Knar Gavin
My studio is small, but owing to this breakfast bar cut-out in the kitchen’s add-on half-wall, I have an extra surface on which to write (for which I am really damn grateful). I call it the overlook (in that it overlooks my actual desk, where I write far less), and it reminds me of my Pop Pop, a big proponent of vertical space.
Readings
A social movement text or work of radical theory
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Haymarket Books, 2023)
I want to slap this one into the hands of any/everyone invested in building durable, life-giving worlds — poets, organizers (new or seasoned!), anarcho-commrades, etc. Hayes and Kaba spit some no-nonsense, all power to the power wisdom around practices of reciprocal care and social poïesis (How might we insist that there is such a thing as society? What are the pathways to re-making and re-stitching the world?). The whole book is fire, but I think the Hayes introduction will interest poets especially, since it’s beautifully interwoven with lines from Diane di Prima’s “Rant”: “history is a living weapon in yr hand” — “you have a poetics: you step into the world.”
In a lot of ways, Let This Radicalize You is a basic repudiation of human resourcification — of the anti-relational degradations and reductions that transmute people into personnel, that render us as fungible, deracinated automatons, alienated and all but interchangeable one with one another. In place of all such bullshit, Hayes and Kaba serve up a fundamental truth: we need one another, desperately, and we owe each other everything.
A work of art/performance/film/album/piece of music/etc.
Algebra Suicide, Still Life (Dark Entries Records, 2019)
Poet and punk avant-garage songstress Lydia Tomkiw (1959-2007, rip) has always felt like an early exemplar of Gurlesque style, and I’ve been an Algebra Suicide fan since the release of Feminine Squared (2013). I only recently caught up with Still Life (2019), but it’s a pretty slick compilation of remastered tracks from across various albums and EPs. These are anthems for the detritus of everyday capitalist living, to the smut of mass culture — but they’re also full of feminist verve, hungover on the uprisings of the 1960s and doing some hair-of-the-dog hankering to overthrow structures of power and permission. Take “Alphabet Song,” a legit abecedarian: “C is for can and the questions it poses: Can truth be found? Can we go to the bathroom? Can we set your hair on fire?” There’s environmental degradation and toxics, too — everything from heatwaves and pollution to rotten lipstick. It’s all very provocative. The songs are both coarse and inviting; funny and bratty and grim all at once: “when the last apple stops worming, you call it still life.”
Anyway. I’ve just about blazed the word count here without getting down to the coolest/most serendipitous thing about my stumble across Still Life. Straight away, it had me desperate to read Tomkiw’s poetry in print — and downright pissy that doing so was impossible. Or so I thought: it turns out that a collection of her writings (drawn from songs, chapbooks, and other materials) was recently assembled and released by Dan Shepelavy (Universal Exports of North America, 2020). Needless to say, I ordered it right away only to discover that Shepelavy is practically my neighbor — the guy lives just up the street. Ok, but sure, Lydia. I miss you, feel like the poetry world has been missing you, so, truly and totally, anything you say. Gimme all your dialectical séance shit: “A whispered remark changed a girl’s life [. . .] The world? The world is not a wild place.”
A book of poetry by a friend and how knowing the poet affects your reading
Jared Joseph, A Book About Myself Called Hell (Kernpunkt Press, 2022)
Just to get a little too real, I speak aloud as I type, a lot of the time, and typing up the title of Jared’s book pinned me squarely onto the laugh-cry nexus (LCN). On its backside, a triplet of lines appear: “Why are we in hell? / Why is it so funny? / And why can’t I laugh?” It’s actually the same nexus on which I found myself seeing the LAPD haul Jared off on the freeway, cloaked in a hoodie featuring an ogre-form, contract-bearing landlord; “Sign it in blood,” the speech bubble reads. I’m sure, somewhere in the background, there are “not in our name” t-shirts, too, though I can’t remember for sure, and the Web seems to have swallowed the image. In any event, different strokes for different folks, all trying to speak at the limits of speech — to hold the line against barbarity — and not with their shirts or hoodies, but with their bodies: Palestine will be free. Let Gaza live.
It was mid-December, in the midst of a salvo of disruptive highway actions across the country, including here in Philadelphia. I happen to have just started A Book, and “It bores me, through me.” Pretty much every page puts me on the LCN, even the character list (Mary, who “conceived Jesus after copulating with a drone”; Minos, who “Once started a band called Minos Thread, for which he was sued by Ian MacKaye”). A Book — it’s something that’s full of grief, and it teaches me about hell; some things I already know; others feel promissory, as though they’re speaking of the hell that is to come. It’s also about the pandemic (and so, about mass slaughter, to which we are acquiescing, more and more): “I’m texting all my exes asking if they are alive, got virus’d, and they are, and they haven’t, in that order, and apparently we all still care, and we do not dare hell.”
A Book [if it’s good] is full of questions, too. What to make of the fact that “the funniest things in life are also hell?” Sometimes I feel like the funniest things are ax-form, in the way Rebecca Solnit talks about it. Hope is an ax you break down door with in an emergency. A while back and thinking of this, I wrote, “hope and satire / both feed / on the possibility of another truth.” A little dramatic, a lot didactic . . . but, I think there might be something to the idea. Like how — and it’s kind of fucked up — reading Jared’s Hell and seeing him in that hoodie on that highway, it made an imperfect kind of sense; imperfect, like the conditions of thought, resistance, and collectivization themselves. And frankly, the clarity of that LCN brought me to my knees; confirmed the necessity of continuing to organize and face off with cops here in Philly, to demand a permanent ceasefire and reparations without limit, to disrupt/agitate/throw ourselves on the line; to fail, and study, and fail better.
A book of poetry from the last five years
Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021)
I like this collection’s title. Before we’ve even gotten into it, the sunflower’s saving spell has been cast, and as for us, we’re among those salvaged from the void of climate chaos and carceral capitalism, of killings made by global elites. Somehow, there’s abundance amongst the ruins, too: we make a big game of playing dead; there are fashion shows and neon balaclavas; there’s BDSM and a “friend all tied up, blissed out, her eyes rolling back in her head.”
Of course, the poems — like any life-ward breach — are deadly serious, too. After all, sunflowers are phytoremediators: grinning into the sun, they restore ecosystem health by hyperaccumulating toxic elements that have found their way into the soil (things like lead, arsenic, and even radiation). In this sense, the sunflower is perfectly suited to survive our catastrophic present. Likewise, in Wang’s work, though “the air of apocalypse is all around,” so too is “the urgency of THINGS MUST BE DIFFERENT.” Because the apocalypse — of settler colonial ecocide, of racial capitalism — has already happened; because life-worlds and entire peoples continue to be obliterated by the day; because state responses to planetary crisis promise only to super-charge mass incarceration and the arming of lifeboats; because, regardless of how willing it might yet be to harness them for profit, “Capitalism is not a bed of sunflowers.” Or, to hear Aimé Césaire in these lines, “a man screaming” — and there is such a man, such men! — “is not a dancing bear.”
And so the planting must go on, and the planters, already saved from the void, each must carry an ax. In the final lines of the collection, we are given a child plugging seedlings into the earth, and this is made especially beautiful because we know this child already: she’s the one who has taken her “giant ax” to the “windows and glass walls,” whose “mode of entering buildings [has gone] viral. Now there are many of us who carry axes and never wait to be let in.”
A book you have re-read and found changed
Daniel Borzutzky, The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat Books, 2011)
My first read-through was in 2014 when I had a more spotty understanding of U.S. empire, of its arsenals and killing reach. I read The Book, but it didn’t read me. Fortunately, I was prompted to return to it after a dip back into Borzutzky’s translation of Raúl Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love / / Canto a Su Amor Desaparecido (Action Books, 2010).
Not unlike Zurita’s Song, this book is astonishing — by which I mean, the thing interfered with me (from the reflexive French verb s’entreférir: interference involves a mutual strike, a strike the launch of which supposes some counter-strike), in turn demanding some kind of reckoning, of adjustment on the level of thought. Like, is poem/poet/publisher/institution X ___ an attack dog of the state? Has ____ helped disappear all of the bodies? Will ___ decline to man the guillotine, or?
Borzutzky’s collection opens with an epigraph drawn from the 9/11 Commission Report, which reads as follows: “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” Bureaucratization is a chatty, corrupting necrosis, and this official imperative, this brutish ergo of the counter-terror state is a pall hanging over the entire book: a terrific, dark cloud that places vision and meaning-making under duress. While the poems themselves are abject, infested, they also manage to elevate the station of poetry (frequently through degrading it). In one poem, a poet-cum-school teacher sends his students away with “poetry as a saw” — “poetry [as] something to slice people open with.” In another, the figured poet, “miniscule” and equipped with a well of slain hummingbird blood for ink, proposes “the duty of poets is to bring down the economy of the United States.” Later in “Illinois,” the penultimate poem, things brighten: all of the would-be suicides convene on a bridge, discovering “it was not suicide they wanted, it was a world with no money.” And so, instead of dying, they chuck their bills and credit cards into the river below, gathering their neighbors together to do the same. Yep: “They [burn] the banks / They [burn] their computers,” finally at home, together, on the bridge.
IDK, if this is the so-called “work of poetry,” count me in. I waver sometimes (what is it, to write poetry now, from the belly of the beast; what is it to write, stewing, in the acid gut of the genocidal behemoth), but this book makes me want to fight for poetry, restless in the assurance that it is here to stay: “State-controlled poetry is the poetry of the future,” replete with “generals writing poetic death orders.” It’s not so much that poetry that will be disappeared, but rather, that it will be yet further finessed to optimize worker productivity and quell dissent, to tongue the boots of the state; to conduct mass etherization or even become bludgeon. And it’s against this that I feel sturdied in both my own writing (which has grown increasingly political) and that of all the poet-comrades who see and confront the death-world with clear eyes, mass readership and institutional perks be damned.
Writings
Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury
after George Monbiot
Increasingly just-in-time,
capitalism hurries the doom’s day
clock toward midnight
pitching
fork fleets
to tear apart
even the dream
of future fabrics.
But fuck it. Let’s socialize, crank
up the work of adequation,
future
forests breaching skyward
out from the abandoned
cop school
land and bread
an incandescent
whole
in the world.
POLI ED
hope and satire
both feed
on the possibility
of another
truth
redoubling their efforts
when starving
ax-heft, I am
bent
on letting
so much more
than the light in
there’s actually a slack
in everything
the vastness of impasse
the opening
that uncertainty is
together
there
we’ll be ripped
fierce chuckleheads
in pieces
taut
with study
we’ll dance for the rafters
gapped
spritzing
moonlight
dance in our skin of plums
we’ll have raided the orchard,
and with those living stones
from fuel
no longer property
we’ll yet
build this house
Knar Gavin lives in Philadelphia, and they are a community defense and environmental justice organizer, adjunct prof, and bike kid/runner. They hold some degrees, and their poetry and other writings have or will soon appear in appeared in Annulet, ballast, Denver Quarterly, Environmental History Now, AGNI, and NiCHE, among others. They are also the author of the chapbook Vela (The Operating System, 2019). Knar was rhizomed to Etcetera by Joe Hall.