Capital P

My poem “(Be)labored Posterities,” which draws on a variety of source texts, is now in “Capital P,” a special section of The Recluse, edited by Simone White. Thanks to Simone for asking me to contribute. Here’s a description of the feature which comes from her introduction:

This section of The Recluse comes out of hearing poets read here at The Poetry Project and my own response to the work I hear and read and the desire to share that work more widely. Capital P is, in a small way, an attempt to distribute an energy that seemed, this season, to keep coming and coming into the Parish Hall. I wanted to share and print what is “in the wind.”

I asked contributors (roughly) for work “involving matters of capital and class,” and I was — I am — surprised and thrilled by the various ways in which the work collected here “involves” thinking poetically about how and why humanness is violently stripped of its particularity, and by what structures, how those structures change and are changing. (Involve: this is a word that covers all ways of relating and is a vestige from legal writing, the writing of interrogatories, itself a very low form of legal writing, the writing at the barest bone of fact gathering. “Involve” implies a lowest common denominator of relation and therefore tends to strategically blanket a category or idea so as to cover everything from a certain perspective. Involve is a false clue.) That is what I mean by “capital and class”: systematic dehumanization of the human into laboring factions.

I was thrilled to receive for The Recluse each of these thoughtful and moving anti-manifestos. By which I mean thanks to Commune Editions, francine j. harris, Fanny Howe, Blunt Research Group, Michael Leong, Robert Kocik, Keston Sutherland for answering this call in the spirit of the work in poetry that they are doing, different work; work that, nonetheless, seems to share a longing for comradeship and an end to exploitation where it is found.

~ by Michael Leong on June 11, 2015.