200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
Drew Milne's Marxist Lichens
I have been reading Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life — a book which helps to theorize the rise of the Biotariat. Moore writes, “all limits to capital emerge historically, out of the relations of humans with the rest of nature. And in equal measure, so do all projects for the liberation of humanity and our neighbors on planet earth.” The Biotariat rises to that “equal measure” — a relational “project” at once for the “liberation” of the human and the extra-human. As I read Moore, his notion of what this project may look like is just as provisional as my sense of what the Biotariat might actually be — it is yet a project, at the conceptual level, that I can only name “poetic.” Here is Moore again:
Efforts to transcend capitalism in any egalitarian and broadly sustainable fashion will be stymied so long as the political imagination is captive to capitalism’s either/or organization of reality.