POETRY TALK: no. 4

The poem as an activity of psyche within history

Last night, I got to participate in a poetry reading and discussion with Thom Eichelberger-Young, as hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers. And my god, I had a fantastic time. Thanks to everyone who came out. I’m sure I’ll miss somebody I know, but shout out to Chris, Mathilda, Dom, Patrick, Jon, Alex, Daniel, Chel, Thomas, and MC—I was psyched to have you all there. And special thanks to Thom and Rachel, both of whom made it a place where I felt comfortable and inspired. It was a great night. There will be a video up soon, and I’ll link to it so you can check it out.

In preparing for the talk, I wrote a lot of stuff to clarify my ideas, and I figure some of this might be useful to share here. It’s basically a reflection on the aims and limits of writing about historical nightmare and disaster, the political life of imagination, and the need for an anti-establishment stance as both writer and publisher.

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In my poetry since approx. 2018, I’ve written quite a bit about fascism, horror, and genocide, and it’s often hard to write and unpleasant to read. The drive to write it has come out of political principle and human concern, but also from a simple inability to tune that stuff out. It gets vomited onto my floor every morning with the news, and my poems had to find a way to speak back to it, or into it. Partly, it’s about poetry as a way of mourning or processing grief, but just as much it was about finding a poetics that could fight back and actually handle this material without being destroyed by it. And at its best, perhaps, it was about communicating energy and resolve for others. I am often asking, “How can a poem even try to articulate something under this weight?” And, relatedly, What the fuck is the point of a poem now?

To answer this, I want to raise an issue that is, to me, fundamental: the fate of psyche—or, more directly, the fate of imagination, in both personal and collective formations. And this is absolutely not just about poets. Imagination is essential to how we experience reality and form an idea of the world. Psyche is one way of naming the fact that reality and imagination are forever entangled. Imagination is how we both receive an image of the world and project ourselves into it in a spirit of possibility and freedom and meaning—imagination is tied up also with our sense of the future. Affects, desires, fantasies, stories, memories, wonder, as well as the mystery with which we encounter suffering and death—all of these belong to our imaginative life. (I am sketching here. I suggest reading James Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology, or my own essay “The Ghost Mine Explodes” for more expansive treatment).

However, the human capacity to experience imagination as anything other than nightmare—or as an atomized escape room—is severely challenged by this historical moment. So often, we are imposed upon through a punishing, repugnant image that seeks to dominate and violate. And this is the experience of psychic domination: of nightmare—a sense that the world is hostile to you, that possibility has disappeared, and that your ability to even experience reality—to BE REAL—is under threat. The fascists want to destroy the conditions for truth, freedom, and reality itself so they can dominate over what remains via technology and financial extraction. A person of conscience is given the option to give up, convert to fascism, or die off. And they absolutely use the media as an engine of psycho-politics: they are assaulting human imagination in its capacity as a world-forming, future-oriented faculty that desires freedom. They shut that down and in its place install an abject, death-cult fantasia.

In this context, the point of a poem is, for me, about resisting this psychic death: refusing to let my imagination be closed off into apathy, terror, or blank spectatorship¹. This is the personal level of poetic activity, of saving oneself through the work, but it also echoes outward and possibly communicates this energy to others. It is a way of building a world of people committed to this kind of work together, and to surviving as imaginative beings in a hostile situation. And concurrently, by insisting on keeping one’s eyes open, it’s also about refusing to concede history to the enemy. After all, a poem leaves a record: to put something in a poem is, among other things, to register it in a historical record of psychic witness and development. Ultimately, it has seemed to me that a poet is, among other things, one who takes seriously their part in a broader historical conflict—a psychic embattlement—and who leaves a record of it for those who share in the fight, and for those who come after us. My position has been to try to commit to the vitality of this record while also to resist the forces that would annihilate my capacity to imagine my own life, and our larger power as historical actors, by naming and exposing them.

This process also involves facing the fact that these forces—media spectacles of ugliness, violence, hate as well as overt, material acts of destruction and violence—are actually their own powers of poetic imagination: they want to shape a vision of the world—and to delude and coerce others into its orbit. These poetic forces usurp and deform, intervening in the psyche in a historically unprecedented way. They do this to protect the wealth and position of those directing the nightmare, and they do so through real, material violence, but also by shaping and defacing world images and inviting projections, fantasies, pathologies. And they have a whole host of technologies—nearly all of them developed originally by the military and its need for total objectification and control of everything it perceives—with which to enact this. They seek to enclose us within nightmare, ignorance, and compliance. And part of resisting that requires keeping oneself afloat, and reaching out to others, but also through exposure of the nightmare as such: to delineate it within the space of the poem’s imaginative work, and to reveal and disentangle oneself from this hostile mode of ruling class poiesis.

I have written much about this before in an essay called “The Ghost Mine Explodes: toward a psycho-material poetics.” That essay and much of my writing in recent years has thought of poetry in terms of the pharmakon—in short, that which is poison and cure in one. In this view, to enter the world of the 21^st century via psyche results in deep conflict, and it may often feel like you are channeling toxins. And this is how I have largely seen the historical task of imagination in the present: to digest and reposition and possibly to neutralize the chaos and violence we experience, at least for a moment². We cannot do this all the time, nor should we, but I don’t think it is unique to poets to feel like there is psychic warfare going on whenever we allow ourselves to be awake to history (that is, when we look at the news or actually allow ourselves to feel what we are seeing in the world). This has genuine emotional and physiological effects, and it alters our lives in very deep ways. And yet, to shut out the violence entirety is to forsake history—a kind of denial. So we are so often caught between trying to see into how it is, and trying to envision new possibility, while recoiling from the disgust and distress we undergo in doing so.

It is not easy work. We should not necessarily have to do ONLY that work of fighting and resisting—and there is a concurrent risk of indulging the horror in a pornographic fashion. You can start to delude yourself into thinking that nightmare is not the only serious or valid mode—in other words, becoming a doomer—and that is not something I am willing to accept. And this is where I have come up against a limit and a sense that, for my work to grow and stay true to imagination—which is also a political truth—I can’t just record horrors. It has been seven years of heavy immersion, and I’m not sure how much more of this I will be doing (Travis may be my last word on it for a while). There are other questions to be asked: where and how does imagination WANT to live? where can we build a future for life itself, which means a world of possibility, freedom, and truth? We ask about the future and the social world we can build here within the wreckage of a decaying empire. But those questions are useless if we haven’t first digested a certain amount of the darkness.

Ultimately, it’s up to everyone to figure out how they’re going to face this stuff and how their poems are going to record it. Further, one has to ask about the nature of publishing. It’s vital to consider how one’s poems circulate and to consider the material facts of printing, distribution, funding, etc. Is your poem of psychic embattlement going to find itself in the pages of The Atlantic? Are you going to be doing soft diplomacy for the state or for centers of accumulated wealth and prestige? If so, I’d suggest you rethink how your work is published and note the hypocrisy involved, as these networks are not part of the world we want to see, and they may in fact be part of the nightmare. Remember, the poem is not the only thing you are saying when you publish it: the medium is also the message.

Now, other aspects of political activity are obviously necessary—this should go without saying! Writing poems will never, ever be enough. But at the same time, a world without poems is in fact a dead one—one in which something fundamental and necessary has died. And I mean “poetry” as a modality of imaginative freedom, which takes numerous forms. So when I am talking in my capacity as a writer of poems, I am also trying to say something about poetry as a form of life: a form of life upholds the poem as a space of psychic freedom and discovery and truth, and which lives among dreams, among the dead and the immortal, among trees and animals, stars, pasts, futures, all of it. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t also donating to those in need, and educating yourself politically, and involved in protest and other organizing, and whatever beyond that. The poem does not exhaust the political, and in some moments, a poem does not need to actually be “about” political “content.” For me, it’s about psycho-political positioning just as much as anything else: you can have a position on this stuff—as in seeing where you imaginative work is situated, and how it stands up to the nightmare forces and the other lies that would entrap our efforts—and then write about whatever you want. Some may be compelled to do the writing of nightmare and political antagonism, some may find they are called elsewhere, but they do that work with clear awareness of the stakes and where and how the lines are drawn. And this is reflected in material ways via publication practices.

One publishes to find comrades, as Breton said. For me, poetry is an activity of psyche in history, and as such it is also an about building a culture of imagination that is free from compromise sand collusion with establishment centers. And careers can compromise us. Ultimately, for myself and my work, I want a culture of liberation, truth, and imagination, and I feel a gain in energy and focus to the extent that I disentangle myself from the liars and careerists—even if this means forsaking “fame” or “prestige” (or whatever it is people think they’re getting out of it—it sure as shit isn’t money, or they’d look elsewhere). When you reach a place of psychic intensity in your work, all these people and they’re noise fades away—they don’t matter, and your degrees don’t matter, and the only thing that counts is that you are ALIVE. Poetry is a form of life, of keeping psyche alive in history—keeping it alive even in its death, which is only a change of phase—and it asks that we commit to the truth of its work and that we find a way to make it open up for others as well. Then, the nightmare begins to lose its hold, because you know how to dream something else, something bigger, from within it.

1. And to unpack that, I’ll say that when I talk about psyche, I am talking about, yes, the inevitable psychoanalytic connotations—the unconscious, dreams, etc.—but also I mean it in a much plainer sense—like, psyche-delic is psyche-manifesting (psyche is NOT “mind”). A psychedelic experience deranges your senses and mentality in order to intensify the operations of psyche, and we forget that psyche is an actual fact of our experience—usually much quieter in operation, but just as real in how it shapes our grasp of reality. There is NO human experience of reality that is not mediated by psyche—in fact, reality could be said to be the workable consensus picture of life available to psyche. For Blake, the body was an organ of psyche (which he called Imagination).

2. This is akin to what Felix Guattari calls the formation of a “chaoide”: a node capable of absorbing and neutralizing specters of chaotic violence.