The first time I read the poet and revolutionary Joshua Clover he was not himself because he was Jane Dark writing about Oasis in the Village Voice [1997] and he was including citations in the body of the review [Walter Benjamin, Tony Blair, The Beatles, Ram Dass, et al]. The Oasis album Be Here Now was the putative subject and this was an illusion because Clover only had the one topic: how people live in a world made unlivable by capitalism. It was clear to me, reading Dark Clover on that first day [1997], that he had found a way to accept pop music’s truth without needing to believe that it was pure or wise or even entirely down to people. He wrote about Noel Gallagher cutting and pasting rock history together as if it were a currency fluctuation (which it was).
We started talking before the twentieth century ended, in emails and in person. We both loved that machines could dumbwaiter us right to Autechre and Timbaland and that the market druids needed both a Sugababes and a Sheryl Crow and that sometimes the workers could punch through the veil and find each other. He said to me once, “I think the only gift I really have is discipline,” right before he tossed a pair of sneakers for being insufficiently springy. He was that way with people, too, like Guy Debord expelling Ben Morea from the Situationists before Morea knew he had been accepted as a Situationist. I was lucky. I got a solid seventeen years before 2016. One moment, we were going to Coachella together, the next minute it was 2025 and he was dead.
Clover’s set of rules made him inspiring. Those who loved and admired and mimicked him knew that there was always a hidden track on Clover’s CD, the one rule you would somehow run afoul of. His love of fighting was as real as his white-shocked hair, the plasma that fired his beauty and his need to stick to the mission.
I met Joshua in the beginning of his third act [21st century], when the poems were both ending and beginning, while he was gearing up for his biggest love, teaching a political toolkit to others so that everyone might march and barricade. Many found him through Riot. Strike. Riot. [2019] and the internet is full of testimonials from people who met him at this peak, a tall man in a keffiyeh occupying a building and dropping bail funds into a stranger’s account. Did he listen to Robbie Williams during the riots? He once wrote to me that “Kids” by Williams and Kylie Minogue [2000] was the only great song Williams ever released, and largely great because of Kylie, but also so good that it didn’t make sense that anybody else had bothered to release a single that year.
When we sang Kelly Clarkson together onstage at a poetry club [2005] it was not because we thought we could do it well but because we both believed that there was a truth in things that actually happened and that acknowledging them was as important as attending to the dreams poetry can sustain. Clover kept saying he had stopped writing poetry and then another poem would appear, which meant that he really did think dialectically. When I go back to The Totality for Kids I hear a Joshua I recognize in “The shift from modernism to world systems is stored in the new candy-colored currency.” But he was most Cloverided in the last collection, Red Epic [2015], which is available as a free PDF and always has been. When Clover wrote, “The poem must be on the side of riots looting barricades occupations manifestos communes slogans fire and enemies,” he was at the vortex and the crux of his matrix. The “enemies” were also friends, d’you know what I mean?
The poems became what they became because he knew the fight he cared about would be out of his reach, that maybe the people he taught through his thinking and his example, even those comrades who disagreed with him and sharpened their thinking through that disagreement, would achieve the transformations that he couldn’t on his own. It was only recently that I realized I was looking forward to Fast and Furious 11 [2026] because I was going to try to reach Joshua again, which reminded me—jump cut—that his second act [1980s] seemed to involve the Grateful Dead and lots of acid, which made no sense until you heard him talk about how someone in the parking lot always had bean sprout sandwiches, meaning the Dead was just another Communism for Joshua, an ontological grace he could grant to almost anything and anyone.
