Back at the start of 2022, I posted some kind of new year’s resolutions list on this blog. Technically, it was more an expanded to-do list, which I suppose is the ambiguity of the form itself--an internalized work-discipline where ‘character-building’, personal fulfilment, achievement of goals, etc, etc, all merge together: pseudo-movement, changing and continuing, like Mike Kelley’s Banana Man, surrounded by a crowd of people who declare themselves all to be moving but who seem to be standing still, lying in a crater in the earth flapping arms and legs and pretending to be an angel, dressed as a stagnant pond that recirculates but doesn’t move. So too, the resolution form, stuck between a series of goals, achievements, work tasks, and something more numinous that doesn’t just turn life into a series of targets and believes in some actual possibility of change.
But who thinks about lists for so long? So here, a few years later, another list, a placeholder for myself as much as anything: an accumulating pile of projects, some of them already initiated back in 2022, others more recent, all of them overlapping so that nothing is ever truly finished--a way of not ending, somewhere between useful motivation and pathology.
Working collectively, collaboratively, is one way to see writing as part of something that reaches beyond itself, beyond selves, as something with a future. And working together this past year, in person and virtually, with Candace Hill on a poetry-and-art book called Abstractive has been a joy--the manuscript now done and in search of a publisher. It’s been a pleasure, too, to open up an ‘infinitive conversation’ document with Nhã Thuyên, in lieu of conversations in person and on foot round the city, and a real honour in the summer to publish Don’t Hide the Madness, a chapbook excerpt of the longer manuscript Taste of Water, in Kaitlin Rees’s expert and fastidious translation. Don’t Hide the Madness and a of Askia Touré’s Songhai! were last year’s Materials titles: in the works next year are Howard Slater’s translation of Abdellatif Laâbi, some other new titles to be announced, and newly typeset-reprint of D.S. Marriott’s Duppies, and fresh runs of temporarily out-of-print titles by Anne Boyer, Lisa Jeschke, James Goodwin, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.
Since 2020 editing work with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux on the two-volume anthology The Umbra Galaxy has been a constant presence. Four years on, the books are moving ever closer to the finish line, and after years of online meetings, it was a thrill to discuss it in person and in public with Tonya and Jean-Philippe at the Furious Flower conference in September, the next iteration at the Louisville conference on literature and culture this coming February.
Outside collective work, there a number of manuscripts in some sort of progress: there’s the makings of a critical manuscript on contemporary poetry, maybe called Working Notes, still to be hashed out; a book on free jazz, Survival Music, continues to be researched and slowly written, as does another planned book on music, Ensembles, accumulating and expanding before (hopefully) to condense a little; there’s an in-progress poetry manuscript, On Musical Objects (a bit of it here), and along the way I may have accidentally ended up writing a book of daily/political essays, though that’s perhaps best left to brew a little. And outside writing--and back to collective working--continued music-making in duo with Tansy Spinks (so far, largely in a studio on a hill overlooking West Norwood, occasionally in other places like Cafe Oto), and in trio with GUE, as well as in another duo with Unk in a bunker near, if not quite beneath, a heath; ‘expanded improvisation’ workshops with Mattin, and a related project on freedom and improvisation.
But enough of lists! All these enumerations of projects tends toward the logic of the CV, the accumulation of writing or writing about writing experienced on substack or social media or whatever other data-harvesting curated venue tend towards the personal brand competing for attention, rather than as part of the collective (fractured, fragmented, sometimes cohesive) struggle within language that one would hope writing would strive towards. As European right-wing social democracy continues to destroy itself, the ‘centrist’ media narrative continues to cling to ‘liberal hope’, the Macrons and von der Leyens and Ampels and Harrises of this world seen as a bulwark against the rise of fascist and neo-fascist parties. But, as a friend put it to me the other day, this imagined centre is, in fact, the centre of the right-wing, as the political climate lurches (is pushed) towards the anti-migrant, anti-woke manufacturing of culture wars with quite material effects, the fusion of nationalist rhetoric and international capital, the accelerated race to hell. For over a year now genocide has gone on unchecked in Gaza, murder on murder on murder, and still the weapons flow, the US has elected a president who promises some unforeseen fusion of old and new right in alliance with tech billionaires, who in turn contribute funding and support to the fascism that rears its head in France, in Germany, in right-wing riots in the UK, the rhetoric of the border on the one hand, the flow of capital, the flow of weapons on the other. Increasingly, we’re going to be writing our way into fascism, however directly it affects us, some insulated, some on the front lines. Our writing, our music, our art, our action, is going to have to rise to this. Our ‘our’.
Today, for once, the sun is shining, though snow is forecast; a squirrel is running around outside gathering or burying its food; plants, still half-way between life and death, lean out towards the window and towards the light.
