"Maximal Commitment, Minimal Loneliness"

Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.

…

We might escalate this narrative terrorism towards a constant aesthetic terrorism; we might pursue infrastructural damage to the arts and to the structures of publishing. This might mean, among other things, clogging submission portals, hijacking the space of the bio, as Rasha Abdulhadi has modeled, hijacking the interview and the podcast and the craft talk and the classroom and the call for submissions and the $75 payment via Venmo for the poem. It might mean writing things that are unpublishable and forcing publishers into doing it anyway; it might mean circumventing or ignoring the structures of publishing in favor of means of circulation outside the bounds of capital and therefore free from the grasp of the invisible hand. It might mean boycott, pressure, and refusing to allow the return of the oppressive dailiness in any space we inhabit. It might mean being loud, annoying, and resolutely steadfast in our refusals and our insistences. It might mean joining with writers who are extending solidarity beyond the page and into direct actions against the complicity of our institutions, literary or otherwise. It might mean, too, building alternative and sustained networks of support for our fellow writers who lose jobs, opportunities, or face harassment. Like a net, we tie ourselves to one another to stop the dailiness from getting through; we tie ourselves tight enough so none of us get lost along the way. Maximal commitment, minimal loneliness, to paraphrase a comrade.

I ask Cazares how far they’re willing to go. “Oh, hospital bed,” they say. “The way I view my strike is physicalizing their inaction.” If the suffering of Palestine is a faraway, abstract concept, they hope their body becomes a bridge across that gulf: “Maybe they don’t feel much for Palestinians. They can’t imagine. But they’ve spoken to me. They can visualize my life. They’ve seen me be among them. What I’m hoping is that my life means something.”

It bothers me that there is so little usable infrastructure beneath artists and so much baroque architecture built on top of us. I’m sorry to bring him up incessantly but Pablo Picasso wasn’t fucking around with artist statements. He and his buddies were hanging out, inventing new ways to use the senses, collecting poets, starting magazines when they felt like it, painting whatever, showing on the boulevard sometimes, icing out losers, reading, honestly kind of torturing each other, and so on. We should not allow our own artistic practices to be replete with inanities! They want us to describe ourselves in GRANT-WRITING LANGUAGE like we are PROJECT MANAGERS rather than to describe our ideas with the MANY VARIED LANGUAGES OF ART! This is how they make us speak THEIR desires! Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world, and to describe OUR visions. I propose that we stop playing along. I am imagining a type of degrowth, a disassembly of dominant structures, a refusal.