The Volta features a special issue of Evening Will Come, on mixed forms, edited by Peter Streckfus, with contributions from: C.S. Giscombe, Jesse Ball, Julie Carr, Cole Swensen, Martine Bellen, & Susan Tichy as well as “Warp Spasm Gristle Day” from TSky Press author Joyelle McSweeney (Salamandrine, 2013; Nylund, the Sarcographer, 2007).
Here’s an excerpt:
Damage is a way of being in the world. Death is something to be endured along with life. The lovely lyric skin cuts away to reveal the rage of prose syntax staging its reversals just beneath. Or the blandness of prose becomes lit up with the meth-rage of the lyric. Likeness is combustible, pharmaceutical, and just as dangerous and violent an element as Plato always feared, doubling things, making knockoffs and artifices and rip-offs and zombies which function, unpredictably, both better and worse than the ‘original’; likeness is the virtual; “like” performs an and/or; the body is transformed to a likeness, a spasming mirrorsite from which impossible waves of damage can be relayed through the traumascape and to which such waves return. At once a glancing and a stunning blow.
And it is this indeterminate and volatile blow which I hope to strike with my writing, with the violence which has kissed me, made a show of me, made me the hole through which it ‘is coming,’ that violence which hosts its spectacles in, on, through me, a carbon-based lifeform in the Anthropocene. My latest ‘poetry’ book, Percussion Grenade, is riven with such spectacles, metastases, plays and damage plans, and my latest ‘prose’ book, Salamandrine, 8 Gothics, is analogously spasmed with genre, with plays and tales and sung dialogue and huffy shuffling and stupifying forces. For me the neologism is the radioactive granule of mixed form, the rehydrated grain of toxin which causes cascades of spectacular mutations and reactions, effects eventually reaching back to smother with glamorous gyrations this nominal beat of cause. This is also why and how my work is political, a wave of mutilation aimed back at the big structural injustices of environmental and economic depredation, as well as at the pinpoint acute injustices such as Bradley Manning’s persecution, the torture at Abu Ghraib, Halliburton’s calumnies, the victories of banksters, the unrelieved grief of drone attacks. Yet it is a wave of mutilation which also is always tumbling back on itself. This world we live in is unsurvivable. It cannot be survived but only endured. My work tries to radiate the fact of damage inwards and outwards at once, switching micro and macro scales with each new word, line break, swerve into prose or spasm of dramatic form. The writing has to swallow/makes me swallow all this violence. Just like it has to/I have to swallow the fist, the camera, the toxin, and the pill. But like Cúchulainn, I can’t keep it down. I can’t keep it together. I can’t keep it to scale. I can’t stay in one place. I am damaged, deranged, thrilled, crooning, in motion, in drag, weaponized, digitized, warp-spasmed, spectacular, sinking, sleep-walking, dirty, hissing, sped-up, preening, ludicrous & mobilized. I am become a zone of violence.