You see, sometime back, I came up with a zippy formula meant to clarify how we might arrive at “political poetry.” It goes like this: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics.
V. Joshua Adams: Let’s start at the beginning. The title of the upcoming 2025 book: WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. It comes from the opening of “Caras y Mascaras,” which juxtaposes the names of poets and literary practices with those of military hardware and politico-historical places and events a total of 14 times, by way of tercets, like this:
From left to right: Laura Mullen, Mullen’s new book “EtC,” and Benjamin Morris.
EtC takes as its subject an iconic bovine mascot who has lived one of the longest and strangest lives of any corporate emblem in history — and whom Mullen here examines in a collection that serves equally as send-up, as critique, and as lament, but above all as trip through the capitalist funhouse: a trip in which, with the knives out and sharpened, we discover there is very little fun to be had after all.
Having recently returned to school as a mature student, once a week I drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi on my way to campus, about a three-hour drive. Most of my commute takes place along Interstate 55, along which I often see a truck from one of the Sanderson Farms chicken plants in nearby Hammond, Louisiana, or McComb, Mississippi. These trucks are loaded up with thousands of live birds, their crowded cages stacked ten rows high and twenty rows deep, likely on their final journey ever taken in the open air.
