#smallpresses

For the sake of keeping the poetry’s structure intact, I’m going to screenshot sections from the review copy HVTN generously sent me. This way I’m not spending ten years typing it out carefully (which I usually do cos I’m normally quoting from ze printed matter), and I want people to see how Joseph works with form and shape. It’s not obvious from the first poem in the collection, ‘Moths’, what the structure is because it’s a short opening piece, but begins to imply some sort of outline, or perhaps a disintegration, where line breaks leave words hanging. I begun thinking about what moths are in this scene, their presence, when do they come awake? Part of the collection’s thematics takes it focus from “darkness”, literal and figurative, the darkness of day, the “grimdarkness” (as Joseph puts it in ‘one rain drop falls out the sky’) of a summer in February and these gruesome, seasonal abnormalities which are set to interrogate us and make us feel uncomfortable. (Let’s face it, it’s uncomfortable when there’s daffodils in January). Beginning with ‘Ending Scene’:

All the way through, Joseph’s poems zigzag and swirl down the page like this ^. I enjoy Joseph’s, I’m assuming intentional irony here, in beginning the collection at the end. He’s intimating the symmetry of our present-day predicament: living in the beginning of our world’s end. That first line propels us to our future: ‘it’s 2030, the wind is so strong it’s a geometrical pattern’. Now take a look at this extract again, look at it as a whole image. Joseph is playing out that image of a geometrical pattern through line breaks and alignment. It’s so deliberate, so exact. It feels engineered. And it’s this powerful wind, winding its way down and down the pages, which embodies a resemblance to a natural form, like the way you think of clouds travelling across a digitised map of the world on a weather channel. Half of this collection situates itself amongst ramifications of climate change, the erratic change in weather, the sky’s putrid colour, threatening and sick. We’re seeing a storm unwind in words. But when you take a look at the other references Joseph wields in his writing, you can begin to see that this visual structure intimates more subtle connotations. 

Remember how I said that the collection is exploring the errors of our species which forever seem to glitch on themselves? We keep repeating the same history which evidences our end? I think this is implied by the way the text swirls, and eats on itself. Joseph says at one point, ‘this glitch is hilarious’ (one rain drop falls out of the sky), opening us up to this denial, like “the apocalypse is happening, this is surreal” laughter, but it’s also kind of like, we’re losing our minds, we’re laughing because we’re bridging the insanity of everything dissolving before us, endlessly replaying itself, over and over. I’m kind of reminded by that scene in ‘The Midnight Gospel’ from Episode 6, ‘Vulture With Honour’, when Clancy and Captain Bryce (the guy that comes to fix Clancy’s simulator), tells him his list of rules when navigating these dangerous different coloured wobbles to get to Sparkle (a cow-like creature who makes green oil which is used to preserve and keep the lantern part of a simulator healthy I guess, hard to explain if you’ve not watched the series). Anyway so they come across this little weird man creature with a hoopla head holding onto a rocket or bomb-like thing, stuck inside purple wobble, which Captain Bryce explains: that’s the kind of wobble that locks you in time. And this little man stuck inside the purple wobble is glitching like:

And then Captain Bryce says: “it’s too late for this guy, his mind is pickled” because he’s been stuck in the same second forever. And I got to thinking about how, the more acutely aware we become as a species of how we’re repeating the same mistakes, facing the same consequences, extinguishing the same forest fires, over and over, the more riddled the mind becomes, and anguished I guess. So the poetry here isn’t just like a cyclonic pattern depicting a natural form; the strange, violent weather tearing up the planet’s astro turf and rainforests. It’s also a visual representation of history’s rhythm. This glitch, this error that remains eternally stuck, jolting on itself. It really gives weight to the series of images in this writing, which repeatedly hit you in the face, but it also compounds the repetition in the writing. In ‘this is the sadness’, (and pretty much all of the poems), Joseph keeps coming back to lines like ‘I can’t stop thinking about’ and ‘I’m writing a’ pegged by a series of repetitive motifs, butterflies, 58 year old men as God, airplanes, butterflies, horror show, airplanes, horrow movie’... That repetition is attached to this glitch-affected way of writing. It’s clever and unusual, and when I started reading the structure as a message in its own right, I was amazed by how things suddenly started to make sense in terms of the writing. I could see all this incredible dualism which Joseph plays with and writes about. 

So I went back and refreshed the first poem in this collection, ‘Moths’. 

I’m thinking of terms like ‘cloudz’, and what clouds are, how they move, what they mean in this day and age. The obvious dualism here is the physical clouds we see and study in the sky, their changeability as they move across throughout the day, carrying rain or snow, whatever. And then there’s this more enigmatic weird concept of ‘The Cloud’ in computing, which is a homonym in and of itself. You have Sky’s WiFi ‘The Cloud’, where anyone can make an account and sign into their WiFi and they have hotspots called ‘The Cloud’ all over the UK. You’ve got ‘cloud computing’ which is this method of data storage, normally created by a single provider. They manage the data and how it’s processed/stored/encrypted and users can upload or save information there. Anyone with an Apple product automatically gets an ‘iCloud’ account where their data is automatically backed by Apple’s cloud software. This means you never have to sync up your devices with wires or buy extra USB sticks/external hard drives to back up your data. You can just set a timer on your phone, link it to your iCloud account and it’ll automatically back up whenever you want. People think of this accumulation of data in one place, (without having to personally manage it) as being an “amorphous cloud”. I’m seeing this as a poem which introduces this element of denial about our surroundings. We’re pretending its normal and trying to squish out the reminder of these seasonal abnormalities. Even if it’s stripped across the sky, ‘black with insane swirls you could drown in’ (alluding to the writing on the page itself), our denial tells us to talk us away from the indefinite scream that it’s not okay. ‘Our cloudz are dying because of u’—the way Joseph intersperses Internet vernacular/text-speech/shorthand here introduces the Internet’s presence, and our tensions between our physical reality and our artificial one. We transcribe events into our phones. We see something, we talk about it in on an online platform. The way we transfer reality from a physical realm to a virtual realm is an exchange which happens so regularly and with such rigour that it’s an indented feature to 21st century society. Every time Boris Johnson makes an announcement in real-time, journalists flock to Twitter to unpack it in an online arena which stays up for the rest of time. The fact that language is swamped by Internet culture and adopts terms once pertaining to more physical objects or tangible sensations sensations, renders language more faceted and multiplicitous than ever before. Such ambiguousness in what we mean and how we mean it, contributes to this acute confusion and fear, which compounds contemporary culture. 

Other homonyms: 

I’m thinking of dark as in ‘dark mode’ and ‘dark’ as in ‘disturbing’. ‘I regret not running through Wheat’ I think is a reference to that Theresa May interview where she said the naughtiest thing she ever did was run through fields of wheat with her friends, (as opposed to increased austerity and fucking up Brexit + various other shit). 

‘accidentally deleting the human race’ makes a mockery of the way the world is ending, which is by no means, “an accident”. I also wonder about the dualism in ‘A tornado touched my heart & I’m crying’, is it that we’re seeing the destruction a tornado unleashes as a perturbance? Sometimes Joseph writes like the way emojis sound, does anyone get that? Sort of like a staccato, plain-text way of articulating emotion. Did an emoji tornado touch his emoji heart? 

Such an incredible line: ‘I love / thunderstorms because it sounds like God is choking on grapefruit’. I’m not even going to unpack that. I’m going to leave that one to simmer. But that’s not an example of an homonym here, in this section I was looking more at the part about ‘a million weird dead bugs’. There’s the bugs that come to eat us as we decompose. And then there’s “computer bugs”. Just a few examples where Joseph’s playing on words here. 

I think of these homonyms as alluding to our inability to discern between reality and virtuality. We’re unable to understand our reality as it is now, I mean if you discard the Internet and technology, we already struggle with deciphering between our own perception to another’s perception. What one perceives as being red, another might call pink, or orange, or green. The additional threat that Internet culture imposes is that, our language eventually becomes swamped by the technological vernacular of computers, of online-existence. And yet it’s inevitable, and it’s already happening. It’s interesting—Elon Musk said in 2016 about whether he thought humans were living inside a computer simulation— ‘The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we have Pong [the Ping Pong video game]—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of playing simulatenously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.’What Joseph’s showing here is the multiplicity and changeability of language, how technology burrows into its sinews, transforming terms we use to describe our tangible, physical realities into ones which you can hold in your hand and scroll down with your thumb. Language is the currency of culture which is being endowed to technology. But that’s not abnormal of language per se, I mean it’s symptomatic of how language and meaning evolve simultaneously, language’s multiplicity. Rather what Joseph is saying that it’s bridging a confusing gap, how can you tell between the tears streaming down your face and the ones streaming from your television? His poetry seems to breed flesh and wire together, forge them as inextricably bound entities of today. We can’t distinguish ourselves from our flesh to our wired online flesh. 

But although set it in the future, you can tell that this collection is entirely rooted in the now, even when it oscillates between different years in the near and distant future, from 2030, to 3042, to 2076. It reads like a series of tweets, but it appears like scan-lines coursing down the page, so Joseph’s really capturing a generational voice here, that “online” voice which is stripped and clipped, where it feels squeezed into 100-odd characters. The poetry is peppered with well-known, familiar references pertaining to our present-day. And I think year dates are an artifice in this collection. The world’s end is so resolutely close to us that we can taste it in images like Elon Musk singing baby shark, Lana del Rey as the saddest superhero, David Hasselhoff eating the white wine emoji... It’s laughable. It’s funny. It’s hard. I think part of the way I read into this mesh of pop-cultural references was down to its implied superficialism. Y’know, we sort of think of our extinction as being a distant probability, but we can’t think about it without losing our minds. We barely accept the inevitable truth of our own mortality, we just can’t come to terms with the reality that someday we will sip our last cup of coffee, hug a friend for the last time. And we won’t necessarily know it’s the last time, until it’s the last time. This fear is particularly prevalent in Western culture, so we’ve barricaded ourselves with our egos, and constructed this site which vows to distract us from that not-so-terrifying revelation, that we’re all going to die. Death is natural. But we think it’s so unnatural and upsetting, that we’ve invented celebrity culture, make-up tutorials, 100K followers, emoji reactions, opinion polls, status updates, likes, Facebook algorithms, botox and red shoes as part of a sequence to distract us from the eventuality of death, thinking that these things will sustain us. It’s all artificial, it’s all blue-light, it’s all moths ever gravitate towards. Joseph humours it, (I wonder if he’s jaded at times) with a sigh: 

‘There’s all sort of thunder & / lighting and it is Fantastic and important tv.’ Me and my mother both laughed when we read this, it’s more mockery of the kind of vapidity in contemporary culture. Just endlessly being like: ‘oh watch this, oh I’ll link you the video, this is so funny watch it, look at this, this is my fav clip’, it’s nauseating. And you get this nauseating feeling when you’re reading this collection as it continues, it begins to make less sense, it begins to glitch and unravel to the point where you don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s bombardment, and the struggle in making sense of what’s going on typifies the way the ‘I’ is struggling to hold onto sanity. And while the dystopia of The Moth Apocalypse makes for a terrifying read, it’s also met with such beauty, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more beautifying approach to apocalyptic writing. You can take deep pleasure in the way Joseph articulates natural disaster. From ‘one rain drop falls out of the sky’: ‘I went to see the cherry blossoms in the glowing forest / [...] / THE SKY IS PURPLE LET ME SLEEP / [...] it smells like strawberry / pop tarts outside’. This “glowing forest” alludes to a forest fire, the purple sky alludes to light pollution, making it hard to sleep. Strawberry pop tarts goes without saying really, probably one of the best examples of describing consumerist culture in a nutshell: pre-cooked, chugging in artificial colours and flavours. But when you read these sentences alone, you don’t get the impression that the world is dying awash in blood and fire, rather the violence is extinguished. It reads and feels more like a painting, this gradual description of shades and experiences. There’s something kind of Eva Figes-esque about his writing style, just the way he colours in scenes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s glamorised, but rather, the apocalypse is beautified. 

I want to bring this review full circle and come back to the collection’s title: The Moth Apocalypse. By the end, I came to think of humanity, us as being the moths, here, roused by darkness and addicted to rectangular devices emanating blue-light. We frantically flap around its notification, its constant stream of information as the world around us is plunged into dark mode. The points where you’re thinking that the collection is relenting and giving up, are actually the most profound moments where it gets up. Joseph writes it best in ‘Everything Is Peachy’: ‘if you’re / looking for a sad and hopeful story / just sit / back and watch this rain.’ This collection begs us to be present, to consider and amend, and if nothing else, to laugh wildly as you don’t remedy it. It is an incredibly self-aware read, an invaluable perception of the “way things are heading”. The composition and structure of the poetry is masterful, art in its own right. The Moth Apocalypse is a promising and brave debut from Joseph Turrent.  

 As Al shared personal stories intimately tied with Unicorn’s history, I learned about one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s early visits to the United States, courtesy of Unicorn. (The press published four of Nhat Hanh’s poetry collections, plus a novel in their journal). Cry of Vietnam was published with support from a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Unicorn was a early recipient of the program. 

Al also shared about Philip Levine’s work. The press published 5 Detroits, which included the poem, “They Feed They Lion.” That poem would one day bring Andrew into Al’s world. Click the audio above to hear that story. 

I heard Al’s stories about Philip Levine just weeks before Levine passed away (Feb 14, 2015). I learned that Al met Phil in Santa Barbara during Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetry reading. With the Vietnam war raging, and with many of the white, middle class audience having never encountered a real Vietnamese, much less one who was a monk donned in an orange robe and with a shaved head, Phil turned to Al and said, “How can we kill people with such beautiful language?” How could we so easily dehumanize a civilization that produced such poetry from someone like Nhat Hanh? 

Phil served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010-2011. 

Unicorn Press was instrumental in raising generations of poets who would grow up to become literary giants. The press engaged writers who mirrored its mission of spiritual, political, and civic engagement.

Producing this podcast challenged me in several ways. Every story Al shared shimmered with so much historical anecdotes that I lamented having to put any of it aside. Al’s marriage to Teo is an episode into itself. He was 19 years old when he met her; she was much older, not Jewish, five times divorced. They established Unicorn Press together, and the press is a testament to their relationship as well as their commitment to carving out powerful literary space in American society.

Al -- a former resident of Gotham Books, a writer, a book maker -- turns the press over to Mr. Andrew Saulters in January of 2016. The fellow on the bike takes flight. The legacy will continue.