Amish Trivedi

The universe, too,

is held together by the same gravity

 

that holds us together. The same abyss

swallows us all,

 

and our hate cannot command the sea —

we cannot beg it back,

 

deny it any longer. But we can fight on, stare

deep into the abyss that threatens and

 

reach back away because that’s what we do

for one another in the trials

 

we face in our time in our place

in our spirit in our replication in our ecosystem

 

in our lust our anger.

 

***

 

How easy it must be

to do nothing — to let time

occur, to let event

and emotion ebb

or flow free. How nice

it must be

to hold time

 

as equity. How nice it must be

for the future to always appear

as perpetual replicator. How nice

it must be to allow time

to solve all issues

and remove oneself

as agent.

 

***

 

But who holds time, possesses it

feels ownership over it? Time

 

is a disease, a lingering pustule,

 

and memory is the sly trace

of it. What is written down

 

is supermemory, hyper-

memory. To fetishize it,

 

to offer it gift it present it

take it make it tease it

 

be in denial of it. I am not afraid

because there is nothing here

 

we didn’t invent.

 

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

 

It would be a terrible cliché to say that the five sections of FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press 2021) mirror the stages of grief — and rather inaccurate. However, the path of the text is certainly from a kind of darkness to a kind of light, from the cold emptiness of space to the warm interior of the body, of the heart. What we have to find is one another in that void, in the replicating automata and grey goo of destruction, we’re reaching instead for the reproduction of sounds we know.

 

Maybe at the center of the book is the idea that the world does not exist for us, a feeling that seems to be getting lost in our present moment. I read about an Asian pottery company where the workers knew it would take hundreds of years for their pottery to harden and thus would leave instructions for whomever would come along in the future to do any painting work. Four hundred years, a mere blip of time, I thought, but do we have that kind of long thinking in our present? Maybe it’s impossible to see around the present terrors we’ve worked ourselves into — political chaos, climate change. Maybe it’s impossible to even imagine the world of four hundred years from now when we do not know if it’s capable of existing in any way a modern human can recognize.

 

These terrors, attempts to understand time, weave throughout FuturePanic, which Co•Im kindly called “Four Quartets for the Millennial set.” Indeed, I think poets and artists are always grappling with the questions that FuturePanic is dealing with, bigger than just our moment, but attempting to look at a lot of time as something which will and has already happened in some ways around us. Much of twentieth-century philosophy has attempted to deal with these questions, which is no doubt where I turned while writing the book.

 

I said in a talk recently that FuturePanic is a hard book to describe in the way that some novels are difficult to describe because they are too big for a simple sentence or two to encapsulate. In some ways I think of this book as everything — a grand unifying theory of sorts. Perhaps that’s overreaching, but I don’t want to shy away now from any kind of grand pronouncements. I mean — why bother now?

 

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

 

FuturePanic

Amish Trivedi

 

Co•Im•Press, 2021, Perfect Bound Trade Paperback, 6" x 8"

 

Sweeping and subversive and anxious and heartfelt, FuturePanic by Amish Trivedi is a Four Quartets for the Millennial set. Infused with the nervous energies of the past half decade, when living with macro-tragedy and dread have become more ingrained in day-to-day functioning than ever, Trivedi’s third book of poetry employs a deliberate and plaintive lyric mode across five unfolding sections to wrestle with how much of the psyche one can let untether before the self faces annihilation. The poet confronts the gathering terrors that creep forth from simultaneously pondering vast, heady concepts like time and futurity in conjunction with more localized, proximate concerns like whether one will face the looming specter of a mass shooting the next time one goes to a box store, concert, movie theater, grocery store, school, or other public space. In FuturePanic, Trivedi questions whether the collective grief and guilt of our shared transgressions and fears are all-consuming or if we can use humanity’s boundless potential for creativity to rouse an alternative we've never known enough of to embrace fully — a moment’s peace.

 

[N.B. Another excerpt from FuturePanic was posted here on Poems and Poetics.]