Franco Cortese
is an experimental poet living in Thorold, Ontario. His poetry won the 2020
UNESCO / Brock University Sustainability Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the
2019 CBC Poetry Prize and has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, The
Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, filling
Station, ditch, and others. He has chapbooks out through above/ground
press, no press, nOIR:Z, Simulacrum Press, Trainwreck Press, Gap Riot Press,
The Blasted Tree and Anstruther Press, with others forthcoming from Timglaset,
Hesterglock Press, and Serif of Nottingham. His full-length poetic debut, Lip,
is forthcoming from Penteract Press in 2021.
1
- How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most
recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well,
this question found a fortuitous slice of the-river-me in time, because my
first chapbook (aeiou, published by derek beaulieu's no press in August
2018) and my first book Lip, illustrated by bill bissett and forthcoming
from Penteract this month (and available for pre-order now!: https://penteractpress.com/store/lip-franco-cortese) are two ends of the same
circle, and the publicational start and end of the same project, gestating for
3+ years and now birthpanging its way to worlding, sickly, beautiful and
dirgelike.
The
chapbook felt like an entry into a wondrous world of crazed kinfellows. A
housewarming. Small press is a very beautiful, welcoming, playful place, and
it’s where vergeminded poetry should want to be. It’s poetic experimentation’s
prime real estate. It’s where I’d like to live, where I’ll likely die. It’s a
good thought, not a bad one.
Meanwhile,
the forthcoming publication of Lip feels very culmative. It’s a
simultaneous birth and death. The thing is out of my hands now, and I can’t
change it anymore. After having been a fifth limb for 3+ years, all of a sudden
it’s done and gone. That’s both jubilant and frightening, and how it needs to
be.
It’s also
become a very special book, near the end. It’s got touches and timestamps of
close friends, and even an icon or two: cover title text by Sacha Archer, a
table of contents by Gary Barwin, a visuopoetic contribution to the backmatter
by derek beaulieu, and 20 original illustrations by bill bissett, who made and
mailed me all these drawings in dialogue with the work, which are appearing in
the world for the first time via the vehicle of the book. It’s strange and
beautiful to see a book that’s been a very constant presence in one’s life for
several years suddenly become more itself in a comparative instant by outside
hands.
The
extended project, and its definitively dissolutional culmination in Lip,
is an experiment in lipogrammatic limit cases, presenting densely multilingual
lipogramatic and palindromic poems composed exclusively of words, borrowed from
a variety of languages, consisting only of vowels (and in its most limit-case
moments, multilingual poems consisting of only a single letter).
What
stories can be told, what moments excavated, what rivers frozen and what ideas
bestilled through the use of words made entirely of vowels, or entirely of
consonants, or, indeed, poems consisting of a single invariant letter or glyph,
like its central suite of poems does? It's hopeless, insane and beautiful
questions like these that compel me forward, and that make the book both
possible and actual.
Lip makes these kinds of questions
possible by transposing and transgressing lingual borders, borrowing from
dozens upon dozens of different languages, finding phonic and sonic oddities
within the world’s myriad tongues that share some invariant aspect of form, and
bringing them together, putting them in dialogue with one another, in order to
create poems that, for example, are exclusively composed of vowels, or
exclusively made up of consonants, as well as other primal and minimalist
fragments of language , and different recombinant shards of lettoral atoms –
two and three letter combinations of vowels and consonants, etc.
Lip takes
these forms of compositional and structural omission and constraint and uses it
to map real world forms of constraint and omission on the broken frontiers of history,
culture, ecology and economy, dictating not only the fundamental ontogenic and
ontologic units of the poems, or what they are permitted to be (the use of
certain letters, or certain invariant aspects of form on the level of the
word), but also how they are permitted to be organized and communitize amongst
each other, AKA, organizational constraint, such as the multilingual
lipogramatic palindrome or the “emop” (poems consisting of words that share
some invariant aspect of form on the level of the word, arranged in
alphabetical order). In doing this, it’s my hope that the book speaks to themes
and concepts that are both timely and timeless, encircling aspects of humanity
that are evertrue: love, sex, death, theft, identity, war, empire etc.
In some
ways the book is also an experiment in anti-translation, in the sense that
there’s no actual translation taking place. I’ve used the verbatim literal
English translations, or at times the technical and grammatical definitions of
its poems constituent words, in composing each multilingual poem’s English
counterpart. The ontological grammar of the book treats the words composing its
poems to some extent as sovereign beings, and except for a very select few
instances documented in the book’s notes, takes them exactly as they’ve been
found, without synonymizing or editorializing them. In fact, the book
synonymizes exactly one word (using “to piss” in place of “to urinate” for the
sonorism as well as the impertinence).
It’s a
project that not only revels in the beautifully ontogenic nature of language,
but also one that attempts to interrogate the darker, ontologically
prescriptive characteristics and potential uses of language as well, like the
nature of the definition, the inherently insidious nature of lists and
registers, the ills of tils, etc.
2 - How
did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Glib but
true, poetry found me, rather than the other way around. In the sense that I
began writing and publishing poetry before I really read (or found a love for
reading) poetry. I became drawn to it as the headiest edge where language
splinters and where words are their most meltpearly and waxlike. Being a
linguic machine (as all minds-in-universe are, necessarily), the attraction to
language at its most anomalous, self-reflecxtive, and possiblational seemed
like the most natural thing in the word. At the time (my late teens, I think),
I was doing other things, and embroiled in other forms of intellectual work and
play. Some science, a lot of philosophy, and some vagabond scholaring. Poetry
is where I went to break (not just the sense of leisure, but also in the sense
of fouling apart; of cracking oneself open and, halfdying, reveling in the
starsplint shards).
I fell in
love with (but hadn't yet read; not really) Finnegans Wake (which
will always be more poetry than novel to me), which likely revealed this
anomalous hallmark of language to me - that words can be plasticized,
ectomized, and Frankensteined into worlds. This is probably the insidious spore
that started it all. Hard to be sure; it's all ghostly mirrors-in-mirrors to me
now (memory being the persistence of decay in the flensing lense of time), and
like most of the frictions spectrating my inner haunt, more motheaten poem than
statue, however ozymandaic.
When I
decided to re-enter the world of poetry in 2017, I was fortunate enough to find
several warm and welcoming guides and hosts close to home. By coincidence, two
of my favourite poets happen to live and work within a 20-minute drive of my
home: Gregory Betts and Adam Dickinson. I sought each of them out and cornered
them, brandishing my crinkled envelope of manuscriptural sheaves, craze-eyed
with animal tremor.
I found
in each of them a generous and vigilant Virgil to my Dante, full of friendship
and informal mentorship (I say informal because I haven't actually studied
under them formally; in poetry, as in all else, I remain uninstitutionally
trainéd). They've both given me more than my due of generous feedback on my
ongoing projects, indulged my hermetic concerns and alchemical ravings, opened many
warm doors, and tipped me off to the best local poetry shindigs both public and
private. I remain deeply indebted to both of them, and cherish their
friendships.
Poetry
also lost me for a while, after it found me. There was a good few years after
really getting into it where I didn’t write, or even read, any poetry. I was
off doing other awfully burdensome and weighty things, trying to change the
world for the better, as I had been before poetry (B.P.) and after poetry
(A.P.), when it first found me. That foray (return, really) didn’t break me –
the gleam and spirit is still there – but it did tire me.
All this
isn’t to say that I don’t think poetry is important; for me it is vitally - even
deathly - important. But in a different way. It’s not going to change human
worlds, or affect very many human lives, but it pushes, breaks-anew, changes
and innovates language in small, isolated, largely unseen but undeniably and
factually existent (i.e., real) ways. It changes Plato’s world, not ours, and
is more akin to the brightforge thunderpeal of a manmade rift in quantum
spacetime, or the fleeting creation of a new subatomic particle, than a
breakthrough in cancer treatment, or a cheap way to desalinate water. Its
innovation, and it’s real, and fundamental, and has the potential to impact
(however immaterially) those who chance a glance before it vaporizes, but it’s
not going to make things better. And that’s okay, I think.
6 - Do
you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions
are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current
questions are?
When I do
poetry, I try to make it do what poetry does best: plasticize meaning at the
borders of language. If I had to define poetry, I’d have to say that it’s words
at their most. “Their most what?” is the right response to that statement, and
precisely the point. Words at their most what.
Poetry
finds, and makes, meaning in misreading. It’s its most elevatory and revelatory
quality. It’s what makes it it, and what makes it worth it. Its power and draw
likes in its generative ambiguity, and a thing whose power lies less in its
lexic and semantic qualities as in its semiotics – not what it means, but the
shifting interplay between authorial intent and reader interpretation. A poem
is a thing that revels in its gaps, its ethers, and its simultaneous
superposition of meanings, whose power and fundament of being is in what it’s
not saying, or what it’s almost saying, or almost not saying.
Above all
else, I’m trying to make it new, as the famous poundcake once spake. What
experiments can I conduct that brings language to a brink no one else has
frontiered before? What can be said there? What spaces and places can be sung
for the fist time or revoiced there? These are the things I’m after.
For the most part, the majority of projects I cultivate lead themselves. I
thrust myself into some overlooked nook of language, some combinatory or
translatory suburb of the worlds inside words, and I explore, forage, and try
to make space to allow things to make and reveal themselves. Often this takes
the form of constrained lexicons – finding some invariant aspect of form that
serves as walls for words, and limits the actual inventory of words I’m able to
work with. A pinnacling example would be Lip, soon to become my very first book (and, by
association, the first two chapbooks I had out in the world: aeiou
through derek beaulieau's No Press in 2018, and uoiea, through your own above/ground
press in 2019).
Other
byways of my poetic practice try to vivisect possibilities of language by
smashing it across the hard edge of our present technological moment, forcing
(or allowing) meaning by using our many hypermodern artefacts to cut into
language, letting it bleed the wons and zheroes lurking inside.
This is
the world of technopoetry, which I would define as poetry which uses distinctly
or emblematically modern technologies as part of its procedural or
compositional process in such a way as to at least part of authorial agency
into those technologies themselves.
At its
best, technopoetry is ideally suited to use these very technologies to
interrogate, document or vivisect our current technological moment, using
omnipresent tools of hypermodern crisis to produce art from artifice.
I'm
thinking here of projects like those encapsulated by my recent chapbooks no mỡ, no mo, no mò (nOIR:Z
2020), tú cu nǔ sù yù mù (Trainwreck
Press 2020), and gó go gó (The
Blasted Tree 2020), which
use a densely multilingual lipogram as a starting point and, in the words of
Kyle Flemmer, subjecting it to "various methods of manual and automated
translation - including verbatim, machine, and text-to-image procedures,
pull[ing] a seemingly nonsensical text through a series of sense-making
operations, forging surprising new poems with each iteration." ,
as well as projects like Bark Ode, a chapbook that I had out last
year through your own above/round press that uses a random, blind and somewhat
violent gesture of the body (random, fast typing, as if in frustration or
desperation) as the raw input for Google Translate, forcing an ever-present
staple of our technological moment to interpret worldess, dumb, blind and
violent bodily vestures as language.
Poetry's
all translation anyway, whether you know, or like it, or not. ... Throughout
all the projects at play in my poetic practice, however, is the idea of finding
an unexcavated corner of language, living there for a bit, and trying to force
something out of it that is both emblematically human and utterly alien, and
truer for it, acting as a host for language to speak itself. I'm just a poet, which
for the majority of my projects to date is less author than a kind of curator,
editor, or space. The poetry is itself, and I try not to get too much in the
way of that.
7 – What
do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he
even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
God,
none. Unless you find one that you feel fits, in which case good on you.
Society usually needs to be the artist’s bane for anything to work in the first
place, but maybe that’s an opinion tied up with my own ideational and aesthetic
preferences.
It’s
funny (in a hellish, Divine Comedy sort of way), however, thinking of
the role of poetry today, rather than writing and writers more generally. I’ve
already said above what I think poetry is at its best – a portal into the
living void on the empty sides of glyphs, fuller than any sky, ready and ample
to be applebitten and firstcontacted. But its role, well. It’s dying.
This isn’t to say that it’s not more vibrantly alive inside itself in certain
nooks and crannies than its ever been before – this is true. But no one reads
it. You need to sell less copies of poetry to be a bestseller than any other
genre – fiction, nonfiction, period-piece gothwestern Shrek erotica, you name
it. And I can’t find a wealthy aristocratic patron for the life of me.
This is a
fairly far fall from what it used to be (and the words already feel sheepish
and clownlike in my mouth, despite their sooth), given that poetry started out
as the thing that founded cultures. When you think about it for a moment, I
think it's pretty clear that poetry was created as a very practical tool to
make myth (cosmological, existential and moral narratives) more memorable and
memorizable. The vehicle for soothing animal fear of death and the black maw of
the night sky, for providing scary stories to deter social chaos amid rampant
self-interest, and for keeping power, wealth and influence siloed where the
last guy found it. A viral envelope to make otherfunctional stories more
transmissible and recombinant. An expressly operant machine for founding
civilizations, for cruxsake!
And now?
Don’t ask me. I’m a poet, and can’t be trusted.
8 - Do
you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential
(or both)?
Sometimes
difficult when there are fundamental rifts in terms of what the thing is, and
wherefore the poem is, but on the vast whole net-beneficial. The overwhelming
majority of editorial experiences I’ve had have made the thing better (and more
often than not have editorialized macrostructurally, in terms of the order of
poems and composition of poems, rather than the composition of poems
– wait a minute…).
9 - What
is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
Learn to find
joy in seconds.
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)?
What do you see as the appeal?
As you
might be able to tell, whenever I’m writing in a form or venue that allows it,
my prose consistently devolves into poetry. Just look at any one of my various
chapbooks’ afterwords. I can’t help myself. It’s a problem.
11 - What
kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does
a typical day (for you) begin?
None,
whatsoever. Not by choice, but necessity. I find it hard enough to find time
between a full-time dayjob and a bustling, burgeoning (but never burdening)
family. I carve out minutes wherever I can, and it's almost always a halfguilty
thing, but I can stay away. It thins me, existentially, if I do, and it always
feels like an RSVP with death, sans chess.
12
- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of
a better word) inspiration?
When a
project gets stalled I turn to another one. Time is way too scarce, and poetry
much too important to my addiction-to-identity, to admit defeat in the face of
flatlines. Luckily, I usually have too many projects on the go at a given time,
and some substantial fraction of them often involve somatic deadweight procedural
steps in them, and the necessity to do a lot of rote dredgework to familiarize
myself with the landscape of a given project's nook in language. Often this
involves the collection and curation (e.g, organization and classification) of
some strangely inventory of words (some constrained lexicon), gathered by hand
into a daunting, sprawling, biblic carcass of an encycloplegic thousand
score-odd document. Lip was this, for a long time.
Anyweigh,
what this means is that when the authorial ghost running my cordyceptic
meatsack of a body-in-time tires, I can turn off, drop out, and cycle through
these pressureless, vacant spaces, digging and dirtpiling grist for present and
future millstones.
Other
times I'm lazier, and I shuck off completely, go watch some Shakespeare and
melt in sleepy sudz, or revel and gasp in the beauteous stacked singularities of
time with my wife and son. These usually prove more effective, and
rejuvenating.
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
My wife’s
skin, and my son’s hair.
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
Writings,
plenty. So very many of my small press contemporaries, who I won’t name because
I’m going to forget to mention a lot of them, unfairly. However, writers
themselves are more important both for my work and my life outside of work than
writings. I find poetic friendships quite important to the existential
endurance demanded by poetry, which involves hard work for little gain,
shackled to the whethered rind of a dying genre. I’ve already mentioned a few,
I think (Gregory Betts, Adam Dickinson, etc.). In my first life as a poet,
before the intermission, I found this in longtime friend and exceptional poet Jacob Braun, who's working on one dusie of a manuscript right now (and who
actually introduced me to Adam Dickinson once, in another life, both
figuratively and physically, although I think neither Adam nor I remember it
now). I still do, with Jake. These days, I find myself spending a lot of time
with Sacha Archer (a brilliant if half-broken savant-guardist, whose friendship
I cherish with raugged, mansome love), and find rejuvenating consort in a
number of others (I’d be remiss not to mention Anthony Etherin and Gary Barwin
here).
17 - If
you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or,
alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a
writer?
I
really don’t know. I feel as though I’d be lost without it. I suppose I’d go
back to what I was doing before, and during the intermission. Namely, blindly and
fledgingly foraging in the rompic headlands of science.
Much
like poetry, I have no formal training in the sciences (or the humanities, for
that matter), but I did manage to teach myself a whole lot of science in my
early twenties – enough to write up and publish a conceptual therapy idea I
worked on over a period of roughly three years: Induced Cell Turnover (see here and here Subsequently, that paper
found a few sympathetic ears, which scored me a gig working on a bunch of other
cool projects and papers with a great band of scientists.
A
selection, for anyone who might be interested (who am I kidding?):
Blood Biochemistry Analysis to Detect Smoking
Status and Quantify Accelerated Aging in Smokers
Population Specific Biomarkers of Human Aging: A Big Data Study Using
South Korean, Canadian, and Eastern European Patient Populations
Towards natural mimetics of metformin and rapamycin
Machine Learning on Human Muscle Transcriptomic Data for Biomarker
Discovery and Tissue-Specific Drug Target Identification
The effects of donor age on organ transplants: A review and implications
for aging research
RNAi mechanisms in Huntington’s disease therapy:
siRNA versus shRNA
Whole-Body Induced Cell Turnover: A Proposed Intervention for
Age-Related Damage and Associated Pathology
Induced Cell Turnover: A Novel Therapeutic Modality
for In Situ Tissue Regeneration
Optimal Phase of Slow Wave Auditory Stimulation
Most of
these are in the realm of the biology of aging and biogerontology, but an
exception is a paper that I was lead author on which offered a roadmap of
existing and proposed approaches for enhancing radioresistance (protection from
radiation) for the purposes of space exploration and colonization: Vive la radiorésistance!: converging research in radiobiology and
biogerontology to enhance human radioresistance for deep space exploration and
colonization.
That
project was probably the most fun, for a few reasons. Science, and scientific
papers in particular, are almost always satisfying in the end, but they can be
such long and stultifying slogs. This one was very (ahem) exploratory, which
was a very nice change of pace at the time.
It also
had a whole slew of authors (from NASA Ames Research Center, Environmental and
Radiation Health Sciences Directorate at Health Canada, Canadian Nuclear
Laboratories, Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, Oxford University, Boston
University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Lethbridge, Ghent
University, and on and on), 30 or more of them I think, and working on
something with that many hands in the pot was really fun.
I also
got to work with an awfully nice feller named Dmitry Klokov (a research
scientist at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories) on a theoretical framework that
uses a genetic and endocrine-mediated feedback circuit to essentially make my
coming-of-age therapy idea (Induced Cell Turnover) adaptive to radiation
exposure. Now that was a dusie – many moving parts (involving “the use of a
radiation-responsive promoter that drives expression of a synthetic or a
recombinant transcription factor that binds very specifically to a synthetic
promoter that up-regulates a pro-apoptotic factor, wherein the radiation
responsive promoter also control the transcription of an endocrine factor which
activates and/or upregulates SCS or hPSC endogenous and/or synthetic or
translational factors controlling SCS and hPSC proliferation and mobilization
in a targeted manner (such that each distinct tissue-specific SCS and hPSC
population is equipped with a specific promoter correlating with a distinct
synthetic or translational endocrine agent)…”). That was nice, revisiting
that idea after a few years to see how it might be made anew, for a different
purpose.
The
majority of them, however, were much more straightforward. Which is fine, if
less compositionally fun.
And,
indeed, often the ones with the greatest actual potential impact are the ones
that are the least fun to make, the least exploratory, and the most
straightforward. For example, I’m fairly certain that that my most lasting
contribution to the field will turn out to be the project in which I served as
one of five authors behind a partially-successful proposal to the World Health Organization
during ICD-11 (the last round of revisions to their International
Classification of Diseases system) that resulted in the WHO adding a new
“extension code” for “ageing-related” (the official definition of which I
helped write – which very much satisfied the poet in me), XT9T, which can be appended to existing and new
diseases within the system. The ICD basically sets the standard for other
specific nations’ drug regulatory bodies for what conditions are officially
classified as diseases (if you’re looking to develop a drug or therapy that
treats something, that something needs to be officially classified as a
disease), and the WHO only updates it once every few decades (the last update
was 1994). What we did there was bring the biological process of aging closer
to being classified as a disease than anyone has before. In practice, this
amounts to providing real financial incentive for drug makers to develop
therapies for aging and age-related diseases, by having a regulatory peghole to
place it in, so that they have the go-ahead to develop therapies targeting it.
While only partially successful, it was still a big win.
Now,
while I taught myself the science expressly to develop that first idea (Induced
Cell Turnover) and publish that paper, as a pragmatic and starkly functional
tool toward that end, in the hopes that someone adepter than me could take it
and do something with it, I ended up very much falling in love with science
along the way. It’s incredible. I mean, forget about the human organism (or any
other for that matter), but even just the cell. My god. Myriads of nested
universes. The strangest, most improbable, beautifully alien thing in the
entire universe. So much stranger than the strangest Rube Goldberg fiction you
could envision. And it takes a fair bit of slogging and fundamental gathering
to really understand the vast complexity of it in its true and sheer enormity,
but once you get there, its like drinking with god. It’s truly astounding.
Anywho,
probably that. But I’d much rather do poetry, honestly.
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
There
are a good half-dozen ideas I crafted and worked on for a long while a long
while ago, which I was never able to push past the finish lie (i.e., publication).
Mostly conceptual therapy proposals – a few preventive cancer therapies and so
called “pre-emptory “ cancer therapies (essentially, biotechnological and or
SynBio constructs that are intended to make cancer more treatable if and when
it occurs), a unique method of multiplex targeted drug delivery that allows for
more precise delivery of drugs (according to multiple cell or
tissue-specific markers – e.g., gene profiles rather than individual
expressed genes, etc. I still believe these ideas have merit, and I’d like to
find the time (and energy, will and determination) to formalize them further,
write them up and push them off into the world for other people to have a
chance at picking them up and carrying them home, like I did for my first one
(Induced Cell Turnover).
Being
unpublished, existent only in my own skull and boxes of papers, they weigh on
me, like errant ghosts. Ideas can do that. I feel a fair amount of guilt having
let them rot for the past few years, and I’d like to at the very least dust them
off and ship them out, if not to give them a standing chance at finding some
scientific artisan to try them out or elaborate them further, then at the very
least to stop them from Hamlet’s-fathering me so often.
All
this lamentation probably sounds very indulgent and vain, but it’s true. There
are other, less practical and functional ideas that I worked on and left
likewise waysided (a few possibly novel ideas in the realm of evolutionary
theory and evolutionary biology; a theory of freewill that attempts to undercut
the fundamental impasse of causal determinism via the fact that the brain is a
semiotic machine [which is what it is to be/signify what it isn’t] thus making
it in some sense a causally-exclusive system with recursive partial overlap
with the mutually causally-exclusive system of the scientifically determinate
physical world, because the metaphysics of signs is a different thing than the
metaphysics of atoms; etc. etc.), which weigh on me none because they have
little to no capacity to actually help people, or improve anything.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m
definitely the wrong person to be asking. I mean, I’m barley even myself,
for the most part. How the hell should I know?
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Issa’s
Moth (book), and Carboy (film). Both by Sacha Archer, both unpublished. The
cannibal joys of toodeep friendships with shifty, broken poets (as all are, I
think). Wouldn’t trade it (©reddit bedamned).
20 - What
are you currently working on?
Right
now I’m embroiled in a project within the realm of technopoetry that’s
completely kicking my ass because, for reasons of thematic and conceptual
convergence, it requires me to complete certain sections of it within the
bounds of seasonal time. Given the project’s scope, it was a monumentally
foolhardy declaration, and I’m already failing. But, because the project is
about the climate crisis, and other forms of modern brash (the omnipresent
threat of human omnicide, the vacant existentiality of consumerism and
globalism, the fact that we’re still embroiled in limbic holywars despite
having gone to the moon, having sent robots to Mars, and having spelled out
acronyms with atoms, etc.), that failure is only fitting, I think. What can I
say, and what can I do? A poet’s gotta poet.
12or 20 (second series) questions;
