{"id":5789,"date":"2025-11-23T17:38:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T21:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/discours-e.ca\/?p=5789"},"modified":"2026-08-03T12:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:48:07","slug":"the-heat-of-the-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/discours-e.ca\/en\/2025\/11\/23\/the-heat-of-the-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Heat of the Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Une version de ce texte a \u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9sent\u00e9e par Geordie Miller<\/a> lors de la s\u00e9ance pl\u00e9ni\u00e8re de la journ\u00e9e d\u2019\u00e9tude Community and Literature Outside the Book le 30 avril 2025. Il a \u00e9t\u00e9 r\u00e9vis\u00e9 et adapt\u00e9 par l\u2019auteur avant sa publication sur Discours\/e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cAll contemporary works of art,\u201d the late Marxist critic Fredric Jameson observed, \u201chave as their underlying impulse \u2014 albeit in what is often distorted and repressed unconscious form \u2014 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\u201d (147). For Jameson, this utopian \u201cimpulse\u201d is universal. Even a standard pop song such as Asia\u2019s 1982 hit \u201cHeat of the Moment\u201d expresses it. But the heat of a particular historical moment can make the universal utopian desire for the \u201cought,\u201d an otherwise, more transparent, i.e., less \u201cdistorted and repressed.\u201d This causal relation of historical heat to utopian desire defined my experience writing and presenting Disharmonies<\/em>, a book-length poem that I co-authored with Marilyn Lerch<\/a> in the fall of 2020 and that Sackville\u2019s Hardscrabble Press published in the spring of 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before more fully addressing how our utopian desire was mediated by three phenomena\u2014collaboration, audience, and technology\u2014I want to linger in the heat of the moment of the poem\u2019s 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\u2019s Eighteenth Brumaire<\/em>. 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\u2019s industrial park. But as many may recall, the pandemic didn\u2019t just alter the rhythms of everyday life\u2014for those who share our political orientation it further emphasized capitalism\u2019s 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 protest1<\/a><\/sup>I use the term \u201cproletarian\u201d 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.<\/span>. Racist police terror and extrajudicial killing have long been part of capitalism\u2019s 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 precarity2<\/a><\/sup>See, for example: www.cnbc.com\/2020\/10\/07\/coronavirus-billionaire-wealth-hits-record-high-of-10point2-trillion.html<\/a><\/span>. The bloodthirsty fires of capitalism\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the specific origins of Disharmonies <\/em>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\u2014a printshop in his living room. After congratulating Keagan on this initiative, I had the following email exchange with Marilyn (condensed for clarity):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dear Marilyn, Maybe you and me could try out a conversation in poetry about what\u2019s (not) happening? It might be a good fit for [Keagan\u2019s new] press.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is so much not happening!!,\u201d Marilyn replied. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After Marilyn very generously invited me to make the first volley in our game of \u201ctennis amidst the flames,\u201d here is what I sent her a couple of days later, which would eventually become the opening poem in Disharmonies<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019t ask why this happens to us. this\u2014deaths of despair, racist police terror, on and on\u2026let\u2019s not hang on let\u2019s hang onwards. progress with its fresh kills. no poetry of the future if no future.3<\/a><\/sup>The \u201cbecause poetry is not enough\u201d line is attributed to Wendy Trevino\u2019s poem \u201cThe We of a Position\u201d in the \u201cAcknowledgments\u201d section of Disharmonies<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Then 10 days later, Marilyn responded over email with a poem that began \u201cAgreed: poetry is not enough.\u201d And we were off, passing the poems back and forth over email until what we decided was the final rally, on New Year\u2019s Eve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call-and-response form of our long poem could be characterized as a \u201cdialogue\u201d or \u201cconversation,\u201d 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\u2019s standpoint to mine, we find both likeness and difference. The likeness is our shared revolutionary awareness and\u2014relatedly\u2014our belief that while \u201cpoetry makes nothing happen,\u201d poems can<\/em> and do make something happen4<\/a><\/sup>Jasper Bernes develops this idea quite sharply in a reading of Claude McKay\u2019s sonnet \u201cIf We Must Die\u201d that was published as a chapter called \u201cPoetry and Revolution\u201d in After Marx<\/em>: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century <\/em>(Cambridge UP, 2022).<\/span>. 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, \u201cheard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, ran from cops in Grant Park in 1968, knew Rennie and Tom, was FBI bugged and investigated.\u201d 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<\/em> 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 \u201968. 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of audience, Marilyn gives a solid sense of whom we imagined ourselves addressing in her \u201cDedication\u201d: \u201c[t]he good that might come from your reading,\u201d Marilyn writes, \u201cis to hear where we are and then go further in your thinking, in your activism, in your art.\u201d Marilyn\u2019s nod to the potential self-activity of our audience echoes Walter Benjamin\u2019s optimism about the transformative potential of newly mass media, canonically outlined in \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility\u201d (1935). \u201cAt any moment the reader is ready to become a writer,\u201d Benjamin declares (qtd. in Bernes 1272). This was part of our experience sharing Disharmonies<\/em>, 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 \u201cThe Author as Producer\u201d (1934), suggests that only a sharpening of class struggle can achieve that<\/em> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We first presented the work at a Zoom reading, livestreamed on the Tantramar Literary Arts Community\u2019s 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<\/em>,as \u201cthere was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea during the reading\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dynamic from the initial reading, of the poem\u2019s 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\u2019s R.P. Bell Library in December. We reached the most people when we performed the full poem as part of Sappyfest\u2019s 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<\/em> that published a section of Disharmonies<\/em>. Ironically, given the political register and purpose of the poem, we were only<\/em> 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\u2014an occasion for gathering to collectively struggle towards an emancipatory horizon\u2014as opposed to merely something to sell, the commodity form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The generative digital process of collaboration and presentation highlights a contradiction within contemporary literary production, vis-\u00e0-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. \u201cOne participates,\u201d Jasper Bernes writes, \u201cbut one also generates at every turn, information about one\u2019s habits that is used to channel that participation in directions the media owners and their clients will find profitable\u201d (1281). Byung-Chul Han\u2019s In The Swarm <\/em>(2013; 2017) characterizes our situation even more starkly. \u201c[D]igital apparatuses are installing new constraints, new slavery,\u201d Han proclaims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cfatal compulsion to work everywhere,\u201d 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 \u201cthe not yet,\u201d the otherwise5<\/a><\/sup>Tillie Olsen memorably describes our liberated future as the \u201cnot yet in the now\u201d in her 1960 story \u201cTell Me a Riddle\u201d (109).<\/span>. More modestly, returning to the language of Asia\u2019s \u201cHeat of the Moment,\u201d \u201cincidents arose from circumstance.\u201d Which is only to say that our poem emerged out of the concrete struggles for another, better world (\u201ccircumstance\u201d); it was but an \u201cincident,\u201d not a gift bestowed from above, outside, or beyond these struggles. Which are not over6<\/a><\/sup>This phrasing is an homage to a refrain from Joshua Clover\u2019s \u201cPoem (Sept 26, 2023)\u201d: https:\/\/proteanmag.com\/2024\/07\/06\/poem-sept-26-2023\/<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bibliography<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Bernes, Jasper. \u201cArt and Revolution.\u201d The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory<\/em>. Ed. Beverly Best, Werner Bonefield, Chris O\u2019Kane. Sage, 2018. 1270-82.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Han, Byung-Chul. In The Swarm:<\/em> Digital Prospects<\/em>. 2013. Trans. Erik Butler. MIT, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jameson, Fredric. \u201cReification and Utopia in Mass Culture.\u201d Social Text <\/em>no. 1, Winter 1979, 130-148.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olsen, Tillie. \u201cTell Me a Riddle.\u201d Tell Me a Riddle<\/em>. 1961. Dell, 1994. 63-116.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Notes<\/h5>