To Start the Year

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, but here are some plans for 2022, noted down here for myself as much as anything. Needless to say: pandemic permitting.  In his book on Faulkner, Eduoard Glissant calls lists "inventories of the magnified universal", though they can seem to compress in even as they balloon out into unreachability (or unreadability). But with the past couple of years we've had, and their suspension or erasure of various kinds of future, their conditions of congealed impossible mourning, of warped realism, prediction or prophecy, lists like these are perhaps different ways of clinging onto a future. Either way, consider the list below as some sort of placeholder, as we all continue to literally and metaphorically hold our breath. 

• To finish drafts of two in-progress manuscripts: one, called Never By Itself Alone, on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco / the Bay Area (under contract from OUP), the other, which I'm calling Survival Music, on free jazz. This work was supposed to involve research trips to the US since 2019--I'm more than glad that I was able to make it over for a week in fall that year to attend the Cecil Taylor conference, and to hang out with Ammiel Alcalay, Billy Joe Harris, etc--and the longer trip will hopefully manifest providing things remain relatively 'stable' travel-wise and in terms of the general pandemic situation. I'm particularly excited about the possibility of looking at archival material relating to Steve Abbott and Karen Brodine, and--perhaps--of consulting the series of recorded interviews Frank Kofsky gave with many of the first/second wave New Thing musicians in the mid-late sixties, and which have never been published.

(Above: One of Robert Wade's photographs of Archie Shepp's group (Sunny Murray, Grachan Moncur III, Clifford Thornton, Alan Silva, Dave Burrell) performing at the 1969 PanAfrican Festival in Algiers, subject of this week's research...)

• Time permitting, to work on another manuscript, (I'm calling it Working Notes because that's what it is), collecting various miscellaneous writings on contemporary poetry from the past ten years or so and telling some disjointed story about some of the currents therein. Which also means a story about friendship and 'community' and the adequacy of terms like community, how politics gets lived through lives and words, what poetry has done and continue to do in the specific and the general. This isn't a story the book can possibly hope to tell properly or with adequate measure, but it will at least--provided I actually force myself to work on it--be an opportunity to force myself to sit down and properly articulate my thoughts on writers whose work I've wanted to for a while now. Currently top of the list are Tim Thornton, Lisa Jeschke, J.H. Prynne (especially Parkland and the array of thought around Kazoo Dreamboats), and Linda Kemp (the excellently rigorous Lease Prise Redux, which I think about almost every time I pass the gigantic thanatotic skyscrapers currently rising high above Lewisham DLR station).

• To put finishing touches on a book of pandemic prose called Present Continuous, written over the last two years in and around the shadows of those skyscrapers and coming out from Pamenar Press; to work on a couple more 'creative' manuscripts swirling around in more or less tangible and intangible drafts and states.

• With Materials / Materialien, to bring out new books from James Goodwin (whose reading for the 87 Press at the only in-person reading I went to last year was more than excellent), Nat Raha, and Janani Ambikapathy, plus English-language translations of an anti-fascist novel by Gunther Anders (a major author whose importance is belied by the unavailability of his most of his work in English) and of work by Ronald M. Schernikau (who should be a radical gay icon but whose work is similarly scarce), and a potentially enormous anthology of out-of-print work to mark ten years since Lisa Jeschke and I started the press from a photocopier and a series of laid and mislaid plans...

• To see the printing of the Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, the manuscript of which Lauri Scheyer and I submitted to the press a few months ago; to continue working with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux on Umbra-related adventures (our Zoom discussions over the past couple of years have been enlivening in the best way, even as Covid has ensure the three of us haven't yet met in person...); no doubt to get sidetracked along the way, to swim (reasonably) regularly, to accidentally cause the death of several house plants, to see if I can make it to the performance of Morton Feldman's six-hour string quartet, to listen to the entirety of the Bill Dixon Black Saint/Soul Note box set, to hope that the latest round of diminishing returns on the academic job market might resolve into something with a little more long-term security (i.e. to be able to pay the rent)...