A poem from Fugue & Strikegot quoted in Alex Skopic’s Current Affairs article, “How To Write A Good Political Poem.” An important question & one, imo, that has to account for the many deeply entrenched norms and networks of reception that depoliticize political poetry, that disconnect it from action or irl solidarities that would lead to action. I also appreciate that Skopic finds my poetics excessive at times. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Skopic also constellates the work of Brendan Joyce, Noor Hindi, Refaat Alareer, Mosab Abu Toha, Khaled Juma, Darius Simpson, and Kyle Carrero Lopez. Before you read anything of mine, read these poets, please. And let them move you into the arms of action. B/c, f*ck, it’s urgent. As is defending militant action.
The poem Skopic quotes, which has former Erie county chief torturer/sheriff Tim Howard accusing himself of murder is part of a sequence that grew and grew into another book that will appear as People Finder, Buffalo from cloakWTF this spring/summer.
There are a lot of poets I love and have met along the way in this THICK issue of Oversound. It features a long poem of mine, “Ekpyrosis, The Watershed” (pictures are excerpts, a few of the 9 pages). It’s about the grind, the purgatory of working, the empire of time. I first drafted it a few years ago, deep under the influence of Samuel Delany’s prose in The Motion of Light on Water, Novalis, and so many walks around the Covid-lockdown-emptied streets Buffalo.
I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the one that’s going to kick off my next next book,to be published in a few years, a future I’m so apprehensive of.
You can find me performing it here.
I’m also more and more mindful when publishing poems about work and alienation of a few fundamentals. Ali Kadri is the one bringing them most recently to mind: work under capitalism alienates us from ourselves andsociety; the only way out of that trap is engaging in collective, anti-systemic struggle. At the same time, I’m in the imperial core and lucky to not have to engage in the kind of work in which, in Kadri’s term, “the living laborer himself serves as an input into his own death.” Sending much love out to everyone taking part in those struggles to dismantle these machines of death, to dismantle American militarism & ecocidal industry. & those risking it all, especially.
This was cool as hell. I respect Protean a lot. They’re an explicitly, out-and-out leftist publication. Not squishy left-ish. They’ve got a firm Marxist common-sense backbone. They rise to the moment. In response to the genocide of the U.S.-back colonial entity occupying Palestine, they’ve published a series of letters from Gaza and Fargo Nissim Tbahki’s blazing “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” Also, the poetry is great. Case-in-point, Laura Jaramillo’s “Handedness” layered: “Always to work. I am a hammer broken / against work.” Goddamn. Yes.
It’s a small thing but I appreciate the succinct framing of the framing of my poem in their tweet: “[it] explores the ways in which wage labor drains the meaning from our social relations.” Explain a poem? Why not. This puts the poem into dialogue with concepts foundational to a transformative politics: the current regime of work sucks so bad it must change (and, if we follow that, the political economy that secures this regime of work and the capitalist social relations of production that organize this work and…). Or else we die on our feet or at our desk giving our life away—and keep working in that death, our life already gone, already taken, before it can ever reanimate us.
Yeah, I hate work, because it’s stealing me from you or you from whoever you desire. When C or I get home, we often hug desperately because now our life can begin again—for about 45 minutes—before our attention is on getting ready to work again.
Look, I’m not hopeless. The recent spike in labor militancy is encouraging. Sean Fain’s call for a general strike? Great. But I am sick (disabled, in fact). And tired. I gave twenty years of my life to work and want it all back. That where this poem comes from: finding yourself at a drug store exhausted and longing for people your exhaustion is separating you from and knowing—knowing—if late capitalism was a machine, something grinding away in front of you, you’d stick your hand in it, just to jam it up.
There’s a genocide going on. As I write this before work, the colonial entity (on a U.S. umbilical cord of cash and bombs) occupying Palestine has killed over 25,000 Palestinians, has—and is—destroying hospitals, sniping nurses, and leaving NICU babies to rot. In the imperial core, we sense, as our leaders provide glib, unconvincing cover for the genocide—that we, as a society, are in a profound moral collapse.
But that’s not it. I’m seeing videos of people fighting for their liberation with homegrown weapons technologies, with words, with their bare hands saving lives from the rubble. Yes.
So I want to turn to the limitations of this poem, the history it doesn’t account for, and what I’ve written about labor: those struggles must have an internationalist dimension, must be invested in the liberation of peoples from the tyranny of imperialist and colonial domination—the bomb, the Apache helicopter, the Elbit surveillance tower, the sniper drone, the structural adjustment program, extraction and ecocide by energy and mining companies—and tracing these links back to where we live and work so the struggle isn’t just for better wages but to replace the wages of empire with something entirely else. In the meanwhile, here’s to publications like Protean. It’s still wild to me that I got in there.
JOE HALL 