Defeat—& Trans*formation

David Grundy

A Voice from the UK: Poetry, the Student Movement and Defeat

In 2010, the United Kingdom’s newly-elected coalition government—a government of the super-wealthy, including Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister and now Vice President for Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook—proposed to lift the existent cap on student tuition fees and to abolish the EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance) grant that provided support to students from poorer backgrounds. A series of public student protests saw clashes with police and the temporary occupation of Conservative Party Headquarters at 30 Millbank Tower. A wave of student occupations and marches followed, met with police violence. We briefly had the sense that the unpopular Coalition government might collapse.

James McCorkle

Field Notes towards Trans*formation

In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe describes an ethos of care that arises from a wake-fullness of the logistics of dispossession and the concentration of property. Trans*formation—Sharpe uses an asterisk between trans and formation to indicate the doubled condition of moving across and of interventions in that movement—requires a conversational education across communities rather than a processional and propertied education, or a thinking-with rather than a thinking-at discourse. By inserting the asterisk, Sharpe interrupts the logistical flow in the concept of “trans*formation,” so as to necessitate an examination of formations and the flows that shape those formations. Sharpe reflects, “I want to think Trans* in a variety of ways that try to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies. The asterisk after a word functions as the wildcard, and I am thinking the trans* in that way; as a means to mark the ways the slave and the Black occupy what Saidiya Hartman calls the ‘position of the unthought.’”[1] As in trans- identities (yes, sexualized, and/but/also the poetics of movements—and yes we need to remember that the M4BL originated with queer Black women), the inserted asterisk jeopardizes binary structures. And we might also suggest that such an asterisk puts into question the rhetorical somnolence, the sleepwalking assurances, repeated and infinitely substitutable, that institutions provide their consumers: we promote “lives of consequence,” provide “experiences that transform,” or “inspire success.”

Poetry in the Ruins; or Confessions of a Bad Academic at a Time Very Near the End of the School

To me, the colloquy on “Poetics & the University in Crisis” (March 4-6, 2021 webinar, sponsored by Chant de la Sirene Journal) is largely about the future: Whither the university? And “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

Or, what might “poetics” mean, twenty or thirty years hence?

For me—a professor who professes poetry and poetics within the American university institution—the presentations at the recent colloquy have struck a nerve. The questions remain from the original call-for-papers to the event circulated last February:

What does or can poetics now accomplish in the current climate of the university, in which neoliberal economic and authoritarian disciplinary codes have been unleashed through mechanisms like defunding, undermining faculty status and tenure, and anti-intellectual agendas?

How can poetics—both as writing practice and as theoretical engagement in the structures of language and narrative—comprehend this crisis of the university within our larger sociopolitical crisis and intervene in it, creating change?

Civics Lesson—sound art

David Lau

To Pavel Arsenev—a poem

1 Creative Deceit

I barreled up from Santa Cruz to attend

Spring. We used another pitted text.

Spring needed to be reinserted at Moe’s Books

after the fall of the Soviet Union

after 1977-1968-Nanni-Balestrini

a work couldn’t be published

because it was a political manifesto

mostly in the voices of other

frenemies naturally,

crinkled, implicative tales of mini-rebellions

and micro-jousts with the state. Contradictions.

Some would later catch

campus spiders therein. Comrades fought against

neo-fascists in the streets a few days before.

A beat-up Antifa in a middle row

took the measure of the wannabe cops.

Vigilantes of the state.

There were lions, too, at the gates in the Ukraine.

They were eating Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

“We’re here to take the teeth of the beast

and abolish the social relations

of its right-ward drifting global master.”

2 Titan Rain

Nothing could have been

as vivid as this dream. I took it for

a gymnastic exercise in vision. I found

hundreds of ants inside my nose. I pulled them out

and put most of them in a 20mm ammunition shell.

Under a sky of toxic data clouds

I went to the mall with my creature.

He was a dog-pig-bear

and he protected us

by exhaling snakes from its

star-nosed mole mouth. At the mall

again there were liberals chasing us;

some were dressed as anarchists and even

truly felt themselves to be people like Francisco

Ascaco, Durruti, but they were liberals.

Some didn’t even possess first principles

like social reform or free trade.

Near the escalator, I loosed

the dog-pig-bear, and off he went—

like the chimera of full automation—

into the long atrium corridor

with 70s-archaic fountains, grounds, and pools—

The latest thing dominating the mall

was a corporate-sponsored

digital simulation/projection

of a Mesoamerican myth bird. Adorned

with semi-pixilated quetzal feathers

but also cubistic and sprawling, the thing

was out of anyone’s control. I knew it was

false, this bird, but still I hated its captors.

My animal—my spirit animal—unchained

and loosed now—for that’s the way it was—

it spat out its face full of snakes—all them

the sort of snake I am—the kind that can

eat a poisonous salamander whose toxins

kill any other creature.

The artificial, shaky, digital platform bird

absorbed the snakes and, in so doing, grew even

larger. It pulsed and quaked and wetted the walls

of the giant, workerless, Guggenheim-like mall.

The walls seeped and mispronounced the spell.

My animal disappeared near the university.

I can see him now and I keep him with me in mind,

his rear, his sides-of-a-flower face

that opened. And then I left, I came down from

the mountain. I fled and sought a river

out of there. The wets walls were turned

to rivers down the fire escape stairway.

The rooms, the alleys, the corridors pulsed

with this corporate hallucination

of a bird. I found Carlos and we went

home like bare feet.

3 The University of Time

Geography of sun

land of apples

the way to automation

across from the thieves

there was a canyon west of yard candy

overcoming rocks with lives

ocean tree diamonds and raisins

in this bold and cruel statement

the sun red horse

mistreated by its horseman

whose solutions lack sufficient scale

I saw Nick at the dump with two oceans

and we watched you recycle garbage

the mythic flints in time of digital irritations

overbuilt by many names

4 Hand Ax

I thrusted it toward the wood, intensely burning.

They say the songs we sing don’t matter

in some new dreck of late theory,

but the dialectic has an array of stone flutes,

purple-eyed hatred for unmusical,

non-total thought, and an obsidian

blade to draw perimeters around the survivors

with the positive knowledge of our struggles.

It was as though he had lived

Walter Rodney Mikey Dread had both

survived assassination Nipsey too the colonel had lived

They space the internet with everything

The world spun and in that you lost losing

The Twelve The Song of the Stormy Petrel

true story made out of lies Innocencia Panda told

They were hiding with weapons cars

and the university’s armed guards