitalism: hyperproduction and hyperconsumerism, information overload, rapid disposability of products and people, which have become interchangeable. This is all part of the erasure of life for the benefit of the few. It is the dominant paradigm. The idea of the individual artist as some portal to freedom—that is, freedom through the career—for the artist, who may achieve fame or money, or for the audience who consumes their products—is the predominant poetics peddled by academic institutions in the US. In other words, the predominant poetics is rugged individualism: pull yourself up by your bootstraps or, you know, use whatever resources you inherited to make a name for yourself and, if you care, hope that it trickles down for others. This model is unsustainable. It must become obsolete. Poetry thrives on social movements and rebellion, not on capitulation to capital’s demands. The form is fed by social upheaval, by the possibility of a more beautiful world. Where there is upheaval, you often find poets, and their participation in struggle seeps into their poetry and into the social realm of poetry. Over the last 14 years, poetry has been shaped by the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, the George Floyd uprising. And while many institutions, including the publishing industry, shifted to the left in response and made attempts at greater inclusivity, the ultimate co-optation and quashing of the movements was then echoed by literary institutions. And where are we now?







Notes and Works Cited

---

[1] Some of the central concerns of this essay were initially sketched out in a talk I gave titled “American Poetry After Privatization,” for the Argentine literary magazine Rapallo. I was asked by the editors to give a talk providing a map or itinerary of what I understood as the most important events shaping contemporary U.S. poetics. A video of the lecture can be found here.

[2] The term “post-avant” was coined by poet and critic Joan Houlihan to describe poetry put out by publications like Fence and Slope. The term derisively denotes the tendency of 90s and aughts poetry to keep meaning at arm’s length from the reader.

[3] See Juliana Spahr’s Dubois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[4] Foster, Sesshu. “How Is the Artist or Writer to Function (Survive & Produce) in the Community, Outside of Institutions?” Poetry Magazine, July/August 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/from-poetry-magazine/77710/how-is-the-artist-or-writer-to-function-survive-and-produce-in-the-community-outside-of-institutions