A version of this text was presented by Geordie Miller at the Community and Literature Outside the Book study day plenary session on April 30, 2025. It has been revised and adapted by the author prior to its publication on Discours/e.
“All contemporary works of art,” the late Marxist critic Fredric Jameson observed, “have as their underlying impulse — albeit in what is often distorted and repressed unconscious form — our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (147). For Jameson, this utopian “impulse” is universal. Even a standard pop song such as Asia’s 1982 hit “Heat of the Moment” expresses it. But the heat of a particular historical moment can make the universal utopian desire for the “ought,” an otherwise, more transparent, i.e., less “distorted and repressed.” This causal relation of historical heat to utopian desire defined my experience writing and presenting Disharmonies, a book-length poem that I co-authored with Marilyn Lerch in the fall of 2020 and that Sackville’s Hardscrabble Press published in the spring of 2022.
Before more fully addressing how our utopian desire was mediated by three phenomena—collaboration, audience, and technology—I want to linger in the heat of the moment of the poem’s origins in 2020 in order to help clarify what Marilyn and I then understood to be driving us to our desks. For we make our own history under the given and inherited circumstances with which we are directly confronted, to paraphrase Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. What directly confronted us was a pandemic that severely restricted our in-person sociality, so actually we ended up drafting the whole poem over email, with the only exception where we talked in-person about our project being a single socially distanced walk along the high dyke behind Sackville’s industrial park. But as many may recall, the pandemic didn’t just alter the rhythms of everyday life—for those who share our political orientation it further emphasized capitalism’s deadly designs on humanity. The May 2020 murder of George Floyd remains dramatic evidence of these designs, particularly for the courageous proletarians who took to the streets that summer to riot and protest1I use the term “proletarian” here in the Marxist sense to describe members of the class in capitalist societies who must either sell their time and capacity to work or starve.. Racist police terror and extrajudicial killing have long been part of capitalism’s management of surplus populations, a term that describes the growing numbers of proletarians like Floyd whom capital accumulation renders relatively redundant to its needs. Since this population cannot be absorbed into the ranks of free labor and disciplined by a wage, they must be repressively managed by the state, often explicitly in defense of the property system. As the pandemic unfolded, millions of proletarians around the world could feel their superfluity as acutely as ever, suffering and dying while the richest capitalists decamped to their yachts and luxury disaster bunkers in the company of the additional wealth they were amassing from the widespread social destruction and precarity2See, for example: www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/coronavirus-billionaire-wealth-hits-record-high-of-10point2-trillion.html. The bloodthirsty fires of capitalism’s planetary crisis had also continued to multiply, with devastating intensities adjusted for class and geographical location. Our poem was forged in the heat of these deadly designs.
But the specific origins of Disharmonies are rather mundane. In late September of 2020, our friend Keagan Hawthorne reached out to Marilyn and me over email to let us know that he was launching a micro-press called Hardscrabble Press—a printshop in his living room. After congratulating Keagan on this initiative, I had the following email exchange with Marilyn (condensed for clarity):
Dear Marilyn, Maybe you and me could try out a conversation in poetry about what’s (not) happening? It might be a good fit for [Keagan’s new] press.”
“There is so much not happening!!,” Marilyn replied. “And I have been making resolutions to start writing something like poetry and then not following through. So your invite is intriguing. Let us give it a go. A kind of tennis match with no rackets no audience no money or riffing on dreams or whatever. Your turn, ha ha.”
After Marilyn very generously invited me to make the first volley in our game of “tennis amidst the flames,” here is what I sent her a couple of days later, which would eventually become the opening poem in Disharmonies:
because poetry is not enough no one has to decide how it will die. less than a decade left so please not another lyric, not another interview, not another workshop. only words that lead beyond words, if possible. plus tactical imperatives like which Irving facility to target first. our butchers don’t ask why this happens to us. this—deaths of despair, racist police terror, on and on…let’s not hang on let’s hang onwards. progress with its fresh kills. no poetry of the future if no future.3The “because poetry is not enough” line is attributed to Wendy Trevino’s poem “The We of a Position” in the “Acknowledgments” section of Disharmonies.
Then 10 days later, Marilyn responded over email with a poem that began “Agreed: poetry is not enough.” And we were off, passing the poems back and forth over email until what we decided was the final rally, on New Year’s Eve.
The call-and-response form of our long poem could be characterized as a “dialogue” or “conversation,” but I think that the term that best captures the nature of our collaboration is a dialectic. By dialectic I mean thought-in-motion; and I just want to stress one principle and one fundamental law of dialectics that apply to our project to give you a better idea of our political and aesthetic sensibilities. The dialectical principle concerns likeness and difference. There is nothing in the universe that is entirely different from any other thing, and nothing that is entirely identical. So, in comparing Marilyn’s standpoint to mine, we find both likeness and difference. The likeness is our shared revolutionary awareness and—relatedly—our belief that while “poetry makes nothing happen,” poems can and do make something happen4Jasper Bernes develops this idea quite sharply in a reading of Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die” that was published as a chapter called “Poetry and Revolution” in After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022).. The difference is a generational one and thus a difference of historical formation, which I can distill via a single contrast. Marilyn writes of how she was pulled into history, “heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, ran from cops in Grant Park in 1968, knew Rennie and Tom, was FBI bugged and investigated.” By contrast, my own revolutionary awareness developed during a period when there were no mass movements, so I reference being radicalized through reading excerpts of The Communist Manifesto in a high school history textbook. Early 2000s southern Ontario seems a far cry from the antiwar throngs in DC or the streets of Chicago in ’68. The dialectical law at play in our literary production is quantity into quality. Several years of emails and coffees and readings and yard visits exchanging hopeful and/or angry opinions about the state of the world—a quantity of these exchanges eventually begat the qualitative change of writing about this stuff together, like how a certain quantity of reform struggles can lead to the qualitative change of revolution.
In terms of audience, Marilyn gives a solid sense of whom we imagined ourselves addressing in her “Dedication”: “[t]he good that might come from your reading,” Marilyn writes, “is to hear where we are and then go further in your thinking, in your activism, in your art.” Marilyn’s nod to the potential self-activity of our audience echoes Walter Benjamin’s optimism about the transformative potential of newly mass media, canonically outlined in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1935). “At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer,” Benjamin declares (qtd. in Bernes 1272). This was part of our experience sharing Disharmonies, both online and in-person, though of course I would not go so far as to claim that we managed to overcome the aesthetic division of labour. Benjamin elsewhere, in “The Author as Producer” (1934), suggests that only a sharpening of class struggle can achieve that overcoming; but at the very least we troubled this division to the extent that our audience became our critical interlocutors, largely thanks to the digital platform (Bernes 1272).
We first presented the work at a Zoom reading, livestreamed on the Tantramar Literary Arts Community’s Facebook page, which Keagan hosted in April of 2021. We read the full poem, which took approximately 40 minutes, and then there was roughly the same amount of time taken up for discussion, which felt more freewheeling than a standard Q&A. Shortly after the reading, Keagan reached out to us about Hardscrabble publishing Disharmonies,as “there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea during the reading” (and not just from the members of my family who were in attendance). Our critical interlocutors that evening wanted a record, beyond the digital trace of the recording, and Keagan ultimately obliged with a beautiful hand-sewn book, featuring a letterpress-printed cover.
The dynamic from the initial reading, of the poem’s performance preceding a loose, extended discussion was repeated at our in-person book launch, in the parking lot of Struts Gallery in July of 2022 and again at an event at Mount Allison’s R.P. Bell Library in December. We reached the most people when we performed the full poem as part of Sappyfest’s 26-hour livestreamed homage to the telethon, known as Infinite Variety, in August of 2021, to an online audience of several hundred, in addition to the crew and other participants who were on site. We even got to read in Australia (via Zoom) for the launch of a collection called 2020: An anthology of Poetry with Drawings by Bill Liebeskind that published a section of Disharmonies. Ironically, given the political register and purpose of the poem, we were only able to read to these larger and more global audiences, respectively. There was no discussion, beyond the chat function in the Australian reading. All of this online activity and something old-fashioned like the associated word-of-mouth might have contributed to us selling out the run of 100 copies so quickly. If Marilyn and me were more committed to a future where the poet would remain a distinct social role, perhaps we would have tried to insist that Keagan print more. But the book did what it needed to do. And we came to appreciate it as a social object—an occasion for gathering to collectively struggle towards an emancipatory horizon—as opposed to merely something to sell, the commodity form.
The generative digital process of collaboration and presentation highlights a contradiction within contemporary literary production, vis-à-vis the information technologies that continue to delimit social life. On the one hand, the call-and-response form of our poem, coupled with our desire for an active audience, appeared to fit the Zoom platform, hand-in-glove, as we volleyed our words back and forth. The chat function and the fact we could share screen space with the online attendees felt more participatory than a standard reading. But on the other hand, this device, these devices, for connecting are also registers and reinforcers of our ongoing social distancing. “One participates,” Jasper Bernes writes, “but one also generates at every turn, information about one’s habits that is used to channel that participation in directions the media owners and their clients will find profitable” (1281). Byung-Chul Han’s In The Swarm (2013; 2017) characterizes our situation even more starkly. “[D]igital apparatuses are installing new constraints, new slavery,” Han proclaims.
Because of their mobility, they make possible exploitation that proves even more efficient by transforming every space into a workplace and all time into working hours. The freedom of movement is switching over into a fatal compulsion to work everywhere. (34).
The “fatal compulsion to work everywhere,” as individualized and increasingly atomized units in a capitalist value valorizing machine, can likewise be fatal for collective action and organization. Our poem tried to push back against this fatalism and towards the horizon of “the not yet,” the otherwise5Tillie Olsen memorably describes our liberated future as the “not yet in the now” in her 1960 story “Tell Me a Riddle” (109).. More modestly, returning to the language of Asia’s “Heat of the Moment,” “incidents arose from circumstance.” Which is only to say that our poem emerged out of the concrete struggles for another, better world (“circumstance”); it was but an “incident,” not a gift bestowed from above, outside, or beyond these struggles. Which are not over6This phrasing is an homage to a refrain from Joshua Clover’s “Poem (Sept 26, 2023)”: https://proteanmag.com/2024/07/06/poem-sept-26-2023/.
Bibliography
Bernes, Jasper. “Art and Revolution.” The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Ed. Beverly Best, Werner Bonefield, Chris O’Kane. Sage, 2018. 1270-82.
Han, Byung-Chul. In The Swarm: Digital Prospects. 2013. Trans. Erik Butler. MIT, 2017.
Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text no. 1, Winter 1979, 130-148.
Olsen, Tillie. “Tell Me a Riddle.” Tell Me a Riddle. 1961. Dell, 1994. 63-116.
Notes
- 1I use the term “proletarian” here in the Marxist sense to describe members of the class in capitalist societies who must either sell their time and capacity to work or starve.
- 2
- 3The “because poetry is not enough” line is attributed to Wendy Trevino’s poem “The We of a Position” in the “Acknowledgments” section of Disharmonies.
- 4Jasper Bernes develops this idea quite sharply in a reading of Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die” that was published as a chapter called “Poetry and Revolution” in After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022).
- 5Tillie Olsen memorably describes our liberated future as the “not yet in the now” in her 1960 story “Tell Me a Riddle” (109).
- 6This phrasing is an homage to a refrain from Joshua Clover’s “Poem (Sept 26, 2023)”: https://proteanmag.com/2024/07/06/poem-sept-26-2023/
To cite this article:
Geordie Miller
Geordie Miller is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison, with a specialization in Creative Writing. He has published two poetry collections: Re:union (Invisible, 2014) and Disharmonies (Hardscrabble Press, 2022). The latter book, co-authored with Marilyn Lerch, was one of the twenty “general selections” for the Frye Festival’s “I’m Buying an NB Book Day!” campaign in 2022. His writing on visual art and poetry has appeared in leading journals, such as Canadian Art and Canadian Poetry. He is a member of the Associate Editorial Board at The Dalhousie Review. In 2023, he co-founded an independent literary micropress—High Marsh Press—with a fellow poet, Keagan Hawthorne. One of the main goals of this press is to provide students of Mount Allison University direct work experience in the literary publishing sector through the administration of the annual Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest.
