A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 6
Note: When the shadow of one ruin stretches to touch another, will they call it solidarity?
What does it mean to endure, or subvert, or rebuild? Perhaps a more skeletal question: what does it mean to survive? Of course, these questions, and our potential answers, are an effect of location: what does it mean to ask these things as citizens of empire?
As a corollary: they are also an effect of observation. These meanings travel out from us, as waves and particles both, limned by watchful eye. Yet their movement, and our implication within them, constitutes the field of inquiry; which is to say, it all means that we are in relation.
For better and for worse, relationality is the domain of poetry. Ask the sports betters of liberal democracy to define relationality and they will point to a map of red and blue, lead you by hand to the voting booth. For them, relationality is a thread between the sovereign individual and the nation-state conjured by their willpower. The orthodox Marxist anatomizes the universe into a circulation of capital, a grand dialectical battle with a consequence of integers—sociality and culture and feeling are just an obfuscation of the scientific system of material distribution. Only in such an impoverished, sterile vision of the world can the Soviet dream of empire seem like justice.
To be in relation is to be in proximity to others, known and unknown. Proximity here is not about temporal or spatial closeness, but encounters — willing and coercive, psychic and material, historical and speculative — that define the elaboration of our lives. Whether we like it or not—and we decidedly do both—we belong to the demands of ourselves and all our Others, even those we cannot know or have studiously forgotten. The rooms/poleis/encampments we build for ourselves and not-ourselves, opaque inheritances of catastrophe and kindness, the ostensibly contingent happenstances that led us into each other’s arms; we structure and are structured by lifeworlds that irrevocably draw us into relation with one another. To inflect more onto our terms — relationality is nonsovereign, and can only impotently inflate itself into a semblance of sovereignty through domination.
The ghost of Derrida reading Paul Celan emerges here, of response-ability and sovereignties in question, but I most love Lauren Berlant’s elaboration of nonsovereignty through the diminutive, ambivalent melodramatics of inconvenient others:
“Thus, the inconvenience of other people isn’t evidence that the Others were bad objects all along: that would be hell. The inconvenience of the world is at its most confusing when one wants the world but resists some of the costs of wanting. It points to the work required in order to be with even the most abstract of beings or objects, including ourselves, when we have to and at some level want to, even if the wanting includes wanting to dominate situations or merely to coexist. The pleasure in anonymity and in being known; the fear of abandonment to not mattering and the fear of mattering the wrong way. I am describing in inconvenience a structural awkwardness in the encounter between someone and anything, but also conventions of structural subordination. Thus ‘people’ in the title stands for any attachment, any dependency that forces us to face how profoundly nonsovereign we are” (On the Inconvenience of Other People).
Nonsovereignty has an extensive genealogy extending across affect theory, postcolonial studies, animal studies, and all others interested in the subterranean and fungal and entangled. I think of Julietta Singh, Donna Haraway, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and others who deploy the term as a fundamental critique against the monadic form of the individual; maintaining such an illusion requires empire, human/animal divides, and the effacement of all kinds of crossings and intimacies that have and will gesture to alternative forms of living together.
Yet, I write in ruins. My interest lies in re-valencing scenes of negativity — of melancholia, diminishment, and self-effacement — into living encounters with unknown others that may, or may not, provide a sense of being with others that exceed the normative boundaries of the liberal subject — the sovereign individual. To live in the ruins of the present, without condemning us all as simply long- or soon-to-be faceless dead, is to develop strategies for attending to intertwined personal, political, historical, and memorial loss as dynamic encounters rather than static conditions of oppression and disempowerment. We need to train our faculties to pay attention to the dynamisms of what Jasbir Puar calls convivial assemblages, which “foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and sexuality as events — as encounters — rather than as entities or attributes of the subject.”
To put it another way, I hold in suspicion that scenes of violently imposed diminishment mark either an absence of relation or a recondite reservoir of potentiality awaiting recuperation through (political, medical, etc.) intervention. Living long enough in ruins, where it is presumed that our comforts must be clawed from the ashes of increasingly familiar others, it is clear that the recourses offered by liberalism cannot even sufficiently describe these scenes of negativity; in fact, the people, lifeworlds, and modes of being negated or neglected by liberalism are either eradicated or induced to assimilate into the very forms of sociality that produce such exclusions in the first place.
All this to say — I am not nearly so advanced as those who can carry the flame of momentous change, the belief in the Event. While I try to do all that I am called and able to do, I am much more interested in scenes that cannot promise enduring legibility, that are not afforded the security of surviving beyond their own improvised staging. I think poems, at best, render legible surprising, dexterous relations (between words and worlds, enjambment and image, etc.) that are always already wilted in the twilight of everyday modalities.
If novels — God forbid — can make a claim to moral instruction, are to be held in breastpocket as a pleasingly distorted map of the world, then poems flourish and die in the span of their own short breaths, requiring us to bring their imaginative short-circuits back into life through our own fleeting encounters, over and over again. How often I’ve fled into my interior life only to read poetry, like Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, that stages a dynamic of love that does not retreat from the apocalyptic but extends across it. Or even just at the level of language—the surprise of a soft ribbon turning into metallic sound and iron sharpening into blade in Phillip B. Williams’s “Final Poem for the Deer” (“Deer you get lost in. Deer with a ribbon / of brass bells around its neck and an iron / sword in its antlers’ altar”) moves me to think and feel unexpected transformation in even the most mundane parts of my life.
In my time reading submissions for lit mags, I have noticed a recurring type of short prose piece. A city bustles with messy life — children play in a park ringed with trash, gutted animals are carried through backdoors and into immaculate restaurant kitchens, a stranger smoking a cigarette looks at the narrator with a look of disgust tainted with desire, and it is intimated that the look is exchanged. Suddenly, everything beautiful and ugly looks up: angels or some other otherworldly figures descend from the heavens. The whole city stops.
Sometimes the angels condemn the city; other times they are there to reassure. If the story is good, the angels’ judgement is withheld, and we are left with silence and an ending. I think about this type of story often as a desire for life clarified — even when the judgement itself is withheld, the space for its pronouncement is cleaved from the ongoing overpresence of a city laden with the enthralling and the hideous. The logic of the Event is alluring for both stewards of empire and their revolutionaries.
I think contemporary poetry can resist this inflated bubble of pronouncement over, and instead immerse itself in crawling ongoingness through various discursive strategies ranging from pop culture references to bringing us into the register of the body, often through desire. Even at the level of language, it’s the dynamic unfolding of the poem — that “ribbon / of brass bells” — that produces worldmaking modes of encounter, rather than considering sentences as units of data. What and how a sentence means cannot be shunted away from the unfolding of the sentence itself. To write of ruins, not as a sterile site incapable of reproducing itself or generating new worlds, is to not hold oneself in apprehension of the coming of angels.
If we’re to proceed with negative formulations, we can walk alongside a common definition of poetry as writing what cannot be said, as an oblique discourse of the unsayable. I think there is a productive thread to draw through poetry as threshold in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, and more recent interdisciplinary work on nonsovereignty. But such thoughts require more time, more living in relation, more uncertainty that I need to recognize as part of life rather than as opposition to the good life.
To insist on poetry in times of material, cultural, and political evisceration is to believe that change can be marshaled from the interstices of legible projects. I find myself unmoved in the face of revolutionary anthems or the calculations of political enfranchisement, where small dollars grow bigger or die. I can’t imagine a future where rage is productivized into statecraft. Instead, I’m a creature awash with minor and ugly feelings — ugly in the sense that Sianne Ngai uses to think through feelings that are not deployed into productive avenues but instead are politically ambiguous, leaving one in ambivalent situations of suspended agency. It is precisely in that felt suspension of agency that we can make up new ways to find each other and ourselves, to acknowledge and imagine new proximities that do not cost us everything we try to hold onto.
Make no mistake — this isn’t a romance of disempowerment that valorizes oppression as innovation for the better. Thinking and feeling relationality, nonsovereignty, and negativity is aimed at breaking apart the calcified fantasies of sovereignty that transform the ruins of the present into a mastered domain of citizenry. I turn to poetry and writing to think through discursive strategies for staying attentive to obfuscated entanglements that can relieve and apply pressure in different ways. There is no single answer here, no line that can produce a coherent narrative that makes everything, including people, fall into place. Instead, I have found that even the most technical discussions of craft always return to the difficulties of living.
And so, too, do we return. What it means to live transforms and is transformed by the context of its unfolding and observation, and I am not speaking in the depraved way that reifies oppression into equal debate. What I mean is this: some months ago, when Americans were flagellating themselves online about the genocide in Gaza, moaning about how they could not possibly go on, I saw a post from a Palestinian (which I sadly have lost) that said something along the lines of: I do not expect you to stop your entire lives. But, when you feel joy, think of our joy. It’s a line that I have thought about almost every single day, and it took me a while to appreciate what it means.
It is a call for encounter, for our feeling to meet the feelings of others, in all their complications and qualifications and immediacies. More specifically, it makes us recognize our ostensibly private pleasures as an encounter with others who we efface in the elaboration of our collective lives. White guilt is so convenient because it circumscribes encounter into a specific feeling of negativity; others and their encroaching needs can be warded off through the performance of acknowledgement rather than the enduring messy stuckness of being-in-relation.
Joy (and other feelings, including feelings of detachment) takes on new dimensions in the scene of encounter. I have thought about this line especially as many white Americans insist on “protecting your joy” as a precondition for their supposedly forthcoming political action. What does it mean to insist on a kindness and generosity and hope that refuse the ambivalent dynamics of encounter? I think it means to dream in and of infrastructures of death and destruction, to wish for a kind of comfort that is untainted by the very world it imposes. The disavowal of encounter structures the imaginary that can only hope for better elections, larger town squares, to expand the very institutions that conjure the fantasy of sovereignty from blood and domination, and softer types of violence that can, if everything goes right, be gently mistaken for life itself.
Of course, many of us languish in our own ruins, but ruin can bring about its own refusals of encounter. For example, there are many Americans who express a frustration that Palestinians supposedly overestimate the amount of power one has in America. They then list all their own precarities: health problems and disabilities, their daughters they cannot protect, etc. By this self-interested logic, disempowerment prevents solidarity, which is to say, Palestinians can only hope to receive anything from me after I am empowered, a limitless horizon of capitalist and liberal fantasying that any colonized person will recognize as empire itself.
I think this is why nonsovereignty is such a useful term, as disempowerment is laden with connotations of inability — it is a static condition of immobility rather than, to return to Jasbir Puar and many others, an event and an encounter. While disempowerment can leave us in the nothingness of failedsovereignty, each one of us an unrecognized royal heir awaiting our rightful office, nonsovereignty gestures to a labile interdependence of unpredictable and mixed help and harm. What it can and does mean, or bring about, can only be improvised and incompletely known; it is a humbling lesson of encounter.
As nonsovereign dwellers of the ruins of the present, there is no prescriptive guide that can eradicate ambiguity and ambivalence, no separate site of judgement for making sense of our ongoingness. Although it might seem self-evident, it is difficult to reckon with the fact that the work of change is a transformative context that is contextually transformative upon itself, often without the scaffolding that ensures its endurance, that it will all add up and be worth it. Doing “the work” of change can and must be a lot of things, but it is ultimately done in the messy unfolding of our lives, where unexpected connections are made without any reassurances of it all mattering, or making perfect sense, or even that we really know who we address—like poetry. Though all is uncertain, I think that, if the flame of revolution does come, it will be born from the friction that occurs when one joy meets another.
DISPATCH 5
Note: jonah wu is a queer and trans Chinese American writer whose politics are oriented against imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, and he believes that Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea. Currently, they are Assistant Fiction Editor at ANMLY and Editor-in-Chief at eggplant tears. They are a three-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror of 2022. Find his work in Longleaf Review, beestung, Jellyfish Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Seventh Wave, smoke and mold, and the Los Suelos anthology. In cyberspace, he is @rabblerouses.
Small God(s)
Witness an ordinary night turned sour with me: out at a sidewalk bar with a friend, sharing dinner and stories. My friend briefly leaves to use to the bathroom, and in his absence, a drunk cis man approaches me and sits in the just-vacated seat at the table. He’s trying to talk me up, I can tell. He thinks I’m a woman. This is not a hard mistake to make; I have long hair and a pretty face. My voice is prepubescently soft.
Even in his drunken state, though, he can tell there’s something off about me. Apropos of nothing, he asks, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I laugh, a bit ruefully. “I’m a boy.” “Really?” For confirmation. “Yeah.” My answer is decisive. I watch, in real time, as the image of me reconfigures itself in his eyes. Strong brow and jawline, broad shoulders: it checks out. “You’re beautiful,” he tells me, as if trying to explain his previous assumption. “Thank you,” I respond, matter-of-fact. I feel neutral about this compliment. It’s not that I don’t understand why strangers perceive me the way they do, and my masculinity acts as a bulwark against being sleazed. He chuckles as he gets up and heads his way back down the street, glancing back at me once, as if unsure what exactly he encountered. If I was lying. My friend returns not a minute later. I grab his arm and say, “I have to tell you what just happened,” and immediately recount to him the strange intermission that he’d been absent for, to find solace in the shared what-the-fuck of it all.
This interaction of gender confusion isn’t foreign to me — this type of thing has happened to me so many times that I like to joke that I experience “Schrödinger’s gender.” Testosterone works slowly on me. Eighteen months on HRT, and I still possess a multitude of feminine features, enough that most still visually categorize me as a woman. But I do, on occasion, pass. Especially when I’m masked, and even sometimes when I’m not, when the other party (usually cis men, surprisingly enough) assumes that I am a younger man than I actually am. Hence Schrödinger’s gender: how would one guess at the gender inside the unobservable box of the body? What is it when observed, or does it exist at all?
Living with the in-betweenness, this incertitude, has given me a keen glimpse of how people interpret gender. I’m increasingly convinced of the idea that gender is a negotiation between self and society. It is taking one’s conception of gender and contrasting it against what Judith Butler called gender performance, a reiterative game of gender telephone that has lost the original. So — I perform masculinity — or at least, my own version of it — in order to write on the box how I want others to observe me. Sometimes it works as intended. Whether I pass or not is entirely dependent on the eyes of the beholder — on that quick and subconscious mental calculation of whether I measure up to their yardstick definition of “man” or not. Such acts, it has to be said, are also impacted heavily by race. My perceived femininity as an Asian person in a white-majority society works as a double-edged sword; sometimes it writes me as Always Woman, and sometimes as I Perceive All Asian Men in This Fashion. What “masculinity” do I have access to, in a white-majority society, when the rubric for me is a moving target? And do I even want it, considering it has caused so much pain via patriarchal and white supremacist violence?
Finding freedom for myself, then, has been an exercise in side-stepping traditional and white-informed models of masculinity, and creating meaning from the in-betweenness. Another joke: to others, I sum up my gender as “transmasculine and non-binary” because being both is about as complicated of a gender identity that most people can handle. The truth of me is much more varied and difficult to explain. My “genuine” gender identity, whatever that suggests, continues to be a negotiation even this far into my transition, rife with reconsidering my previously held views of myself. And the new realizations are always at interplay with the ancient buried ones. Lately I have been surprised to find some amount of girl in me, despite my best efforts these past few years to kill her. Lately I have been finding some perverse joy in donning my old skirts and dresses, and finding that the lines of topography have changed on these once familiar clothes, and that they evince the boy in me more thoroughly than men’s clothes ever could. There is a kind of allure in that, in eating up the feminine image and spitting her back out forcefully into a disarranged mise en place. My girl is, and always has been, vengeful. With my mouth she swallowed Plath’s line and rises with her red hair.
(Maybe my gender is seasonal. Joke number three. I despise my choices for men’s summer clothes and it’s too hot for pants, so above the Earth’s increasingly intolerable temperatures, I take her out of storage from under the bed and wear what little she gives me. Including the mannerisms, the flirt, the voice. These all make me feel lighter in the suffering heat.)
I look at my soul and recalculate. What is in here, my ungovernable box unobservable even to me? Feeling strangered to myself, but also — the cusp of immense possibility. But also — rejoining with a childhood friend. I kept the dresses and skirts because I had always known, at some point, that I would one day feel comfortable enough to wear them again, just like I knew all those years ago at twenty-six when I told my therapist that I would one day want to explore the masculine side of myself. Non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, demi-boy and demi-girl — these are all words that capture, at best, a fraction of what I am, yet exist alongside my transmasculinity, making all aspects of me gestalt. It would be incorrect to say that I am all genders, as I’m certain that my experience of gender is unique to me, just like each person’s experience of gender is unique to them (even for cis people!). So, more accurate to say that I am all of my genders. All sorts of things in-between those genders that are true to me and possibly only me, but at the same time, reflective of all those who live in gender expansiveness.
Sometimes trans people are demanded proof of their transness, that their experience of their gender is not simply an emotional delusion. Questions like, how can you be sure? How can you know, with absolute certainty, that this is the real you? A cis friend once asked me, in the context of transness, whether I believed in anything like an authentic self. No, I told her truthfully. I think there are selves that we want to be, and that those, too, are social constructs. Humans, as is oft said, are social animals, and I don’t think any of us can understand ourselves without the context of others, even when we so desperately despise societal strictures. Anti-hegemonic — that is a construct we choose for ourselves, guided by our natural intuitions and proclivities. The rest is murky and uncertain. We craft ourselves in real time.
I think the lack of certain proof is part of transness, or gender, or even humanity at large. I think humanity exists in this exact lack. In Kai Cheng Thom’s recent article about the transphobic fixation on transition regret as a premise to deny people gender-affirming medical care, she argues for a concept in disability justice known as “dignity of risk,” or allowing human beings the autonomy and agency to make choices that they may regret, or may even hurt themselves, because that too is an extant experience of life. “Sometimes people make decisions that they don’t feel good about in the end,” she writes, “and I simply cannot believe that the answer to this problem is taking away the freedom to choose.” Trans tattoo artist Eoin McGraw expounds on a similar idea, writing in favor of trans doubt: “Trans people are asked for the impossible promise of certainty in how they align and understand themselves. The myth of certainty panders to cis understandings of gender, false binaries, and the false concept that there is a before/after ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ destination in transition … Who is allowed to experience doubt and still receive care? Who is allowed to follow their own joy without having to provide extensive written proof of their own ‘sanity’? I think we often view doubt (and fear) as a sign of something negative, when really — to me — doubt is a part of allowing yourself to feel.”
Humans are terrified of doubt, of the fact that there are no hard and fast rules for anything in life. But humans, all of us, are always in a state of transition, whether we know it or not, whether we’re trans or not. I am not the first to say this, but I do think that transphobes hate us so ardently because they are envious of our freedom. It takes great courage to step outside of a rule, especially one so steadfastly ingrained in our societies like gender. Trans people are one of the few groups of people who are both our own creators and creations, and that degree of self-autonomy — and murky doubt — is dizzying to the non-believer.
In injecting testosterone, I have a strange body made stranger; I am making my body thus because I don’t want a cis body, I love my body when it makes messy and fuzzy disorder out of borders, when it defies all definitions, even escaping at times my own.
I feel a little bit blessed, if I’m to be honest, that I’m still in the process of shaping and reshaping my identity. That it still exists intangibly as something for me to craft and discover through the crafting of. I often say that I only know myself through writing; you, my friend, are lucky as well to be bearing live witness to my transformation. In crafting this prose I craft myself before you. Who am I? I cannot say this in two or three words alone. I am the entirety of my written work, and I am more than that. I am cavernous expanse; I am contradiction enough. I answer to no god but my own, which is me. I have become a small god of my own domain, which is my body, and by extension my life and my existence.
DISPATCH 4
Note: There is no one else in the room with us.
There are so few ghosts around, nowadays. Some have been forgotten or exorcized but most have court dates, publicity engagements, tiresome summonings that leave them utterly depleted. It’s a lonely business, being alive, searching without recourse in or traction with talkative spirits. Hauntings are of the yesteryear--today, we have an emptying or simply--desolation. What kind of future can we face with only paltry spirits at our back?
I find that ghosts have fled my poetry. Even when I am pulled ghostward by expectations of a legible historical archive, I find that they have already left. Have I failed them in some way? I should be on my way, striding closer to them, but they recede from view. There is no mistaking a present absence with an absence. Just--nothing.
But nothing can be generative. In fact, most legible positive structures have, at their core, a kernel of negativity, a disarticulating nothingness that substance accretes around. Such is my poetry these days. Accretions around absence.
How to move, if not forward, laterally? Without trying to summon more exhausted ghosts? A poetics of ghostly reprieve. All I can do is continue to do the work, see what comes of it all. The question of ghosts is as open-ended as the matters of life.
DISPATCH 3
Note: All empires will fall.
I am asking myself: What kind of writing life cannot muster a word in response to genocide? Among so many other things, I think about the character of silence. I walk slowly in cold air.
Good poems make themselves vulnerable to interpretation. Yet a craft that matters understands when exactitude, wrought from ambiguity, is demanded. Too often I hear people speak about living with contradiction in a way that crosses back into uncontradicted complicity. A material critique reduced to a simple observation of discursivity. I think of the demands of witness.
In what ways can we refine the production of an aesthetic form without merely serving as decorators of empire? How can such an airless question be pressurized to gain its proper shape? And yet, the invulnerable redoubt of idle writers: craft freed of life itself, autonomous elaboration agnostic to trees and dangling limbs.
Often, I turn to the speculative to parse my questions. But I am not invested in an aesthetic and ethical project of an exclusively distant futurity; I think the conditions for imagining otherwise are improvised within the very inhibiting conditions that reify what is happening as what only ought to ever possibly happen. To put it in other words: scenes of negation are still sites of living encounter. To write this as an addendum to Foucault indebted to Lauren Berlant: epistemic shifts proceed unevenly and even unrecognizably within the shifting infrastructures of life. But let me say this plainly: there is a world and a life where such urgent questions must be (re)formulated and answered—and it is this one. Why have some of us not done so? Why can I not find the words?
One side of the path drops several stories. I hug the opposite side, hand grazing stone, yet I still feel the sensation of falling.
DISPATCH 2
Note: When the text below was first dislodged from the mud, a burst of music played. But we couldn’t hear its notes.
Today, I went on a walk to Highbridge Park. It was chilly and overcast and I retreated home at the first few drops of rain, but I got to see the river and the city’s skyline so it felt all right. I wore earphones and listened to songs that passed as invisibly through me as the air in my lungs.
As a sonically illiterate person, my most meaningful encounter with music is unemotionally brushing past buskers on the subway. And yet, when I read Reuben Gelley Newman’s Feedback Harmonies several months ago—a chapbook centered on Arthur Russell’s music—its joy and intimacy played deep into my mind.
I can’t quite remember where or in what context the following was uttered, but I remember a writer telling a musician they were jealous because, unlike writing, music is so immediately felt. I have always disagreed with this sentiment—I find music and writing to be both bound up in the exertions and glancing blows of mediation and interpretation. As a frequently exhausted reader and fully incompetent listener who dove into Feedback Harmonies during some of the most stressful months of my life, I immediately connected with these poems in a way that is quite rare even in the best of times. Tumbling through medical anxiety and work burnout, Reuben Gelley Newman’s work felt like a lifeline, a beautiful record of a musician’s work brought into living relation with the urgent desires of life.
This is not a review. I had the pleasure of reading Feedback Harmonies because Reuben Gelley Newman sent it to me after I complained about how I desperately needed more chapbooks to review on social media. I feel very badly that I am not writing a review but my drafts were destined for the recycling bin. The first was solipsistically fixated on the position of the reviewer in relation to an unknown subject—I had never heard of Arthur Russell and never listened to his music until I started reading this chapbook—but it felt both self-defeating and like a self-reflexive movement toward specially (un)qualified mastery: the Reviewer is very small and it’s his birthday, so let us be generously subservient to his pronouncements, if just for today. Subsequent drafts focused more on the chapbook’s queer intimacy, which I was immediately drawn to, but adumbrating the technical context through which such intimacy emerges felt like a fruitless and remedial exercise.
This is all to say—I return to Feedback Harmonies as I came to it: a reader in need. The world has still ended so many times over, yet returning to this collection of poems filled me with the same eagerness, appreciation, and respect for the author’s work that I experienced months ago. What is there for me to say other than, thanks, it was a joy, looking forward to more?
Tonight, a little bit of Arthur Russell’s music will be playing in my apartment. Then, I think, I can lay my head down and wait for morning.
DISPATCH 1
Note: The text below was recovered from the last few leaves yet unburied by snow.
It’s the end of the world. Ongoing genocides, a global pandemic ignored, unceasing mass shootings treated with barely a shrug in the news—we live in such overwhelming proximity to disaster that acute catastrophes lengthen into atrophy, into hopelessness and disengagement and boredom. I often find myself inarticulate, running my fingers across the featureless stone of well-worn grief where I hoped to find an inscription of resistance or solidarity.
Yet I still turn to poetry, its ability to mediate emotion and truth in difference to the exhausted utilities of everyday expression or the pronouncements of statecraft. Poetry offers no easy answers yet grounds us in the fundamental truths of living: the pleasures of a graceful phrase, how tenderness is both embrace and wounding, that the morning light is best savored in the company of others. I have been turning to poems, whether they thrum with defiance or cradle our smallest joys, as a register for feeling and thinking outside the withering terms of a broken world.
Reading and writing poems reminds me of the preciousness of encountering creative work that bears witness to many worlds—interior, speculative, the stark present or faded past. There’s something comforting, knowing that the craft of poetry continues ever on. Even the largest empires have been unable to eradicate the work of poetry—the ability to stand in wonder before the world and share that wonder with others. To trade words in a form that understands how one word is never guaranteed to be followed by another.
I like to think of the poem as a dispatch of hope, for us who dwell in the ruins of what ought to have been. I believe in a mode of poetic engagement that does not induce us to comfortably look away but to look with, a dynamic mediation of the world unburdened by the arrogance of believing itself a substitute to action. A couple of months ago, I read Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s excellent essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” which critiques how the neutral-universal notion of “craft” as a technical context undisturbed by politics and culture serves as a reifying implement of active oppression and effacement. Like most writers, I find myself in the lives-long, worlds-spanning struggle to not only theorize but live with a writing craft that can remain attentive to the reproduction of violence and power, emergent particulars, and the wondrously unknown. The only certainty is that it needs to be improvised collectively, full of stumbling and friction, yet moving toward hope.
I wish these words could do more, that action was immanent to utterance. The genocide of Palestinians while us Americans sit enthralled by a football show fills me with despair, especially as I find myself effectively a spectator in the imperial core. I read a post from Hanine Hassan sharing the death of a 3-month-old killed in Rafah, who asked, “Is there any piece of me left as I’m writing this?” For how much longer will we keep manufacturing the conditions that force her and so many others to ask themselves that question? Whatever words I write, our bombs continue to fall.
And yet, giving into a sense of powerlessness is to abdicate what makes a life of writing so important. Poetry has been written in prisons, on the eve of one’s execution, in overflowing streets and deserted roads. I remember a writer telling me, “When I worked as a dishwasher, I wrote in my head.” Her words taught me that a life of writing demands resilience, purposefulness, and an attentiveness to the things that matter which can pierce apathy, obfuscation, and hopelessness. As long as one still finds themselves in this world, in relation to others—the work continues. May we collectively improvise worlds where the oppressed can live with and be enriched by poems, rather than just being turned into them.