Brian Whitener’s Face Down opens with a poem in which two characters, M and L, spell-cast a circle of protection, improvising with Gil Scott Heron, Walter Benjamin, and 2 Live Crew: “revolution will not be sexualized, and sex will be politicized and by sex I mean face down, association up.” Turning down that most individuated of human body parts to turn up sociality, they live a politics “greater than friendship, less than nothing.” The magic by which M and L “project themselves into the future—a future without contracts” will be a revolution exceeding representation and libido (7-8). Fascism sexualizes and aestheticizes politics; communism politicizes aesthetics and sex.

Antifas: read Face Down; it's yours—it's composed against fascism's conditions. It says so: at the end of its first poem a narrator declares, “No bosses, no borders, no whiteness” (8). And it does so, as I invite you to find, through its four sections of untitled, lyrically essayistic, sometimes serial, surreal prose and verse. In the third section, a narrator offers terms according to which readers may evaluate Face Down and all contemporary literature: “To say there is no longer any promise in the literary outside of attacks on infrastructure is not the same thing as saying art or poetry is dead” (63).

In the first section targets are broad: bosses, borders, whiteness; connecting them all, sexuality, disrupting them all, association. In one verse, sites are named, like “living room,” “car,” “jail,” “hole,” “battleship”—stood in, and destroyed. It proceeds according to the form “Stand in [site] / “Destroy [site] // This is the poem that represents that instead of writing poetry / [Past tense communist verb phrase].” Phrases include: “Taught how to sow,” “Learned how to organize a building occupation,” “Worked at Habitat for Humanity to steal knowledge about how to build a house” (25-26). Enumerating sites and modes of attack, the poem reiterates the time that politics subtracts from aesthetic practice.

Another pair of verses follows the forms “Once had job” and “Once so white.” On the real: “Once had job, I rode you until you came in me. I had my hair in pigtails”; “Once so white, called gentrification homesteading.” On the surreal: “Once had job, there were hundreds of pigs and you had to write ‘fuck pigs’ on each one of them”; “Once so white, most shadows machetes” (10-12, 16-18). Less suggestive of how to attack, these poems remind that struggle must be as thoroughgoing with both reality and fantasy as capitalism and whiteness are in their imperialism.

Face Down’s second section attends closely to gendering. Its first poem, concerned mostly with gendering within/preserving whitenesss, opens with prose paragraphs juxtaposing three timelines: historical, late 90s pop cultural, and future. Historical: “non-ethnically-marked” female gendered proletarian social life in mid-1800s Britain, initially naming its protagonist Mother; 90s: scenes from the fictional television show Unknown Mother, drawing from Ally McBeal (for those unfamiliar, a pseudo-surreal TV dramedy following the title character, a white woman lawyer in Boston) (31); future: difficult to summarize, with sentences like,

Next century, Your Mother could no longer take it and spends a decade slowly, piece by piece, dismantling a bathroom with a needle and taking a photograph of each piece next to her body before dying and reincarnating herself as a wage. [33]

Other poems in this section: twist the infamous joke “The Aristocrats” into verses addressing, 1) the murder of Ana Mendieta through images of organ and blood spilling (38-39), 2) men’s collective suicide (40), 3) the complicity of having witnessed but not intervened against sexual assaults (41-42); prose-narrate instances of social violence along mostly gender but also racial lines with the narrator describing how they did or would respond differently on the bus, at a dinner party, in poetry spaces, or political spaces, with the latter the only where the narrator reportedly would intervene beyond writing (43-46); a lyric imagining a revolutionary situation, with lines like, “We formed a repro cadre, heading to / The upper and middle class repro farms / To liberate our sisters, this repro is being / Repro-ed” (50). The latter closes with one of the book’s essential questions: “how can the site of our abjection / Be the site of our revolt” (54).

In a book configuring theory so thoroughly with practice, the third section is both Face Down’s most sustained theoretical and apparently biographical part. Among other things, it addresses the relative inconsequence of US experimental literary debates, e.g. between the lyric and the conceptual, when considered alongside human life lost to murder in Mexico, 150,000 people since 2006.

Instead of saying war is bad for business, the math of 150,000 asks how war produces value. The proposal is simple. Once I was paid 750 USD for editing a group of blog posts about “contemporary” Mexico in the context of a show in a museum. The museum show was designed to increase the value of a collection of Mexican photography. This was my cut of the 150,000. [59-60]

From this section too, recall, comes the promise of literary attacks on the infrastructure.

Since the Movement for Black Lives' breakthrough into US popular culture, many social institutions have been pressed to consider their structural racism. While a reckoning remains, signs suggest that those who represent these institutions cannot ignore antiracist efforts (even conservative backlash suggests this). Last year, for example, the Conference on College Composition and Composition (CCCC) gave Asao B. Inoue's 2015 book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (AWAE) their Outstanding Book Award. Also last year, the Council of Writing Program Administrators awarded Inoue's AWAE the accolade of Best Book. And, I think, rightly so. The book is an essential manual for compositionists, especially the antiracists among us.

Inoue has researched racism and writing assessment for years, publishing on the topic as early as 2009. As Inoue tells us in AWAE's introduction, the book asks "how can a conscientious writing teacher understand and engage in her classroom writing assessments as an antiracist project with her locally diverse students?" (9). How can individual writing professors oppose racism not just as individuals (the focus of, e.g., diversity trainings) but structurally? The core outline of an answer are theorized in Inoue's second and third chapters, on "Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies" and "The Elements of an Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecology.”

Readers may note, in my brief depiction below, that "structural"—i.e. ecological—rather than "racism"/"antiracism" is more visible; see Inoue's Chapter 1 on "The Function of Race in Writing Assessments" for his analysis of academic writing's racist white racial habitus. I have focused on "ecology" because many teachers may not be in a position to alter their assessment methods—although Inoue makes a compelling case for changing our assessments, writing "classroom writing assessment is more important than pedagogy because it always trumps what you say or what you attempt to do" (9). Inoue's ecological framework may be one of the most useful contributions for many readers.

In the second chapter, Inoue defines an AWAE as "a complex political system of people, environments, actions, and relations of power that produce consciously understood relationships between and among people and their environments that help students problematize their existential writing assessment situations, which in turn changes or (re)creates the ecology so that it is fairer, more liveable, and sustainable for everyone" (82). This definition strings together five aspects of ecologies.

1) Ecologies = people + environments (eg students + classrooms + teachers + offices, + + +). 

2) Ecologies = the mutual transformation of people and environments, with labor as a central means of transformation. Inoue argues here and elsewhere that labor ought to be our antiracist grading metric in writing classes, through contract grading because writing quality assessments tend to rely on white supremacist standards. 

3) Ecologies are lived in, and through Paolo Freire's problem-posing methods, people can make them more livable. AWAE's pose problems about the lived situations of writing assessment. 

4) Ecologies are produced by material activity.

5) Ecologies are political, and AWAE's think these politics in terms of the power relations of white supremacy.

From this definition, Inoue elaborates both classroom priorities and themes for problem-posing, which he helpfully and concisely summarizes at the close of the chapter in two lists (images of which I tweeted here and here).

In the third chapter, the ecology's elements are thought discretely, and in connection with one another, in terms of power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places. Inoue represents the dynamic relationships between these elements in the following diagram in which he also concisely defines each (176).

As in chapter 2, with aspect #1, above, at the center of the ecology are people and places. As with #2 and #4, these people and places are mutually shaped by labor processes and the parts worked with and on in the processes; out of these emerge products, for students and teachers (learning, assessments). As with #3, the explicit purposes set for ecologies (problem-posing, or banking, e.g.) shape their activity. As with #5, ecologies are structured by power relations.

Though I’ve always enjoyed formal learning, since teenage (since I’ve begun to understand existing society), I’ve been radically critical of existing society. Both the romance and the realism of reading and writing have kept my interest over the years—encountering the imagined worlds of other radicals and imagining the world otherwise myself, studying the radical strategies of others and communicating my own.

As an anarchist-communist, I hold dear the principle of social solidarity and the tactic of mutual aid. Having, most of my life, loved studyingreading and writing—for their pleasures and their practicality—for some time I’ve been interested in teaching as a way to share my skills and interests with others. After a little experience teaching over the years, including writing workshops since my MFA in Poetry, as well as significant experience in tenants movement community organizations working with proletarians facing challenges reading and writing in English, I’ve come to want to further develop my pedagogical skillset beyond the rarified confines of poetry and critical theory.

As far as writing goes, I’ve published poetry, stories, literary criticism, and social theory in online and print publications, as well as presented scholarly and creative work at conferences and readings. Narrowly considered, my tutoring and teaching experience is slim—a year teaching elementary after school programs before my MFA and couple years facilitating a weekly writing workshop since, but, considered more broadly, with the understanding that much community organizing consists of sometimes formal, sometimes informal, popular education, I have almost a decade and a half of intermittent experience in a variety of contexts. Most recently, with community organization Causa Justa :: Just Cause, I have for three years been one of the primary trainers of new volunteers in the Oakland Tenants’ Rights Clinic.

Frankly, I am intimidated by the extensive, direct statist constraints faced by teaching reading and writing in colleges and universities, rather than, for example, community-based literary arts programs—but I have no delusion that community-based programs are somehow less constrained overall, even if perhaps less overtly and less directly. So, I am ambivalent about future teaching plans (to, for the moment, leaving matters of hiring/funding aside), and want to prepare myself for a range of possibilities.

Submitted to San Francisco State University Admissions on May 1st, 2018

Shortly after I graduated from the Poetry MFA at Mills College I was meeting with my newly-former professor, Truong Tran, at the Fruitvale studio he was packing up. “What’s next?” Truong asked; did I want to teach? I’d presented in his classes, received his compliments.  

I affirmed that I wanted to, but that, though I had by then some experience facilitating political and learning environments, and though as student and organizer I’d paid attention to which pedagogies work in which circumstances, I’d relatively scarcely studied or practiced teaching itself. I shared that I felt particularly unprepared to plan curricula and assess student learning.  Truong recommended I consider SFSU’s certificate programs. Fond, overly maybe, of school, I took this to heart. But I knew that before more schooling I needed a break.

I wanted to take time away—I’d only a year between MA and MFA, and none between BA and MA—so I could focus on strengthening my social relationships in this place whereto I’d only recently migrated. I’d come here to go Mills, and I was a serious and somewhat shy student. I wanted time to make more friends, and to commit more to publishing, neither of which I did much while in school. And I wanted time for deeper involvement with anti-gentrification projects that I’d gotten involved in, like the Causa Justa :: Just Cause Tenants’ Rights Clinic and the Omni Commons, a volunteer-run radical community center in North Oakland.

Actually, involvement with Omni per se came slightly later. At that point, I’d only begun my involvement with the Bay Area Public School (BAPS), an anti-capitalist free school that emerged out of the Oscar Grant justice movement and Occupy Oakland, which was a member-collective of the Omni. Then, in October of the year I finished Mills, 2016, on my mother’s birthday (she was visiting), at the Omni, through BAPS, I began my most consistent endeavor facilitating group study to-date— “Writing with world stuff” (WW/WS). WW/WS began as a generative workshop, in which participants wrote in response to “stuff from the social life of the world” that participants brought in to show and tell about. Over the course of its first year, responding to participants desire to read, WW/WS mutated into a more traditional generative workshop, though loose. Every week, the group—mostly friends, though some joined via word of mouth—chats for about thirty minutes. When conversation slows I, or sometimes another, hand out texts selected for that week (I try to vary the genres, styles, themes), which we read and discuss for another thirty. We spend the last roughly fifty minutes writing from prompts derived from the texts and then talking about, sometimes sharing, our writing.

Meanwhile, through the Tenants’ Clinic, during my time at Mills and since, I’ve participated in facilitating about a dozen Know Your Rights (KYR) workshops. We take some time presenting on landlord’s gentrifying tactics and state and local laws around, e.g., residential habitability, and then we take questions. Then we practice writing letters to landlords, the best first step in most situations for a tenant to assert rights. The letter writing portion is difficult and we’ve tried a few approaches—ranging from starting with sample letters to starting with blank sheets of paper, and various prompts. Participants in the KYRs often seem hesitant to write. One of the counselor/organizers at the Tenants’ Clinic has, in another context, pointed out that many of the tenants we work with are not the most comfortable with reading, writing, or legal research. Lately, with a friend I initially met through the clinic, I’ve been working on distributing an Oakland Tenants’ Rights Handbook—something that, though useful for many, has limited relevance for folks who aren’t the most confident and comfortable reading and writing.

On February 14th, 2018, a coalition of Oakland community organizations delivered a “People’s Proposal for Public Land” to City Council. On behalf of Defend Aunti Frances, I delivered the following speech (which was workshoped with fellow DAF organizer Sara/Felix Linck)

As many of you may already know, Aunti Frances Moore is a black elder and resident of North Oakland, where she’s organized the Self-Help Hunger program in her neighborhood at a small public park called Drivers Plaza. At Drivers Plaza, Aunti Frances and volunteers with program have for 8 years come out every week to offer direct services and hot meals cooked in her apartment, just down the street. Self-Help Hunger and allied groups have fought an ongoing battle with the City of Oakland over their right to use that public land for public good. Like we’ve seen all over the city, from East 12th Street to The Village to the Coliseum, getting together and fighting is the only way the City Officials concede rights to even a sliver of Oakland to working class, black and brown, residents rather than the developers, real estate interests, and speculators, who will stop at nothing to monopolize all the land they can, and steal poor people's incomes through higher and higher rents. Unfortunately, Aunti Frances is not able to be here today because she’s conserving her energy for another fight, the fight against a no-fault eviction by a speculating gentrifier—the court process for which begins next week. So I’m here, speaking as a member of the organizing committee for Defend Aunti Frances, to stand with you all for the People’s Proposal for Public Land.

I want to tell you about how you can support Aunti Frances’s fight to stay in her home, in her neighborhood, to keep up her local commitment to preserve public land for the people. Aunti Frances is facing a no-fault eviction through an owner-occupancy loophole in Oakland’s Just Cause for Eviction ordinance. This is one of the loopholes that that the Close the Loopholes coalition has been talking about, sometimes called the duplex/triplex loophole. For several months now we’ve been organizing to demand that Aunti Frances’s landlords, the Morphys, drop the eviction. Next Wednesday, bright and early at 8am, we’re asking everyone who can to join us at the Hayward Hall of Justice for a rally outside Aunti France’s settlement hearing with her landlords. In the spirit of the Self-Help Hunger program, we’ll be offering breakfast and coffee, not only to rally participants, but also to fellow community members with hearings. As many of you may know, not too long ago Oakland eviction cases were heard in Oakland, but, due to statewide austerity measures that work to the benefit of landlords, all Alameda county evictions are heard in Hayward. We know that many people can’t come on a Wednesday morning, and that for many who can getting out there won’t be easy. So I’m here with a signup sheet for those of you who can make it next Wednesday and could offer a ride or would like to be given a right. We  know that, rooted in solidarity and mutual aid, you can’t evict community power.

This pamphlet poses in fewer than 1400 words a set of provocations to those in the contemporary tenants’ movement. As the title declares, the provocation focuses on the proposition that “abolish rent” should be the slogan upon which militants promote a distinction in the movement between anarchists/communists and social democrats, toward the end of building a revolutionary tenants’ movement.

Table of Contents (& links to the tumblr posts)

Some Communist Theses for the Tenants’ Movement

Abolish Rent, a note

An Annotated Bibliography of Rent Abolitionist Tactics (in-progress)

Downloads

Pamphlet for Screen

Pamphlet for EZ-Print

At the time of posting this resource was not completed, but will be asap. This page will be updated with the annotations as they are read, and with some improved organization.

to submit to this annotated bibliography email julianfrancispark (at) gmail (dot) com

Friedrich Engels “The Housing Question” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/

research and destroy https://archive.org/details/LandLibertyAgainstTheNewCity

https://libcom.org/library/land-liberty

the indentured tenant https://rentistheft.org/the-indentured-tenant-114b969c8bfa

https://itsgoingdown.org/trouble-13-fighting-back-against-gentrification/

http://www.prole.info/thm.html

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/01/you-cant-evict-a-movement-strategies-for-housing-justice-in-the-united-states/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-52129-9_16

http://oaklandschool.ucdavis.edu/resources/

https://www.thenation.com/issue/june-18-25-2018-issue/

http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/rental-housing

http://www.urbandisplacement.org/

https://www.antievictionmap.com/

https://righttothecity.org/about/member-organizations/

planet of the slums

http://rebels-library.org/files/planet_of_slums.pdf

status of tenants in the us

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Status-of-Tenants.pdf

tenants movement in the us

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/The-Tenants-Movement-in-the-US.pdf

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Organizing-the-New-Tenants-Movement.pdf

social democrat’s positions

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/affordable-housing-crisis-peoples-policy-project

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/new-york-housing-gentrification-affordability-de-blasio

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/housing-crisis-rent-landlords-homeless-affordability

https://jacobinmag.com/2015/11/public-housing-social-welfare-crisis-affordable-gentrification

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/affordable-housing-crisis-minimum-wage

history

https://libcom.org/history/tenant-movement-new-york-city-1904-1984i

http://www.stopdisplacement.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Anti-Imperial-Housing-Forum_READING-PKG.pdf

https://www.pitzer.edu/manifesto/wp-content/uploads/sites/104/2018/02/Ultra-Red_School_of_Echoes_Broadsheet-School-of-Echoes-2017-Anti-Gentrification-Syllabus.pdf

https://homesforall.org/reports/rise-of-the-corporate-landlord/

https://homesforall.org/reports/rise-of-the-renter-nation/

Reports on the crisis

Tenant Unions

“Forming a Tenants Association” by Metropolitan Counicl on Housing — A broad outline, including step by step instructions on how to form a tenants’ association. http://www.metcouncilonhousing.org/help_and_answers/tenants_associations

“Tenant Union Training/Webinar” by Homes For All (Right to the City Alliance)—A video from March and April of monthly trainings you can sign up for.

March https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=867scM6_jFI&t=1s

April - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41BENBGe30

Origins and Evolution of a Social Movement Strategy: The Rent Strike in New York City, 1904-1980 Ronald Lawson Urban Affairs Quarterly 18 (3), 371-395, 1983

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004208168301800306

https://roarmag.org/essays/organizing-tenants-rentier-society/

https://roarmag.org/essays/rent-strikes-ucl-san-francisco/

http://www.hamiltontenantssolidarity.ca/resources/

https://itsgoingdown.org/parkdale-vol-2-issue-2-gentrification-tip-iceberg/

https://itsgoingdown.org/no-gentrification-yes-rent-strikes-interview-torontos-parkdale-organize/

https://defendourhoodz.tumblr.com/

Beyond Squat or Rot: Anarchist Approaches to Housing Beyond Squat or RotThis zine from the 1990s looks at anarchist approaches to housing beyond squatting, focuses mainly on cooperatives, collectives, and the idea of anarchist neighborhoods and temporary autonomous zones. It offers some good criticisms and thoughts on the subject.

https://archive.org/download/BeyondSquatOrRotAnarchistApproachesToHousing/beyond_squat_or_rot.pdf

https://itsgoingdown.org/tenant-power-from-below-la-tenants-union/

Neighborhood Assemblies

Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to Gentrification By Two Toronto Members of Common Cause Anarchist Association

http://linchpin.ca/short-circuit-towards-an-anarchist-approach-to-gentrification/

Building Communities of Resistance An Anti Capitalist Response to Gentrification

https://rentistheft.org/building-communities-of-resistance-d229d8508bfc

The properties of property Steve Martinot https://popularresistance.org/the-properties-of-property/

https://archive.org/details/Archipelago

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/becky-the-road-to-the-barricades-runs-through-the-neighborhoods

Mutual-aid/Solidarity Networks

https://roarmag.org/essays/us-housing-solidarity-networks/

https://libcom.org/library/solidarity-network-or-solidarity-service-challenges-building-solidarity-network

http://libcom.org/library/you-say-you-want-build-solidarity-network

https://libcom.org/blog/6-practices-build-community-power-intro-solidarity-networks-27122014

Housing Cooperatives

https://homesforall.org/reports/hfacltguide/

https://homesforall.org/reports/communitiesovercommodities/

https://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-housing-co-op

https://archive.org/details/CollectivesAnarchyAgainstTheMass

https://itsgoingdown.org/community-self-defense-mobilizes-to-defend-hasta-muerte/

https://coophousing.org/resources/owning-a-cooperative/starting-a-new-cooperative/

http://www.poormagazine.org/homefulness

https://cooperationjackson.org/sustainable-communities-initiative

http://ebprec.org/

Eviction Defense

https://itsgoingdown.org/detroit-eviction-defense-tabloid-3/

http://occupyourhomes.org/blog/category/home-defense/

https://en.squat.net/tag/oakland/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/05/a-new-tactic-maybe-a-new-movement-for-fighting-eviction/

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Societies-in-MovementPreventing-Evictions-20141013-0054.html

https://archive.org/details/ItsVacantTakeIt

https://archive.org/details/AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs_759

https://archive.org/details/OursOccupationGuide

https://evictionfreesf.org/about/

http://organizingforpower.org/resources-3/

Slashing land prices

http://defendboyleheights.blogspot.com/?m=1

http://alianzacontraartwashing.org/en/bhaaad/

https://itsgoingdown.org/anarchist-response-to-anti-gentrification-attacks-in-philly-may-day/

http://arcadenw.org/article/san-francisco-tech-bus-stops-displacement-and-architectures-of-racial-capitalism

Land Reclamation

https://en.squat.net/books/

http://takebacktheland.org/

https://www.akpress.org/takebackthelandak.html

Squatters’ Handbook: “Political” Squatting Tips Home » Catalog » Zines » Organizing » Squatters’ Handbook: “Political” Squatting Tips squatters_handbookThis zine from Homes Not Jails explores the idea and process of squatting as a “political” organizing tool. It offers a number of helpful tips on how to squat, the legalities of squatting, how to identify empty homes and other spaces, how to establish utilities, and how to fight evictions.

https://archive.org/download/SquattersHandbookpoliticalSquattingTips/squatters_handbook.pdf

https://archive.org/details/ElementsOfABarricade

https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/files/2017/09/The-DIY-Occupation-Guide.pdf

https://archive.org/details/ItsVacantTakeIt

https://archive.org/details/AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs_759

http://www.thefullwiki.org/Homes_Not_Jails

1.

For Marxists, tenants are not a class. Classes are differentiated by source of income—wages, profits, rent. Both capitalists and proletarians use land owned by landlords. Not all tenants pay rent, even though landlords and capitalist property law considers many non-rent-paying tenants—unhoused people, squatters—unlawful possessors. Rent, like wages to labor contracts, validates a rental contract. While number of people politically identifying with their social status as a tenant does seem to be growing in the United States, this does not mean that all tenants have the same interests—there is a class division of interest between capitalist and proletarian tenants.

2.

Housing Justice Movement, Tenants’ Rights Movement, Tenants’ Movement, despite their more or less synonymous use, do not refer to the same thing. Housing Justice and Tenants’ Rights refer to movement objectives and Tenants’ refers to social composition. We should be writing and speaking about the Tenants’ Movement because it focuses on those in the struggle and the conditions they struggle in, and it does not proscribe objectives. If our question regarding the tenants’ movement is “where is it going?” then we should answer this by studying the movement itself, asking, how are proletarian tenants’ waging struggle, to what multifarious ends, within what conditions, against what multifarious obstacles—slogans and stated objective are only one part of the answer.

3.

At best, Housing Justice and Tenants Rights’ are transitional objectives for the socialist Tenants’ Movement. At worst, Housing Justice and Tenants’ Rights are petty bourgeois objectives for the Tenants’ Movement. The ruling ideology in a given movement tends to be the ideology of those classes which rule within that movement. While it is not of necessity that the bourgeoisie rule the tenants’ movement through petty bourgeois social movement managers (not to mention politicians), except in moments in which the course and intensity of proletarian struggle overturn this, this set of affairs is the tendency. Recently we have seen petty bourgeois social movement managers and politicians attempt to co-opt the radical slogan, Abolish ICE, to more or less ridiculous results. At a given moment in a given place, some slogans are more easily, and some less easily, co-opted.

4.

In capitalist society, there is no such thing as decommodifying housing. It is not necessary for a commodity to be sold at a profit for it to be a commodity, so distancing housing rentals and sales from profit calculations, including speculative profit calculations, whether through state or (non-profit, cooperative, etc.) corporate collective ownership, cannot stop capitalism from pressurizing and/or forcing neglect to housing conditions, it just redistributes the site at which the costs of housing are calculated. This led Engels in the pamphlet on the Housing Question not to be interested in housing struggles. But Engels was a productivist, and was organizing amid a vibrant workers movement; the communism that many of us care about today is not productivist, and the workers movement is not coming back.

5.

Contrary to the fixation upon speculation as the social ill that takes away and keeps people out of homes, the housing crisis is not caused only by the excesses of monetary capital. On the one hand, housing crisis precedes racial capitalist social relations, and on the other speculation is but a feature of contemporary capitalism. Today’s housing crises are but one aspect of the general crisis which is the general law of accumulation of capital, which is the production and reproduction of surplus capital alongside surplus populations.

6.

Today, we should make the abolition of rent the communist objective for the Tenants’ Movement. The ongoing and historic role of (state-)capitalist landed property relations, mediated by rental contracts, in colonizing and dispossessing indigenous peoples, peasants, and in tethering formerly-enslaved and other racialized peoples to debt peonage and wage-dependence, as well as the fact that housing is a primary site of social reproduction and gendered struggles therereof, make naming this objective particularly important for our ability to propagandize communist struggle. To compose a communist movement deep and broad enough to be able to liberate territory from racial capitalist society we need slogans that are deep and broad, and that, for that matter, directly concern removing racial capitalism from everywhere we live. “Abolish rent” is a decolonial, race and gender abolitionist, demand, as any genuinely communist demand must be.  

7.

I seek to provoke those in the tenants’ movement to substitute a fundamental demand, “Decommodify Housing,” with another,“Abolish Rent.”

The demand to “Decommodify Housing” is made because, it’s said, the crisis for proletarian tenants is caused by housing being a source of profit, often through speculation. If only, so it continues, housing didn’t circulate as a commodity, then it couldn’t be a source of profit and couldn’t be speculated upon, so its price couldn’t be competitively inflated. Then tenants could be housed affordably. Therefore, says the conclusion, we must remove housing from markets. We should limit profit with rent control and speculation with taxes. We should establish social housing of various forms—through ownership by the state, by a cooperative, by land trusts.

Under capitalism—including its socialist variants—there can be no decommodifying housing. Housing is not only circulated as something that must be rented, whether or not at a profit to its landlord; it is also produced, at a cost, by the investment of capital in labor power and raw materials, and thus, going through a capitalist production process, is a commodity. Alternately, and unfortunately extremely commonly, capital improvement is neglected, and the cost is borne by those tenants who have no choice but to rent more affordable but less habitable housing. Even social housing, of whatever form. Even if a tenant pays no direct rent out of a direct wage, their rent payment is a social rent out of their social wage, which the social landlord requires in order to pay—or neglect to pay—the costs of the reproduction of housing.

Many of the specific demands under the heading “decommodify housing” are referred to as such because the slogan sounds anti-capitalist—thought the demands may not be. There’s nothing inherently anti-capitalist about a social landlord. For the demand for social housing to be anti-capitalist in practice and not just in ideology, it must deal with the capitalist problems that persist for social housing. Cooperation Jackson is one of relatively few socialist organizations dealing with this, in their Sustainable Communities Initiative, which seeks to reduce costs through a chain of interlocking cooperatives forming an ecovillage.

can't get you out of my throat

nothing sexier than a mouth full of chips

except a throat with a chip caught in it

I look at myself in the video, coughing

you walk up from behind & heimlich

uncanny as a can of worms

opened automatically by electric can opener

on a timer that's also a casio wristwatch

which comrades tells me are common trigger for IED

seriously, there is a chip wedged there

at the meeting, I can see you

eyeing my mouth from across the room

or maybe i see you looking past me

at the bags of chips on the table

that comrade brought to the meeting

maybe I was speaking, so that's why

you looked at me and my mouth

if you die, it could be a cholesterol thing

you ate too many chips, i heard,

but we ate the same number &

nothing ever happened to me

except frito-lay gave me an award

for chip-eater of the year,

which i obviously deserve to gloat about

with you in the grave, a chip still in your throat

fuck frito-lay

we knew frito lay is evil empire & all that

kettle chips too, but i guess i like them better

even though they killed you & never gave me an award

despite the fact that last year i ate at least 70

more bags of kettle

the worms eat only one things, chips

a can of living worms, once opened must eat

so we deliver 8000 cans to the frito-lay factory

& 8000 cans to the kettle chips factory

& send in a team of canned worms

to trap management in their offices

& then pull the fire alarms so the factory workers get out

& then, they come back to the truck & get the other canned worms set up

with electric can openers, so that,

once the worms are out, all thoses

chips amid interrupted mass production

can get eaten post-haste.

i see you looking at me like there were worms coming out of my mouth

when worms have gotten fat

off factory chips, then

if i eat them while

you watch me from the grave

you have dug your chip-throated body out of

it is almost as though we are

one—you, me, the factory

managers, the worms that ate

their dead bodies, & most of all

I’ve attended many readings at Woolsey Heights, and I don’t often read, so it was doubly cute to share the evening with the wonderful and powerful Hannah Kezema,  Ryanaustin Dennis, and Jacob Kahn—and an extremely sweet audience.

Here’s a couple pics of me, the first thanks to J. Divina Erickson and the second to Angel Dominguez.

A few friends weren’t able to make it last night, and a few that did asked for me to send them what I read—so, here! About half of the poems had been previously published, in the “Writing with world stuff” anthology No Longer Accepting Feedback, in Blind Field: a journal of cultural inquiry, and in my chapbook I want communism because I have to go to the store and get some rest and feel better soon and that is why I am asking for a friend to talk.

what pseudo-physics does trust

thrive off in the night that

rains around this building

in its ostensible common ownership?

for black and red patterned linoleum to be

more and less than target,

more and less than floor

that quivers and fills the quiver

that you run out into the world

with, to fill it up with headless arrows.

a structure is a theory of the city

it builds its projections into.

an arrow with pointed head would

pierce, i want its direction pointless.

A steel-cut monstorg smells what’s cooking at the station house, so starts to mosey. “Those oats smell great,” thinks the monstorg.

Trailing behind are three cartoon kittens, each one with a different shaped aluminum hat: one shaped like a satellite, one like an eiffel tower, one like a waffle iron. Arriving at the station house, the kittens take off the aluminum hats and roll them into one large ball, kicking it around from one to the other.

“Get us something to the break the fast, will ya Tommy Gun?” says the kitten that had been wearing the waffle iron, to the monstorg.

Tommy Gun turns around and winks, then walks into the station house.

There it’s all cybers and the oats aren’t what anybody thought, closer to boats really and the whole foyer is foating to high heaven. There’s a kite string dangling down a stairwell, and all the cybers are so distracted that none notice Tommy Gun go pull the kite string. The kite tumbles down and spills a bunch of rice into Tommy Gun’s open mouth. As the rice continues to spill, Tommy Gun 4nds an oatmeal sandwich in the backpack next to one of the cybers. It’s no easy balancing act, catching all those grains while pulling a kite string around this foyer full of boats and distracted bodies of roughly 5 networked types, trying to snag sandwiches, but this isn’t Tommy Gun’s 4rst station raid, not even the 4rst this week.

Outside, the kittens are already radiation-drunk and folding the aluminum back into the hats the ball used to be.

i am my sibling's preacher and have minimum lawyers in plainclothes

in plain sight, we follow like frizzys and throw frisbees to dog sign,

parks to rat out arrangements that corruption can only euphemize.  back

to the lockers bare trees blow fog at our asses nailed like coordinates,

our fingers triggered like publicity stunts. symmetry, it can't fail. don't

fail me now at my – morning – frailest; just a cup, nothing else to hold

these stomach contents down. it, the elevator, but seen thru grating

relayed thru security's leakage and betrayal that warehouses didn't

anticipate but could have anticipated, until two on the roof in the year,

time, spilling dark glasses out of jackets that have left pockets in line

for dark glasses to spill out. whose casual waste coat? whose doctored

trench? anglo-french? still i snub myself, that battles remain of interest,

so in that we follow several irrelevant disputes that have borrowed

partial form of pearl handle, partial form of tin cup, partial form of

whole in wall but all it on circular blast, that it could have been that

casual and remained almost so despite the aimless pursuits that look

all that time, & brought lord commander, slumlord & crimelord alike

to the ground breaking, with comically large scissors & comically

large check cut this part of town to ribbons in dumpsters full of the stuff

we want, bottle empty like the crown claiming it came from, a sticker

that can saw thru wood would just cuz it could, and, losing at chess,

snap, crackle, truce. that's the contract, those the terms. conditions

changed three years or so ago; we're still catching up. shop got broke

into again, says a TV watching shopkeep, CC'd. what would it be to

realize the sex they want, with degree, quality of desire dissociating?

after an essay by Moten

They sweep with justification the loot

into the loot bag.

Meanwhile, thumbprint of an unwilling

participant, diaphragm depressed by

intimidation, remains over the edge.

Given alteration, by stretch for

example, or direct pressure

that a car issues in its

slow combinatory roll, we

walk to the front

to confront each

others’ cravings.

We take them home to keep giving our roommates a little taste.

Small sets of immunity are like seeing things

that are there with our roommates

in the dark or in urgencies interrupted by the TV’s imperial detachment.

Oh, when sly minds go suppress ordinary risks.

overwrought cat of my horny street-sitting,

will you, at least, marry me

if I will marry no one else?

with moon & lamp doing shit

with the tree needles, & me

sitting here writing words with

the tree needles, who

needs to say, “fib first

but be” true in the way

you get fucked by your fib

i mean my fib, that gendered lie

whose kinks I’ve been going to

no gymnasium to work out.

there with the televisions at it

again, aren’t they always,

there, there—with nothing &

everything but weed for comfort.

as always i love most the burning traffic,

the way it fucks my eyes, fib-like,

while the crowd wanders 8 lakes of smoke.

a poem after Julie’s hand-note

In the flu filled room

with all of you

I felt the truth

& called it stew

& killed a couple

because couples deserve it

I am a murderous romantic

Flu is murder, don’t you know

& couples too sway fro & to

I felt the room and killed a stew

I am romantic about the truth

Who filled the felt with stew

and knew the flu would catch a couple

I called you, but you called me romantic

I deserve it, I am frantic

minor panic, where else, at the bus stop

from corner of 14th & international to

one of the last week’s of work in the

soon closing deep East oakland tenants clinic

just came another email to respond to

from a poet to me about my forwarded

ask to publicly confront a writer of the landlord class

about said landlord-writer’s planned

art gallery boycott picket line crossing in LA

no more parties in LA, goes kanye on a song I don’t much care for, from a record I do, that nonetheless fits the bill

I think the person in front of me is wearing a Lucy Parsons t-shirt

but I might just have imagined that since she’s been on the mind

ever since a comrade tweeted about Emma Goldman’s anti-blackness toward Parsons a couple weeks ago

in front of the T-shirt wearer a just busboarded person with an infant is slowing our boarding  ow for sake of making sure that infant is sat safely before sitting themself

driver has a driver next to them and the driver next to the driver says something like, “go & get out the way”

so t-shirt passes thru &, as I pass, t-shirt looks back at person with infant saying, “don’t worry about it momma”

“cigarettes, grease, butter, all that shit, I don’t sit outside, I watch my stories or some music,” says another rider into a telephone

turns out the stop buttons on this bus broke so telephone rider now off the phone looking to off the bus hollers please stop until the driver hears & the former says “I appreciate you”

broccoli rabe, sweet dominoes,

how we learned the politics of conversation

switching up the activities in our chilling out

me only intermittently oscillating between

thinking, it would probs

be fun for us to fool around, it would probs be

too intense for us, but maybe some day

the gif novel we watch, with flowing blood

& falling bodies, & our families back at

what used to be home training us in

knowing who is family & who are friends

& how loud the coffee grinder grinds

when you borrow electricity at this time of night

with a doggo on loan at your apartment

& an extremely fluffy hoodie over your top

it's moon river all over again, it's so cool

it's the cariacature of cool while remaining cool

even tho your new friend is like you a sales person

and what you're selling they aren't buying but

it doesn't matter until the boss takes a second

look over your labor contract, while I take

a second half of Meyer lemon to make

that tomato soup taste anything approaching

what feels good feels good, if you can stay awake

in a place where wanting it anymore is half the battle.

strain my heart for whatever you can get but I think it's all out of juice

I just need to drink water, but it would be so much more fun to go to sleep before the hour of 7 o'clock

I could drink everything in my dream, olive oil, vodka, vinegar, salad dressing

I could drink from the tap, the hose, the spigot, the bathtub, the pool, the ocean

but instead I have to make tea & coffee because the portions aren't right

I'm still hungry for chocolate because the portions weren't right

this is the thirsty dinner of my own doing

this is after the thirsty dinner where I ate too much injera & I had to leave before drinking all of the water from my water jug

bc of those damn white-looking teens, with their Rasta hats on MLK day at the Ethiopian restaurant

bc i was eating alone on my way home where we have practically no groceries & roomie won't be back to go shopping with til later

bc the way my table was positioned, I had to look at my phone or else I was looking right at someone at another table also eating alone

& tho the thought crossed my mind to ask them to join me, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that & not pass over to an undesirable & strange public intimacy

& all I want is strange public intimacy

I'd trade it for all the red water in my pocket that I can only get at with this here pocket knife

how would you react if i started to give you the gift of my red water, instead of going to sleep before 7 like all good children should

a to-sleep-before-7 where we children dream of public salad dressing, intimate vodka, & sitting at one big table, taking turn pouring water from the holes in our pockets into the jugs into the glasses into these funny things I heard are called mouths

break out the ice, break it on the floor, let border patrol dehydrate to dust in the desert of yesterday's subdivided dinner tables

we aren't serving you water anymore, there's hardly enough blood orange to resuscitate those we want most to resuscitate

but if you wanna be a filthy animal later, you can eat the pulp right out of my soaked & throbbing thigh

& my orange pulpy thigh has never been more than the strange public intimacy of my once illegally immigrated mother, who, with a zorro-loving midwestern accountant, conceived me one winter in Baja

has your heart ever been as dry as the cotton ball eyes of those desiccated bodies that once patrolled this one-day former nation-state's southern border?

[play Patsy Cline’s Walkin’ After Midnight]

I go out walkin' after midnight

Out in the moonlight, just like we used to do

I'm always walkin' after midnight

Searchin' for you

it's some lateish hour here

& it's some medium hour for most of you, internet friends.

what if some of y'all come over, say, next week when i'm back?

can we make something other than noodles & drink some wine?

i haven't drank much lately, this past week been in bollington with mum

& except for the wedding i think i've had maybe a glass of alcoholic ginger beer.

then if we're ambitious, can we fill those wine bottles up with petrol—

as i'm currently in the habit of saying—from a nearby parked truck's tank,

one of us prying open the tank door & another feeding a long straw

& another drawing hard & quick & spitting the petrol out their mouth

while another feeds the straw into the empty bottles

& others tear their t-shirts into fuses,

& from then

go out walkin' after midnight

Out in the starlight, just hopin' you may be

Somewhere a-walkin' after midnight

Searchin' for me

go walking around the block

using the magic of "we do this, we do that"

to steal several very pretty cars

& drive them fast in two groups

one to the country & one to the construction

where we'd use our lil fire bombs to set alight corn fields and condos

while drinking cokes & eating snacks.

one of us can withdraw a revolver from a fannypack

one of us can withdraw a bullet from their pocket,

one can load and roulette

one can hold the gun

one can trigger the hammer & let fly round the world

something to pierce all the livers of the reactionary forces.

I go out walkin' after midnight

Out in the starlight, just hopin' you may be

Somewhere a-walkin' after midnight

Searchin' for me

later, in condo & corn ashes,

beneath blankets that someone had just in case,

can we invite bees and rodents to cuddle their bumbles among ours?

when we wake can we sort thru our dead enemies to compile a list

of those whom we will with mixed feelings mourn

after we finish mourning all the lost beloved creatures

hella cut, what hair

do you dare leave on public bathroom floor

it's all cars out there

without a care, without my dresser drawer

take me home to the place

I left my wallet & keys

which is not home

let me hear your sweet dial tone

let me feel the cup of tea

yester comb, yonder wounded auto barber

.

I don't feel like I did

about that band & we can't talk about it

because if I message you again

that's too many messages

I heard you voted

but I didn't bring it up in convo

cuz my mum partly owns your rental condo

& land is a relation that ships our gossip

it's like hips are everywhere

oh so purple, oh so rosey, oh so blunt

the TV we watch, doing our own stunts

the TV we watch, smoking house guests' blunts

the TV we watch that someone's mom paid for

the payment of which has something to do with a sustained & broken labor contract called a divorced marriage

.

I can't talk with you too long here

because to talk is to betray

& I can hardly stand anyway

I can hardly stand, I can hardly talk

but I can smoke & I can walk

I can hear the wrong thing

& ask for it clearer

I can hear the song sing

& pour another glass of water

I can view a puke I can smell

under the water, cooler

I can spread a silence

I can secret a rumor

I can push a cop caller

I can cheer for a bar brawler

I can listen to bar brawl stories

I can crawl beneath tall lorries

I can stand & I can talk

I can sit but I can't walk

I can chant & I can dance

I can slip because I hurry

If I curry favors, do I carry them?

If I laugh at Larry David jokes, must I marry them?

What if being anti- is all I can provide?

Take me in your vehicle

away from my styed apartment

a paper presented at

1.

How does one write about poetry and policing in the same sentence without disjunction or using either term metaphorically? To think the two in dialectic – as poets are presently called by the history of anti-black violence that is the United States and its police apparatus – what are the terms for thinking the unity of poetry and policing? It is in, against, under this unity that antagonism is possible. In Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism the Martinican poet makes a comradely suggestion to think of the petty bourgeois in all their forms, including journalists, academics, ethnographers, theologians, intellectuals, sociologists, and artists as all equally responsible for slavery, it's imperial afterlife, and it's boomerang effect, fascism. They, the petty bourgeois, are all enemies of decolonization insofar as they defend the Western bourgeois division of labor, operating capital's “digestive system” by using their intellectual capacities to filter the social for “what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois's clear conscience” (52), a clear conscience known as whiteness, and, at the same time, “split[ting] up the forces” of liberation (54). These petty bourgeoisie – whom Césaire never names without articulating their inhabited affects and dispositions – are marked by the physical and psychic disfigurations that thingification, or in other words, turning human beings into instruments of production, is bound to have. By passing through this thought of the petty bourgeois as enemy, hints of how the social roles of poet and of police are united in class and in habitual ideology begin to emerge.

2.

When you hear the word fascism I want you hear it echo in the manner that Black Panther George L. Jackson,  murdered by prison guards as he inched toward release or escape, analyzed it in the US context as no mere potential at the heart of capital, but as the reality of our empire at home. The notion that the prison-industrial complex, to quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “constitutes a geographical solution to socio-economic problems, politically organised by the state which is itself in the process of radical restructuring” is closely related to this thinking of fascism, though when Jackson wrote that complex was only forming.

Fundamental to Jackson's analysis of fascism is a description of what he calls the pig class. I quote from his book Blood in My Eye.

The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalist trappings and the loyalty syndrome that sociologists have termed the 'authoritarian personality.' One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working- class consciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man's [sic] herd instincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of totalitarian capitalism (fascism). It feeds on a small but still false sense of class consciousness and the need for community. The collective spirit in fascism is a morbid phenomenon that grows out of the psychopathology of mob behavior. [152]

Though Jackson does not name racism here, it is clear elsewhere that the “nationalist trappings” and “loyalty syndrome” articulated through this “psycho-social appeal” to “herd instincts” include a leveraging of the resentment and fear generated by capitalist conditions against those racialized as outside the herd. Nonetheless this passage quite usefully leaves open the figure or figures against whom the pig class is formed, through a multiplicity of differentials that obsess the authoritarian syndrome.

There are two key components to Jackson's analysis of the pig class. The first concerns it's composition as a fractional alliance of, on the one hand, that part of the lower-middle class whom fear being proletarianized by an “upward thrust of the lower classes” and, on the other,  that part of the working class whose consciousness of itself as a class is undermined by fascist ideology. The second concerns the pig class's aim, which is precisely to dissolve the upward trust of labor in revolt by further dissolving working class solidarity.

3.

The similarity between Jackson's pig class and Césaire's petty bourgeois are just as stark as their differences. I'd like to add a third line, from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, that connects the two.

The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier. [3]

With Fanon now in the equation we might read the three together as a series moving from political representation to social responsibility that would read Fanon, Jackson, Césaire. Fanon poses that police, soldiers and their infrastructure materially represent the color line. Césaire, on the other end of this schematic, attributes responsibility for colonial violence to all those whom defend, not only by class position but also by affective disposition, the imperial division of labor. Jackson puts the poles of this schema into dynamic relation, arguing that between those that represent fascism and those responsible for it there emerges a pig class that exceeds the apparatuses but also falls across or between classes.

4.

The idea that poets and police effectuate one another's political constitution and social position could follow a pattern something like that according to which, to paraphrase Stefano Harney and Fred Moten from “The University and the Undercommons,”  “perhaps more poetry promotes more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that poetry produced incarceration as the product of its negligence.” This substitution of a single word produces a formulation quite different from that concerning the university, in large part because the social relations and production of poetry, let alone the literary material of contemporary poetic production, are not something nearly as many people do or even need to care about. This is no lament on my part. The difference between the university and poetry does not reduce simply to the comparative scale of those whom are interested and involved in their apparatuses. Though poetry does not circulate without finding both refuge for study and composition, on the one hand, and financial and administrative support for production, on the other, in the university itself, this is not to say that their protocols are the same. The negligence to the undercommons, including all out conquest denial, that the protocols of critique and professionalization effectuate in the university are not identical to the protocols of poetry, though critique and professionalization are certainly important in poetryland.

5.

What then are some of the protocols of poetry and what might they have to do with policing? Lately I've been reading poems and essays about poetry by police to figure this out. In 2012 the online poetry journal Rattle published a “Tribute to Law Enforcement Poets.” As far as I've found, the only other similar collection of poems is 2003's Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and about the police, edited by Jackie Sheeler (who is not a police officer but whose father was). Off the Cuffs is most interesting in terms of thinking how to write poetry about the cops, which this essay is not about, though that kind of poetry is the kind I've been writing for the last six months.

As an aside, I strongly suspect that these two publications emerge when they do largely because of tendencies in poetry and police apparatuses associated with the crisis of our present US centered cycle of capital accumulation. This crisis is also, and relatedly, a crisis in what Fred Moten has called the “raciality of the concept,” which is, as I understand it, the founding of modernity and Enlightenment in conceptual thought per se upon an underground of racial difference that can't be separated from sexuality and sexual difference, the absolute guarantor and initiator of which is blackness and blackness's global effects. Another way to put this would be that, if alongside the sexual division of labor, which Engels argued was the first division of labor, the division between intellectual and manual labor is as Rosa Luxemburg argues the basis of slavery first and only private property later, then the conceptual as thought distinct from its materiality is always already racial. The present essay is something like the background to the poems I'm writing, since I started them in the first place because contemporary US so-called experimental poetry is haunted by, on the one hand, police reality in and as crisis, i.e. fascism, and on the other hand, by real poetic practices of policing intensifying under historical conditions. Suffice it say that as long as there are police poets there also will be poetic policing and this is because the forms that fascism takes hold of are and are held together by the contents it expresses. The social relations and practices that fall between poetry and policing turn metaphor into the metamorphosis it already is.

6.

In the essay that opens Rattle's tribute, entitled “cops on the beat,” retired police detective James Fleming argues that “Cops actually do have more in common with poets than one would think. Police officers are always writing...Relevant detail must be written down, with strict regard for detail and accuracy. Isn’t this what a poet does?” This is a tautology, but apparent tautologies are the stuff of dialectics: the idea that cops are common with poets because both write with detail and accuracy is a police concept. Undoubtedly poets write, sometimes with detail and sometimes with accuracy, but the idea that there's anything strict about a poet's regard for these qualities exclude much of contemporary poetry, marked as it is, since at least the 1950s when, for example, jazz's influence upon poetry was reaching its peak intensity, an intensity that began 30 years earlier and would last for maybe 20 more years in my impression, by persistent improvisation of possible relations between content and form. The history of poetry is also the history of improvisation, but only insofar as poetry and other arts, by framing social practice, mediate the improvisation that is social life. Fleming continues in the essay to engage common stereotypes of poems as both highly emotional and highly subjective forms, to which he responds “good poetry should evoke passion, not talk about it. And a sparse, carefully written police report can evoke tears,” which is fair enough but for its recycling of a popular lesson of so-called creative prose in the place of a popular poetry cliché, namely, “show, don't tell” and posing this lesson as a poet's duty.

After these relatively flat points of comparison, Fleming introduces something quite significant, writing,

As expansive as language is, poets can only work within its limitations. Knowing the limits and possibilities of your material is a basic requirement for any art. It’s called creativity. Cops work within the law and are confined by it. Within those limitations, it’s surprising how much creativity goes on.

This conception bears a contradiction of great significance. In the “Critique of Violence” Walter Benjamin argues the police are not simply confined by and thus engaged in “law-preserving violence,” they also deploy “lawmaking violence” insofar as it is their job not only to perform the impossible task of applying abstract and universal laws to concrete and particular conditions through their administratively determined and individually implemented procedures, but also to “intervene 'for security reasons' in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists” (243). In the US this lawmaking has been enshrined in case law at least since 1968's Terry v. Ohio with the introduction of the notion of reasonable suspicion. This notion has been expanded as recently as December 2014 in Heien v. North Carolina, according to which reasonable suspicion now, in instances when a cop's incorrect application of law stemming from misunderstanding, can be granted after the fact by evidence revealed in the course of applied misunderstanding. As is well known, the Terry stop, also known as “stop and frisk” have been extensively deployed enforcing the war on drugs and broken windows policing in a geographically uneven fashion that has reinscribed racism and classism not only in the imaginations of police, but also and by way of both police production of crime statistics and the media spectacularization of criminality, in the popular imagination as well.

for easy readability, posting poems printed here in 2014

the poem beginning “we need not display”

we need not display our wealth in our shoes.

our wealth, tho it may be visible in the shoes that we wear thru the park & on the island’s forest

trails & on our ways to the cars, need not be put on display.

there are pedestals which things sit on top of, yes.

& the things & the pedestals are praiseworthy, in their singularities & in their combinations. but

praiseworthy

cannot be

displayed.

praise is the prayer to the gods in our lover’s left buttock or the cart-wheeling children or the

grass that itches our bare summer backs when we lay down upon it.

it is in the labors

of the mothers & the workers & especially the mothers at work who make the shoes

because we are hopeful that children are not making our shoes, not wheeling carts, but cart-

wheeling, tho we are not certain.

praise is in the fourth stomachs when some of us eat the black-colored cows that eat the grass

that we laid upon bare in the summer.

it is the fourth stomachs.

it is in our first stomachs when some of us eat the black-colored cows & when the cart-wheeling

children become the black-colored cows & eat grass tho we politely suggest that perhaps

they should eat more spinach & less grass & also when we eat the spinach instead of the

black-colored cows.

tho it is in our first stomachs we cannot display it or any of this & it is our leather shoes’ worth.

it'll grow back

hey, we look at certain beasts.

the next sits in the wetted nest.

my house sits by, just so

adjusted, sure.

the contexts help with guesses

as to the specific

abyss at hand. and i be

there. no fever then

the minutes late.

"it'll grow back," chelsea

said shaving her pink

faux-fur coat.

keep your eyes

clothed

& your animal

The other night, getting ready for sleep, lights off—a friend of J's, C, leans down to remove a sock and slams their left eye into the corner of the wood-frame lofting the bed in J's room. C and J are so tired, neither of them—especially J—process how serious this might be. C's ball made direct and forceful contact with the wood.

The next day J texts folks at work that J is sick-by-association and won’t be coming in.

At the ophthalmologist, C and J find out how serious and irregular the damage is. Before C consents to the treatment, the doctor is already administering something called a bandage contact lens, then handing over a scrip for antibiotic eyedrops to prevent infection while the contact is in, protecting the healing process of the abraded and irregular eyeball.

Later C and J are at a cafe across the street from the ophthalmologist’s office waiting, as instructed, to see how C's eye feels after at least 30 minutes of wearing the contact. There, over coffee and salad, J speculates to C that the ophthalmologist might have been particularly hesitant to seek C's consent because they may have been uncomfortable with how C narrated the damage occurring. J speculates that the ophthalmologist may have wanted to get as quickly as possible out of the examination room.

C's narration, as this narration perhaps does too, left open the implication that, sharing a bed, C and J were fucking—insofar as it is both a common euphemism that to sleep together is to fuck and a common assumption that those whom sleep together also fuck. Assuming the doctor fears queers, then it could be that the narration, combined with C's and J's intimate demeanor, manner of dress, and J's presence in the examination room, incited a fear in the ophthalmologist that impelled them to offer treatment without seeking proper consent—so as to escape ASAP. C responded to this speculation by first acknowledging that, given the pain, they had not paid as much attention to the ophthalmologist’s demeanor as to their words and actions, though had indeed noted this more or less unconsensual treatment. C further responded that, while J’s speculation could have something to it, it could also simply be that the ophthalmologist’s bed-side manner left plenty to be desired.

The next day C and J are in a city adjacent to, but across a bay from, the one that C was sleeping with J in. The city’s and the sun’s lights are causing C much pain, and C keeps cycling through a variety of methods of reducing this. C wears sunglasses; C takes off sunglasses and cups their left eye but not too closely; C puts back on sunglasses and cups their left eye even less closely; C takes off sunglasses and puts on an eyepatch; C takes off the eyepatch and wraps it around the left lens of the sunglasses and puts the glasses back on; C closes both eyes and asks J to guide them on the city streets.

In the afternoon, C and J are riding a streetcar to the ocean-facing beach side of the city to attend a friend of C’s, and acquaintance of J’s, open studio. On the way, to pass the time, while C closes and covers both eyes—since by now the right eye receiving light produces after a short delay pain in the left—J reads to C from a book. J had put this and another book, to be discussed shortly, in J’s backpack in anticipation of an upcoming literary gathering, a Story Hour, that a comrade of J’s facilitates. The book, a feminist epic, was called The Descent of Alette and was written by Alice Notley. The first piece in the epic reads:

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

“But I knew the train” “knew riding it” “knew the look of”

“those about me” “I gradually became aware—“ “though it seemed

as that happened” “that I’d always” “known it too--” “that there was”

“a tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were”

“below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing”

“A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway”

“that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,”

“all of you, & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to

live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is

what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides”

“this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls”

After that first, J continued reading twenty-four more pieces. Later, at an exceedingly dimly lit pub, after C and J had spent no more than 45 minutes at their friend and acquaintances open studio—which they had left because there was an uncomfortably large number of former friends and acquaintances—C said to J that listening to J read from Notley’s feminist epic while having had eyes closed and body at the whim of the streetcar’s motion had given C an experience of the book’s words that C would prefer to no other experience with those words. C had, with Alette, descended, or C more or less said.

A couple day’s later C has left and J’s mother, S, is visiting. J and S have not yet met up, as they would soon, at S’s hotel. A series of events unfold which J reported on a popular social media platform. The reports are transcribed below:

after a few days of "good" air quality in Oakland (remember, if you forgot, could forget, the wildfires), it's back to "moderate."

i unintentionally celebrate this fact by leaving the burner on too long while I clean—by burning off some oil from—the cast iron.

reading @Thisbhanu's Incubation to find a selection for the anniversary sesh of the writing group I facilitate, which falls on mum's bday,

i forget to watch the pan. the apartment fills with smoke, sets off the alarm, & wakes my sleeping roommate. i hurry to respond to these by:

taking pan off burner, turning burner off, opening windows, waving a tshirt at smoke alarm, taking alarm out off ceiling & moving it away.

the apartment remains filled with smoke but now I am distracted. I've thought, oh what a thread I could tweet. Woken roommate comes in.

Asks what happened; I stutter response. Roommate opens our apartment door & puts on the ceiling fan, blows out scented candle I'd lit.

"we don't need more things burning in here," she said. & later he tells me, "keep the windows open, I still can't breath in my room."

I want to offer a smoke mask, 1 of several a friend who'd been visiting town left when they left; I want not to disturb more. I say nothing.

I leave mask on table next to a card she made for mum's bday. Drawing traced from a photo he woke me to ask for last night, & a v kind note.

[here, a fair number of events worth narration are left out, as, by time of revision prior to posting, J has run out of time to write. this bracket then to note things such as Marshall, tech troubleshooting, volunteers meeting, birthday, burger king photos] 

The next day J & S spend much time in S’s hotel room. Shortly after J’s arrival, while S naps, J writes the following email to a writing group that J facilitates weekly.

To those writers of world stuff whom it may concern,

I can only somewhat believe this group’s met for a year now. Worlds' times’ been fastslow—distorted by so much loss & so much solidarity amid ongoing un/natural disasters. In the group we’ve had plenty of changes in who attends, several hiatuses, and a change in format (for those newer, we’ve moved from a more show & tell format, as described here, to a more classic workshop format, with readings to get us started writiting). 

In honor of our anniversary and of Sheila Park’s, my mother’s, birthday (she attended our first meeting and will attend again tonight), we’ll be reading from the first set of sections in Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil. The reading is also inspired by the theme of this week’s Story Hour, an excellent event facilitated by a comrade-writer Eleanor Liu, the theme of which is MONSTERS/DESCENT TO THE UNDERWORLD. (By the way, if you’re free and intersted Thursday night, check out the webpage for Story Hour, and consider following the directions to rsvp). 

Kapil, like my mother, grew up in Britain, moving to USAmerica in adulthood, eventually had and raised here her only child. Incubation, though I did not know it when I was reading it as an undergrad (first year?), was the first book of contemporary unconventional—or “experimental,” if you prefer, as I don’t—prose I read. It was released in 2006 on Renee Gladman’s now retired press Leon Works (a press that’s published several books that mean a lot to me, including Fred Moten’s Hughson’s Tavern). In the book's link, you can read a bit of back-matter. 

From the first pair of sections, linked here, we’ll focus on “Hallucinating Childhood (3),” which is 7pgs in length. The pages preceding are also 7; feel free to read those in advance if you’ve time. Sorry for the markings; back then I still underlined, and in pen. I should mention, if you like the readings, the book is currently out of print and the only available copies are hundreds of dollars. If you enjoy and would want to read more from the book, though I believe I read recently it will be brought back in print by another press (I haven’t been able to re-find that info), let me know and perhaps we can find you a copy ;-) (or once I’m thru re-reading, I can loan).  

Prompt-wise, we’ll begin with these two two-part alternatives. Alternate 1, part 1—given the definition of a monster Kapil quotes on page 7 (“The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances”), write something that either makes space (hostile) for or is filled by monsters. Alternate 1, part 2—what you write could respond to the following question quoted from pg 10: “As a child, in the space before writing, did you suffer when you went to other people’s houses?”

Alternate 2, part 1—given the definition of a cyborg Kapil quotes on page 12 (“Cyborgs are built for assimilation into households and factories”), write something that either makes space (hostile) for or is filled by cyborgs. Alternate 2, part 2—what you write could respond to the following question quoted from page 12, “Am I boring you? Do you want some coffee?”

Looking forward to incubating with you tonight,

Julian

Having sent this email J then returns to the popular social media platform and finds a nearly year old post by Bhanu Kapil, verifying J’s suspicion that Incubation was to be reissued, not by Leon Works, but by the press that published Kapil’s first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, namely Kelsey St. Press, named for a street that C and J had wandered several days before, seeking both to get where they were going and to avoid light. J reposted this post with the following comment:

had been looking for this for days. initial searches were blocked by a stubborn sense the title was "incarnation" not "incubation." 🤔 to self

To this Kapil replied,

let me know if you would like a preemptive PDF before it comes out properly

This reply, J excitedly informed the writing group that night, new which the group responded too equally if not even more excitedly. The excitement, no doubt, was boosted by the wonderful key lime pie one writer, P, had baked and brought, and the beers and cider another writer, D, had brought.

The prompts proved difficult, and though all were in apparently good spirits, despite a variety of difficult recent personal experiences—among those being that P had not gotten a job they wanted and D had gotten a promotion at a job they didn’t want to still work at—many were unusually hesitant to share. Particularly hesitant was S, whom had reacted with panic to the prompt of writing a space for monsters, preferring, instead, to write one for cyborgs. J, to the prompts, wrote the following scrap of prose:

A steel-cut monstorg smells what’s cooking at the station house, so starts to mosey. “Those oats smell great,” thinks the monstorg.

Trailing behind are three cartoon kittens, each one with a different shaped aluminum hat: one shaped like a satellite, one like an eiffel tower, one like a waffle iron.

Arriving at the station house, the kittens take off the aluminum hats and roll them into one large ball, kicking it around from one to the other.

“Get us something to the break the fast, will ya Tommy Gun?” says the kitten that had been wearing the waffle iron, to the monstorg.

Tommy Gun turns around and winks, then walks into the station house.

There it’s all cybers and the oats aren’t what anybody thought, closer to boats really and the whole foyer is floating to high heaven. There’s a kite string dangling down a stairwell, and all the cybers are so distracted that none notice Tommy Gun go pull the kite string. The kite tumbles down and spills a bunch of rice into Tommy Gun’s open mouth. As the rice continues to spill, Tommy Gun finds an oatmeal sandwich in the backpack next to one of the cybers. It’s no easy balancing act, catching all those grains while pulling a kite string around this foyer full of boats and distracted bodies of roughly 5 networked types, trying to snag sandwiches, but this isn’t Tommy Gun’s first station raid, not even the first this week.

In the initial email to the writing group this week I included two pieces from issue one of the second generation New Narrative journal Narrativity that are also in the book depicted above. Here’s the email:

Hi all,

See folx at the Omni tonight at 7:30. After this weekend at the New Narrative conference, I've still got narrative writing on the brain. So tonight we'll look at a short essay by Kathy Acker, called "The Killers," and we'll talk some about realism in writing. I'll follow up with prompts later, for those writing from home tonight (the air quality, after all, still isn't great). Also, last week I gave a somewhat muddled answer to a direct question—what is new narrative? One popularly referenced essay on that is Robert Glück's "Long Note on New Narrative." I don't plan on attending any literary events this week, the conference exhausted me, but please let us know if you're going to any & want company. Last, a little self promotion—this is a link to a tweet thread where I've gathered links to some new writing of mine that's just been published (including my conference paper).

See you tonight,

Julian

And here’s the follow-up email with the prompt:

Hi all,

Tonight, as mentioned, we'll read that short essay by Kathy Acker. While we read it we will, and you—writing from home—can, take two sets of notes. The first notes should be on the qualities Acker attributes to what she calls "stories" and "realism"; the second should be on the qualities attributed to "narration" and "fantasy." In particular, consider how these two sets of writing may or may not differ concerning what Acker calls the "time triad" of writing (her example is a novel, but it works for any form of writing), where the three concerns relate to, 1) the time it takes to write, 2) the time it takes to read, 3) the time happening inside the writing. Also, take some notes responding to the political claims that Acker makes about these different kinds of writing. After you've read and taken your notes, open yourself up to thinking of the first thing or things that happened that you can think of (this includes things you heard about happening). Take notes of no more than five lines or sentences on this thing or these things. Then take (at least) 15 minutes to write either a story or a narration from those notes. Take a break, then take (at least) 15 minutes to write whichever, story or narration, you didn't already write from those notes. Keep in mind that there is no expectation that what you write be prose, poetry, or anything. 

Happy writing, Julian

No writing from J included in the post this week. A number of participants warned J in advance that they wouldn’t be able to make the meeting, and it ended up that just one person showed up. So that person and J read the Acker, and discussed. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the political claim that Acker makes, namely that “realism is simply a control method.” To get closer to thinking about this, we looked up the definition of “realism” according to Dictionary Dot Com.

Following instructions, we compared it to “naturalism.”

We discussed how these definitions of realism, as a set of historical literary conventions do seem, through claiming that a particular set of genre conventions could best represent the real, to ignore the kinds of reality that emerge from what Acker calls “narration” and what she cites Julio Cortázar as calling “fantastic.” Further, by tending to concern the correctness of a particular representation of, e.g., working class people, does likely tend to support the ideology through which working class folx are socially controlled. One of us expressed excitement at this idea of narration and at our previous discussion of inmixing in science fiction (following Delany) as a challenge to writing differently than we often habitually write. Another of us expressed some interest in populism, and a desire to write unconventionally in a way that friends and comrades would still enjoy reading.

After that discussion, we skipped the writing for the night and hung out at a nearby bar, chatting and catching up. About this, I tweeted the following short thread this morning:

last nite a friend & i drank at the avenue in oakland; played nearly all of the weeknd’s house of balloons: we are lonely & sentimental. Oct 17, 2017 at 9:48 AM

i mentioned that i’d recently been hired to write a bio & album description. having never done music writing, i found the task v difficult. Oct 17, 2017 at 9:51 AM

i said i ought to read more music reviews. my friend spoke the praises of @HexPositive, & we read https://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/review-at-the-drive-ins-inter-alia-w481358 Oct 17, 2017 at 9:53 AM