LITMIR.BIZ

      The blood on George Bush’s

      Hands keeps coming out in my stool.

      Night is never dark enough because

      Everything I see frightens me.

      —Charles Bernstein,

      “The Sixties, with Apologies”

      We work too hard.

      We’re too tired

      to fall in love.

      Therefore we must

      overthrow the government.

      We work too hard.

      We’re too tired

      to overthrow the government.

      Therefore we must

      fall in love.

      —Rod Smith, “Pour le CGT”

      A PICTURESQUE STORY ABOUT THE BORDER BETWEEN TWO CITIES

      the san francisco bay area can boast of having both many great poets and many mediocre poets. Among the mediocre were two poets better known as Demented Panda and Koki. These two poets thought of themselves as living life in pursuit of both the intellectual and the social pleasures of poetry. In this they were like most people who considered themselves poets.

      It is important to realize that in the time of Demented Panda and Koki poetry was an art form that had lost most, if not all, of its reasons for being. It was no longer considered, because of its ties to song, the superior way for a culture to remember something about itself. And at the same time, it was also no longer considered the superior way for a nation to inspire patriotism and proclaim, with elaborate rhyme and rhythm, that its values were great and universal values. This was especially true in the nation that claimed Demented Panda and Koki among its citizens. This nation had long ago realized that the best way to inspire patriotism and convince other nations that its values were great and universal was to offer a series of tax breaks and incentives that encouraged the international distribution of colorful moving pictures and songs that celebrated soldiers, government agents, and upwardly mobile consumers as heroes.

      It was in part precisely because poetry had lost its patriotic importance that Demented Panda and Koki were so devoted to it. But as poetry had lost its patriotic importance, it had also lost much, if not all, of its potential to be a meaningful part of any sort of resistance movement. It was not as if they had totally given up. They knew that poetry still had a role in various anti-colonial movements in cultures other than theirs. But they found it impossible to imagine any equivalent role in their own culture today. Despite this lack of faith in their ability to be meaningful poets, they remained devoted to poetry, full of hope about its possibilities, no matter how limited these seemed to be. As they remained devoted to poetry, they met frequently to take long walks together, and on these walks they talked about poetry and its particular lostness.

      When they walked, they took up a lot of room on the sidewalk. Demented Panda usually brought his two dogs, who tended to yip and yap at other dogs and at skateboarders, and Koki frequently pushed her baby in a stroller. Demented Panda and Koki thus walked down the street with three other sentient beings in tow, sometimes talking loudly like the baby, laughing and enjoying the sun, which was often accompanied by a cool breeze, and sometimes, like the dogs, getting in each other’s way and then being annoyed and snippy with each other or with the world at large.

      During these walks, what they would talk about could probably be best described as gossip, although it was also about poems and poetry. They didn’t gossip about poets or poetry they didn’t like. So they didn’t talk much about poetry that tends to portray, in a quiet and overly serious tone, with a studied and crafted attention to line breaks for emphasis and a moving epiphany or denouement at the end, the deep thoughts held by individuals in a consumerist society. Instead, they talked about poetry that they liked, the sort that stretches language to reveal its potential for ambiguity, fragmentation, and self-assertion within chaos, the sort that uses open forms and cross-cultural content, the sort that appropriates images from popular culture and the media and refashions them, even if they often also talked about their frustrations with and the limitations of these kinds of poetries that they nonetheless liked.

      During their walks they often played a sort of game where one of them would say something negative about some poem and then the other would say something positive and then one of them would say something negative and this would go on and on for some time. They were fairly ecumenical in their approach. They talked in negatives and positives about their own work and each other’s work and the work of others. It was a sort of erotics to them, this moving of their brains between saying something negative and then something positive. It was like a game of one-upmanship that they played with each other and with the poems themselves. Some days Demented Panda was more negative and Koki more positive. But other days Koki was more negative and Demented Panda more positive. But when it came down to it, at the end of the flipping back and forth, the poems always won, and if they made a list of work that they liked, their lists would probably be remarkably similar and it would be that work that they talked about together, no matter how much they complained about the poems or gossiped about the poets while walking on any given afternoon.

      One summer day, a particularly nice and mostly sunny day of 69 degrees, while on one of their many walks, Demented Panda and Koki decided to collaborate. They would, they said to themselves, write something that they would come to call A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. Demented Panda and Koki lived only 1.4 miles from one another but they lived in different cities. They said to themselves that in A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities they would write something about what it meant to be poets in this time, this time of wars and economic inequality and environmental collapse, and in this particular urban space, a place that put up signs claiming to be a “Nuclear Free Zone” despite being the place that was largely responsible for the development of the nuclear bomb, a place that was now defined by the development of a technology industry that distributed colorful moving pictures and songs and social media through flatscreens of various sizes. They hoped that if they thought hard enough, they might be able to figure out some possible new configurations for political art and action. They wanted to think about the connections among place and time and writing as more than just an artistic problem, and also about how a site can be a complex cipher of the unstable relationships that define the present crises and their living within them.

      But mainly they tended