I would rather I didn’t have to. When I told a friend I was working on a talk on writing and industry and the state, they responded, “Isn’t that boring?” Frankly, it is. Since my writing is essentially antagonistic, and as it has been essentially diagnostic, it follows that I couldn’t help but write about the antagonisms I found myself in. I want to puncture this myth that the US is a free space for people to produce culturally. The US likes to say, We don’t put our poets in prison. But that only reveals who we count as poets and what we count as repression. Repression can be pursued quietly here: you don’t get the money; you don’t get the job; you don’t get the publication; and you cease to exist as a writer. Literary citizenship is tied to the exchange of these resources and affects what is produced. This citizenship asks of us allegiances and complicities and silences, dinners at tables that we promised to never sit at.
I don’t mean to paint myself as naive, but before my entry into that world, I had a romantic view of poetry existing outside of industry. In reality, poetry is part and parcel of the machine, serving as a pressure release valve for what might otherwise become a political explosion. I have found that the machine is excellent at metabolizing any content that we throw at it. For example, I can introduce the reader to the nouns of Iran—the dishes of Iran, the mothers of Iran, whatever it might be—and thereby give a human face to the people of Iran, and the machine will hum. It is lubricated by our diversity. However, if we challenge the grammar, the contemporary literary establishment clams up. As long as we use the same syntax that an established white American poet might use to describe Vienna when we describe the content of our own lives—even content disruptive to this nation and this language—we can get away with anything and be rewarded handsomely. But we are defanged by this established grammar.
If I had made another explicit response to the state, like Look, that would have felt expected and very much like playing the game. With Look people could say, “The problem is the Department of Defense, not me.” Customs says, “You’re the problem, too.” Customs is a book of refusal for me. It names resentments I don’t want to carry or name anymore. The reason Customs ends mid-sentence—spoiler alert—is that it’s a clearing away, so that what must come will be able to come.
2087
stormborns
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
snowghoul