Amish Trivedi, FuturePanic

 

Went into the river clean and came out with
one eye damaged. Was told there was time now

but heard it differently. I cannot hear
any of you:

            the screamings of the mind I have made ears
of new ghosts. It’s not the words that are hollow,

just the voice behind it. Ready to be something
other than deceived.

The third full-length poetry title by American poet Amish Trivedi, following a handful of chapbooks and the full-length collections Sound/Chest (Coven Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], is FuturePanic (Normal IL: co·im·press, 2021). “The future is a kind of capital—,” he writes, “the desire for more is, too.” FuturePanic is a book length suite broken into a quintet of suites—“Automata,” “Constructor,” “Unreality,” “Spree” and “FuturePanic”—each of which is constructed out of accumulated bursts of lyric fragments. Trivedi’s poems speak of anxiety, patterns, time and the future, whether or not we are able to have such. “To save a dying world // by walking across it,” he writes, as part of the opening section, “by letting the pavement / cut & burn your bare feet.” Writing slant in a sequence of quick sketch-notes, he writes of an anxiety directly fueled by humanity’s ultimate self-directed ruin. “The invention of a way to measure time / is of immediate suspicion: a sense // that the turn in our lyric / is every new scab left // to be picked.” He writes a potential fraying, eroding and dismantling of climate, culture, humanity and language. “How the water // remains settles the only mystery / in a scene dedicated to the waxing / epistasis of language.” In a note to accompany poems from the then work-in-progress at Jacket2 (via Jerome Rothenberg) in July, 2018, Trivedi wrote:

FuturePanic encompasses macro and micro concerns to transform the reader’s sense of space and time and force them to engage with the present era’s perceptions of death, politics, and the border at which they meet. The opening (presented here and separately titled “Automata”) considers the Von Neumann Machine, an as-yet impossible organic machine designed to replicate itself across the galaxy over the next four hundred thousand years. Conceptual, expensive, and perplexing, the Von Neumann Machine raises questions present throughout FuturePanic — who benefits from the long reach of technology? How do the earth-bound conceive of transformation light years away? And how do mortals deign to simultaneously explore the potential for never-ending life at the cost of killing death for machines, while grappling with their own limitations — corporeal death, political conceit, and economic destruction of the world around them? Is the quest for knowledge that may outlast us all worth stargazing above the screams of others in the here and now and the cries of our own limited bodies and minds?

There are some big ideas running throughout FuturePanic, first and foremost asking what the actual and ongoing cost of the future might be (and, in Trivedi’s view, at least, it doesn’t look good). In their own way, the quintet of suites that provide the narrative of FuturePanic coincide with the five stages of grief, offering not a way out or through but a way into. “What happens / when two words // are put in opposition / to one another: speech continues / as comprehension // stops.”