In her conversation with artist-scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, Saretta Morgan poses the question: “What are the definitions for war that render its presence physically and emotionally unescapable?”
The horizon of Morgan’s question is long: by invasion, intervention, investment or disinvestment, domestically and abroad, the U.S. has been warring always. But as the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza continues, this moment feels particularly of war’s presence, and time has slid into a clipped and repetitious circuit, adhering to and detaching from this image then that one of the worst things you’ve ever seen, nicking its gaze on headline after headline. On the one hand is a stall and stasis, the refresh of endlessly “developing” stories—about the collapse of ceasefire negotiations amidst the massacre of another extended family, about the latest bombing of a school-turned-shelter. On the other hand is the sheer rush of milestones, the intensity of each undermined by the news of the next. Official counts of Gazan war deaths have now surpassed 40,000. Polio was confirmed this week in a Gazan 10-month old, the first confirmed case in the Gaza Strip in 25 years. The UN expects this year’s tally of aid workers killed in conflicts around the globe to exceed the record-breaking total of 2023. Despite winning delegates in primaries around the country, the DNC has denied the Uncommitted Movement their request to allow a Palestinian speaker time on the stage. Morgan’s question makes me ponder how war is not merely action or event; for all the above to happen—and so much else—war must be a world. Now how does that happen?
In another piece from this issue, Karim Kazemi defines for Ann Rower the term “trip-sitter”: an abstaining witness-guardian, designated driver for those on hallucinogens. She hadn’t known the phrase, but was familiar with the concept from her time as a babysitter for Timothy Leary’s kids: “Tim always thought there should be someone there that wasn’t tripping or whatever. He had this whole setup that was sort of academic, for the ‘experiment,’ and that was supposed to be a part of it. I mean, obviously that is a good idea. It didn’t really happen that way, but that was the plan.”
Because my experience of the Poetry Project is, as for so many of us, embodied by the church itself, I’ve long imagined the Newsletter to be a kind of annex to the Project, a multi-level labyrinthine structure built for a different kind of encounter. Poets in their poetry are on their own wild trips. But if I find them in some corner, if I sit with them and with their work, it is not (or is not only) because they need me to watch out for them. They’re on something and onto something, and it helps me to listen in. Helps me crucially at this time, under this heavy shadow of warring disaster. I feel that particularly with the several translations of Latin American poetry in this issue, written across eras and nations but all in states of political crisis, communal grief and horror. As Cesáreo “Chacho” Martínez asks in his Donde Mancó El Arbol de la Espada y el Arcoiris (trans. Judah Rubin):