Thom Eichelberger-Young

I have been corresponding with my friend Thom Eichelberger-Young about poetry, writing, and politics for over a year now, but in June 2025 some of our back-and-forth began to take on the tenor of an interview, as I messaged them repeatedly with questions while reading through their latest book OINTMENT WEATHER (CLOAK, 2025). I was drawn to Eichelberger-Young’s investigations of cognition and their commitment to producing art with political efficacy in mind, and I wanted to learn more about the overlaps (and breaks) between their book projects, from the intimate and ocularly striking “panels” of ANTIKYTHERA (Antiphony, 2024) to the theory-driven political-poietical interlinked essays of OINTMENT WEATHER.

Eichelberger-Young writes long sequences. OINTMENT WEATHER is drawn from a 360-page sequence they claim was dictated to them while conducting site visits (generally to museums or zoos) or interacting with media; there are 150 panels, technically 153.5, 50 of which comprise ANTIKYTHERA; and they are continuing to develop a serial work titled DAY(S) SO FAR, initially meant for publication this year (but which Thom has decided to continue), which documents day-to-day life amidst the crises of imperialist society (they have published and frequently performed a large portion of this book-length project over the course of the last six months). My conversation with the writer covered a wide range of topics, including the mediational function of memes, the varying degrees of “artificed production” across genres, and the writer’s personal conception of “poietics.”

Thom-Eichelberger Young is a writer, artist, publisher, archivist, editor, and former caregiver, originally from the Carolinas and now living in Buffalo, New York, where they are a research fellow earning a PhD in Poetics at the University of Buffalo. Their first book, the long poem BESPOKE, was published by Saint Andrews University Press in 2019, followed by ANTIKYTHERA (Antiphony Press) in late 2024, and a sequence of “essays” appeared in April of 2025 entitled OINTMENT WEATHER: Insurgent Poietics for Desperate Times, through CLOAK. A digital chap of Panels, “The Last words of Sergeant Metaphysic,” is available from Datableed, also released in early 2025. In 2021, they started Blue Bag Press, which they continue to run. Recent work appears or is forthcoming mercury firs, Fence, Brink, APARTMENT, Capgras, bethh, and beyond.

Alex Tretbar: You’ve put out two full-length books in rapid succession over the past year, and are now nearing completion of a new book-length sequence tentatively titled DAY(S) SO FAR, and while these projects share certain formal and political characteristics, they also seem to chronicle a gradual shift over time. How would you describe the evolution of your writing and your interests and your poetics over the course of these three projects? In what ways do they overlap, and how do they depart from one another?

Thom Eichelberger-Young: All of my writing is definitely intended, at least for me, to work with durational spaces or windows. That’s why I date my book projects alongside their titles, to clue the readers in to the ‘when’ of the composition—hopefully, I trust, they will reflect upon the contexts of each book’s time. I am always developing a near-singular theory in my work. A theory which is so integral to my perception, I am unsure if  ‘theory’ is an appropriate word, beyond ‘knowing awareness’ or something like that. My desperate belief. As a theoretical singularity, it is not narrow and confining; but there, perceptually, it is a universal.

To take it all the way back, after some miserable failures over a decade ago, my project ‘as a poet’ has been entirely serial. I work usually in sequences towards books, while one-off and shorter writings are rarer. I’m bringing [their first book] BESPOKE into the account here, and the two unpublished manuscripts that came after, but you and any other reader I hope will readily cleave those from my current project. Those define my ‘early career’ I guess, if I have one. I gave a copy to Jenkin [Benson] yesterday and cautioned “it’s my juvenilia.” The seriality there is less publicly visible and more so entirely for me, though it is still part of my overall and never-ending project contemplating and re-ordaining the nature of cognition. One can surmise that if we cannot know what another person cognizes, then we can only speak about our-selves-as-a-self: autobiography. I don’t write outright autobiographies anymore, which ‘seek to narrate the author’s life to another’ and come from a self/intrinsic motivation. But my first three books are autobiographies.

There’s a long poem of mine, “History of the Zodiac,” included in my second manuscript [The Private Life of Adonis, a 2019-2020 composition], unsure if anyone will ever see it. That’s all just me looking at spines and covers of books and taking dictations from them. It spiraled into a poem that was capable of being hewed to match the form of material in BESPOKE, and then was ‘lost.’ It was meant to be one of the “Orders” (an organizational system I took from François Couperin) in BESPOKE, which I go back and forth about repudiating. I’m probably giving too much attention to it here now, as well. The point is that that poem, “Zodiac,” it’s only my own sight in a limited way—an earlier precursor of what would take over me. I was by myself in a room, a childhood bedroom (the same room my father would begin to die in). Everything there was abstracted from objects I possessed. There’s nothing of an outside there that I was aware of then, even from those objects. It’s so selfish, so self-obsessed. The way the poem’s language would come to me now, I think,  would be with curiosity over the idiolectical nature of the dictations—a way to leave that room, so to speak, and know others were there with, and speaking (historically) through, me. Because we do not write alone. 

Even though I continue to write through myself, my awareness is all different. Something went wrong (in all the right ways) several years ago and has thrown me for a loop ever since. I am unsure what it is or was. But!—I have always been mistrustful of the information I received and the systems I was/am thrust into. I could tell you a story about how I quizzed my Catholic school teacher over the exclusion of dinosaurs in the Bible. Now, my work is perhaps paranoid, and it is in total rebuke of the world of systems out of which I derived or acquired my language. At this point, I’m simply caging my statement towards the effect “this is no longer autobiography.” Go and try to construct a narrative of my life from these last three projects.

Truth be told, I don’t know what the work is now—but it isn’t some strictly symbolical articulation, I do know that. In Train I Ride, Kit [Robinson] says: “Writing, as running, an exercise for the breath. A way of engaging time. Lest time take all away. A physical, sensual art, bound into the body, not evidently the stuff of pure ideation.” This is what it is about to me. I’ve also been rereading Irigaray, so refreshing after Baudrillard—good for the things I had been using him for in DAY(S) SO FAR re terrorism (his definitions are intriguing there) and provocative Anti-Americanism, but his adherence to a supreme imaginary—alongside his disturbing transphobia (which Mathilda Cullen showed me)—manifests such recalcitrantly masculine incapacity to ever be ‘real.’ I believe my work has now arrived at a point where it is materially real in the sense of how it is coming through an awareness of my having the status of Being—of consciousness of Being—and how my now knowing that understanding is through its being em-bodied. I felt this change around the same time I came out as neutrois. The work is materially real because (in part) it is somatically felt as the pressure of truth upon and within me—not chalked-up empiricisms of the world of philosophers and scientists and their constructive lies. It is in my body and not solely my mind, for my mind is but a part of my body, and across all sensations that I know this. 

What you see then in the two projects “in rapid succession” and now DAY(S) SO FAR is a hurtling through—refining of—this knowing awareness because of autobiographical and global events (divorce, genocide, as two large ones), and their channeling into the poietic iteration. Considering my cleavage of my early work as “private” in its seriality and my estimation of it as “juvenile” or “worthless,” what we are left with is these new works as their own trajectory. We are also currently split between two trilogical sequences. The first three end in abandonment in collapse (their mostly unpublished status; the third of those, Flight Behavior of the Birds, went unfinished in a deleterious manner for years—when it was completed, with immense authorial satisfaction, it swiftly drifted from my memory, for I had started The Panels), and now the second trilogy is also finished here with the current project I’m after, as I see it.

The current trilogy represented in ANTIKYTEHRA, OINTMENT WEATHER, and this DAY(S) SO FAR consists of three projects undertaken independently and each spawning the next out of it. ANTIKYTHERA is the final full volume of The Panels, which is a book of books of fifty panels each. I don’t seek to go back to that time and re-live what a panel is, but they were tri-columnar structures that came to me suddenly after finishing Flight Behavior. I wanted to write a book about the figure of “C—” haunting my work, a noxious former lover who has figured into much of my poetry, and thought I would use my inadvertent archiving of too many screenshots, logs of texts, voicemails, emails, Drive folders, etc, to create some sort of collaged, hybrid work. The first panel touches upon this and outlines the “story of the first trip back,” while also being a sort of imitation of Susan Howe’s poem “Space Permitting,” and it was written on a legal pad centered on the page (I prefer a large legal pad to write on, the longer page is far better for those of us who don’t write these short poems. All these short poems! My god. Please write longer poems, thank you). During the completion of the volume Antiphony put out, I was coming to the realization that many publications could not technically handle some of the more difficult panels. So, I moved them into paragraph blocks with slashes dividing the lines. It was easy, fast, translation. Very economical. And, they started getting accepted in the new format. But, this choice destroyed the rapid receipt of dictation I was experiencing during the writing of the first 120 Panels (July/August 2023-February 2024). The remainder was a real challenge to hear, to have come back to me. Hence the slowness—the last 30 took 6 months. The first 120 took nearly as long. And, I don’t hear it anymore—three panels attempting a fourth volume appeared in October in bethh, I’ll be curious if people see what I see, that they mark an end because of an incapacity to continue (on my part) that project as a formal style.

Where The Panels used its visual system to map the way the material came (as dictations/was heard on the mind), to allow it to be destroyed in linear reference, to make it part of the all and have all be there by its representation thus (the poems speak for themselves, let that be clear, against my comments), the collapse to the paragraph and slash led to OINTMENT WEATHER, which found the material I was channeling could be inscribed/documented far faster and to far greater length that way (most of the footnotes in OW were dictated to me as well). I realized how much I was bogged down by attempting visual explosion in poetry, something that reminds me of what I view as gimmicks related to the failure of BESPOKE—visual play present in the latter feels fairly derivative of [Susan] Howe and Scalapino.

My project with this stylistic shift also became even more political (I often use the term social-conditional), as I began to re-enter a more public society in ways that are too personal to here discuss (I was a caregiver, and much of this was during the lockdown into re-opening portions of the ongoing pandemic). My ratcheted-up activism and public commentaries also obliterated interest in “worthless autobiography” that speaks endlessly of isolated suffering and joy to the point of obnoxious narcissism (who cares about my life? From me, that’s probably absolutely useless). My ‘poietics’ are about “leading” us to a revolution that is partly organized around a radically new consideration (new for the masses, not for the academic historical tradition—wherein it is only studied and rarely if ever is deployed) of language and aesthetic production that, as Heidegger might say, en-thinks or poetically thinks Being. Those who read OW will know the book grapples with this alternative mode of analytical propositioning, and invokes the philosophical foregrounds I speak into here also, while directly outlining this belief system. It explains while being an example.

DAY(S) SO FAR would return us to the motivations of The Panels—the po(i)etic as preferable to a lineated/prosaic text. And, the project seeks to demonstrate the synthetical point, the mediation, as enfolding autobiography, documentary, joke, horror, etc. To prove, therein, that every genre others produce in is located here as well, that they should not be afraid of ‘poietry,’ but that also their iterations often are, as I have said again and again, artifices. Vainglorious or ignorant.

Stylistically, this is conveyed through the prose block dedicated to celebrating the phrase, the snippets of dictations, language, ideation, articulation, which come across all of my work, and to allow them to stand on their own as they come to me—closer to their status when received as impulsed ‘poiem.’ I did not want structure, visually, to intercede in interpretation here. While imperfect, at base the abandonment of line and justification for a poem is a rejection of poetic structuralism. I wanted to focus on language alone and its sheer force, uncontained by formal, philosophical, and empirical systems and thought. I felt I did not need to adorn the work, sans minimal occasions. And, I have my font-play (as you all call it! I say “textual scoring” as well), which I only just recall to mention, which took from the visual alignment the very spatial visuality there and relocated that into the ‘line’ (that is now a phrase) itself—no longer having to be displaced from its convenient positionality on the page, which (the page) is such a vital user interface—I mean, why, really, try to re-invent what we do there instead of just accepting that it’s a sort of spatial glue upon which we lay iterated ideas? In the new project, there are no section breaks (in sub-divided poems compared to OW) because I am attentive to the concept of totality I have mentioned, and thus view each “Day” or “Days” as a paragraph in the sense of the word in its langpo derived manner, I suppose. Think of the paragraphs Silliman articulates in Tjanting, and the route towards such an understanding of the paragraph that an appreciation and invocation of parataxis affords. Such a paragraph suffices to convey everything with no need to add another, despite what I tell my students when I ask them to improve their flow and organization. As you can see reading them, I am also not interested in punctuating grammar—unless it is part of a formal speech-act that erupts in the text (OW has many such ‘descents’ into more formal academic prose, or punctuated phrasing). Internal to a phrase, punctuation may erupt as the phrase runs into multiple sentences, but that’s still the phrase, whereas each phrase is otherwise only hailed by its commencing with a capital letter, and bears no “closing” punctuation (this can become complicated when working with proper nouns and “I” in these texts, which accentuates contextuality and attention to the text itself).

Every phrase and part of a phrase is simultaneously part of a whole and halted into functional parts—which often operate separately from traditional grammatical concepts (though of course they rely on such, which we are incapable of totally eliminating at the present time). Across this production and project, stylistically, I have not located a perfect “pair” (in another’s work) to form a twin by which we could destroy any notion of contribution or individuality I profess I feel I make when writing these—to me, they remain one, singular, mine. Which I mention to potentially comfort the producer in our capitalist society who desires uniqueness and needs be assuaged—such is modernity, and much of our labor in revolution: assuagement-as-persuasion to the cause. No twins, but there are voices who are similar. I do know Léon [Pradeau] and I have discussed our affinities towards each other, with the prose poems I am doing now and his phenomenal book This Is It, and our mutual resemblances (noted by ourselves and others) to Stephen Ratcliffe’s work. I can also say that reading Erica Hunt’s Local History was at hand in the background, and when I went back to it in recent weeks, I saw that more than ever.

I’m curious about this “enfolding” of other genres into your po(i)etry. I recall that in our previous correspondence you have been critical of fiction because of the amount of labor it requires, all of the planning that necessarily goes into plotting, character development, and revision, and how that tends to move the work of fiction far afield from the poietic impulse, which in turn dampens its political efficacy and its ability to respond to a given urgent moment. Perhaps as a means of better understanding this critique, and because I want to know more about your conception of the “poiem,” can you speak to this disparity between the work of pure poiesis and the artificed work of fiction? You say that “every genre others produce in is located [in DAY(S)] as well.” I assume then that fiction, too, plays a role in the project; if so, how have you managed to bring that genre under the poietic yoke?

I feel quite differently about fiction now than at the start of all this substantial and public articulation of ‘poietics’ as I think it. My initial remarks in OINTMENT WEATHER, and I carefully state this there, are just an initiatory sketch. Yes: I rejected wholly prose fiction—in its widely perceptible generic form, and as a technology of the prosaic register. But, in the lecture on Heidegger’s On My Own Publications [at RESOURCES in a short folio of work on ‘Kinship Poietics’], actually after I gave the lecture and because I gave it, I started to ask questions which contradict such a massive rebuke.

First, let me quickly say that the ‘poiem’ is, as it suggests etymologically, a making, a very specific and important making (compared to an artifice, or a manipulation). As a making, it is, however, not original. And yet, it is a production, but not a re-production. It is a making of something. And that something is of Being. It is a making of understanding. Therefore, as a making, it is a mediation, not a creation. When I spoke about artifice at first, I demarcated all work that, essentially, was not heard or channelled by the maker/producer as I just discussed with all that about dictation. I was trying to express something and perhaps my own production occluded what I understood, investing there myself as a bias. My process of dictation—and I just heard a new “Day” piece today coming towards me, which I think will become something!—and that process in other poets I have closely examined is that way, but that does not mean this must be the only way, does it?

Where I think I was wrong lies in how I located the occurrence of ‘mediatory-re-mediatory chains’ almost entirely in dictated productions. The questions the lecture has raised for me surround the procedure out of the capacity to actually hear/be impulsed by the guiding call of Being into a being, and those beings’ production of an artificed work which manages to somehow still enshrine the call with the forward capacity of re-mediation—is this the same or different from the simplest fact that Being precedes as backdrop everything else, despite all possible denials towards its unfolding?

Above the distinctions around style, structure or construction, the mediatory-re-mediatory chain is the most important process. And, that comes through from OINTMENT WEATHER, where I indicate that an artificial production, which has not even come from the call, can be (and more often than not is) received by the audience as—or in the same way as—a poietically derived work leading to the potential for an impulse into the audience there out of Being. Being, being behind everything, inevitably leaks through.

So, I don’t rebuke fiction, or genre fiction. But, I maintain my wary posture that is ‘opposed’ to it. I have still to navigate much of the mechanics of this (the same is the case for ‘pure speech’). If the chain is more important than the type of production—but, no. See, I catch myself. For, the production is flawed as artifice. Wrapped up in this is the way we think, and the need to think, and speak or produce differently than before, which is the urgent call in that last chapter of OINTMENT WEATHER. Amidst a lot of reading, I get carried away and drawn back into the fold of the mechanical world, which is as alluring as it is dangerous. I want to believe that the other ‘linguistic registers’ afford a greater capacity than they do, but, as they stand, I am unconvinced that is the case.

What is artificed production, in this system? It would be the construction of any generic production without a pure spoken eventuation. But, and this is critical, all language—all inscription of meaning—could be in the poietic register. I’d like to quote here from OINTMENT WEATHER to further this point: “Language, when poietic, can manifest in whatever forms capable of the total range of a subject’s somatic and psychical composition” (185). To say otherwise would be to say that good/bad aesthetic valuation (which harbors ableism and insidious thoughts about literacy and human value, the same way the glorification of handwriting does) is pre-human and essential, and that is absolutely not the case. Such would entail that Being has an essential language and style—as odd as that sounds, for it is odd: it is totally absurd. We can guarantee that that is not the case because we know that it is our use of language to capture the truth of Being which is deficient and flawed always. Being is gifted to us, but it is a joyously-torturous gift impossible to fully articulate.

Heidegger’s hope, in part or whole, and I am close to him here, is that a thinking of the event, which is inscribed, can supersede metaphysics in its, to here borrow from recent reading of Derrida, “rendering an account” and an account that is “full” in its articulation (at least, fuller than we actually can do, and therein driving us further into the machinated world where we are not, as Heidegger says insistently in What is Called Thinking?,thinking at all…). Derrida, in Given Time, brings the rendering of an account into play first conditionally, “if one must,” before making it instinctually mandatory, “one must render an account.” If you recall, the “aesthetic” productions driving the cultural arm of the revolution I call for—itself organized through and out of a radical upheaval in language and production—may be arrived at through mass silence against the mandatory conception of the rendering of accounts of world, lived experience, and so forth. These rendered accounts, to go back to something I said earlier, are re-productions of the world—as in most philosophy, which is generally artificed, and onerously so—and the world-as-rendered-as-ours: machinated and rife with the Danger [Gefahr] posed by the profligation of technologies, which occlude our capacity to think Being. It is this concern which drove the discourse in OINTMENT WEATHER: “The Final Technology in the Question of Genre” (the last chapter of OW) begins with a meditation on Danger and its role across my text into the predication of this system of thinking.

The outcome of a poiem, in whatever form it is propositioned as, still involves the inclusion of quotidian content (micro and macro) from the world we live in because language as idiolect is derived from others through experience amongst them (which encodes strife, oppression, exploitation, State programmings, etc.), and because we have been totally saturated by ever-escalating Modernity, which is as a polluting sphere around our globe (what I call the ‘Cartesian Wake’). Modernity as a condition must be conditionally accepted—if only initially—amidst all this re-ordered thinking, for we need to pragmatically and concretely recognize that, right now, no revolution, linguistic or political, is taking place in our society—except that from the Right. Nor can we delude ourselves into thinking that the technologies posing this incredible Danger, which holds the world in (a) vice, will simply and swiftly disappear. Even if they vanished tonight, there would be no joy, only the infliction of serious traumas, somatic and psychic, across the majority of the global population. In this way, the Danger, where danger is a supposition and caution—something is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean it is actively harming you, a dangerous animal may be some distance away from me yet I face no real risk—has this Danger fully transitioned us into the final stage of submission to this devastating world-ordering? Perhaps every people of a period feel this way, and new technologies will shock us out of such pessimistic thinking and remind us of the actual capacity for this change to occur. I lean towards this latter mentality, that there is great potential, and even now, for such a revolution  to occur.

At this point, it should be clearer that the matter at hand, within the mediatory-re-mediatory chain, regards substantive content (Being), not exactly the “how” of its inscription outside a single parameter—that the expression is “heard from Being.” I am not an authority or the authority—as a god or sovereign—when it comes to what that would mean, “heard from Being.” I only speculate that whatever is produced, the incitement of that production is impulsed upon the producer, the whole of it, in a life-altering instant. And, because of this, I continue to be suspicious that, at least for the producer, the belabored craft of fiction, especially contemplating the novel, does not subsume the impulsed-call (compulsion) into autobiographical distortions, manipulated from a pressure of truth into the whim of a subject’s desire (self-obsession). Few novels are written without scaffolding around them, but there are many poems that are rapidly composed with minimal to no revision. Why is that? And, is our association of poetry and its power ontologically, or even only ontically—which would be not all poetry but a type or types—part of this? Because this specific rapid production is channeled, I suppose. And it is channeled out of Being, into a deteriorating form (inscription).

But, I haven’t answered your question fully. What do I mean when suggesting that everything is there in DAY(S)? It is not that the stylistically perceivable production is there. But, that the manifold is there through both source and input into the text—too massive to address fully—and in that such a hybrid, relying on a major historical and cultural synthesis (documentary/documentation), covers or could cover (as formulation) the ground of all other genres or modes, at least written ones, in conveying what they seek, always partially, to themselves convey (their motivations?). But, that this is the case is not universal to all poetry or hybrid work, and is not universally apparent to all people interacting with materials where it does occur. I want to get most people to write, speak, and think in that way—after silences—and so I don’t exactly admire focused labor on other forms of production, and I don’t necessarily admire substantial swaths of poetry (drama is, I sometimes think, a more potently poietic genre), except for certain journalism and documentation which is incredibly urgent (there is more I could say about the prosaic register and propositional speech surrounding “what has sufficiently been shown” as a record we can utilize and “what has yet to be exposed” within the extant record, which bears a good deal on a praxis-void academia today); and, separately from that, I can admire work in the more limited sense of amusement or pleasure within a cultural economy, between capitalism and imperialism, which I deeply despise living within. No different than my fascination with tabloid media. Are they entertaining? Interesting, even? Potent for analysis? Yes, yes, and yes. Are they anything to do with anything of the far-more-important-to-me matter I mentioned above? Generally, no. Because they aren’t being thought in this way.

Your mention of tabloid media has me thinking about meme culture. Just last night we were messaging about a meme of yours that features the infamous Buttigieg cinnamon roll image, among other things. Having first been drawn to your writing because of the striking visual modularity of the panels in ANTIKYTHERA, I’m not surprised to find that you can produce compelling memes. I also know that you have presented some of these visual meme-works at poetry readings. What is your relationship to the meme? To brainrot? How do these types of media (and humor more generally) inform your poetry?

Probably my entire thinking about everything here and elsewhere is ordained by my exposure over many years to memes. Memes are it, they have always been it, as poietic saying. Memes seem to be aligned with the same energy that goes into the poetry and art this thinking calls for. I especially see them as deep and late—no, chthonic and aged—beeping along the mediatory-re-mediatory chain. The memes present now rely on a near infinite span of mediations of memes from a year, ten years, twenty years ago, and beyond (memes are present across culture and language and obliterate supremacist and standard languages, unlike ‘objective journalism’). Memes are not spontaneous individual creations, participant in the empirical worldview and “knowledge production,” or the belief in the design of an original idea as a social contribution. Memes are highly interactive and totally exchanged. They entirely rely on external sources and materials in their construction—making them mediations. Even where they are developed and altered by an individual in unique ways by technological or handicraft manipulation, the sources are still articulated through another frame as a mediation (e.g. the digital software used to alter the image for the new meme, which is itself an intervention in the construction denying autonomy of “one” author amidst the alteration of the image).

I think memes are impulsed, and they are most readily, if they are not impulsed, received as carrying forward the call into the call for re-mediation when the audience perceives the meme. This capacity lies within the social fungibility of the meme, and memes’ transociochronological endurance. It would be interesting to compare memes and gifts and the act and cycle of giving economically. Do memes transcend the debt and transaction which generally destroys gifts? Only because such a line of questioning would further scaffold and support the pure spoken and ontological connections the meme conveys. Presumably they do. Let me quickly offer a flight of linguistic fantasy: la même = the same. Indeed, not similarity (resemblance) but sameness. Something there—every meme capable of re-mediation, bearing forward the call: they consistently function in the same way. They consistently bear the capacity for the same result. The same poietic inscription. Transcending their encoded information—content (the location of the social-conditional in poietic inscription is content)—they carry forward the call of Being. They do this regardless of capacity with language and form. They can be what some would call highly crude, or extremely slick. They celebrate language not as a tool to re-present existence but as a gift that is participant within it. A huge driver of this gift is the resonant emotionality that the linguistic manifestation of the meme carries. Humor, here, comes into play. It is one of the dominant emotions in the ‘memery.’

One of my newer creations is a riff on the shopping lists CNN publishes, always with headlines like “55 products our editors love for this Fall,” which I view as these egregious and absurd capitalist articulations tone-deaf to the devastated society we live in in the US economically, and ignorant of the necessary global social actions we need to take re solidarity, liberation, resistance. Snipping some of those headlines from CNN, I juxtapose them with popular imagery amidst the far-left/progressive spaces I am aligned with, including the aftermath of the attack on “Big Balls,” the 3D-printed “Liberator,” the Guillotine (inspired by extraordinary publishers and friends Discount Guillotine), and the keffiyeh. The content was presented as a set of images on a spare, black, background, as an IG story shared by my Blue Bag Press, with the tagline “endorsed by our editors” (it relied on having this outlet of the Press to iterate it). This meme is fairly obvious in its commentative juxtaposition of news media and popular ideology/feeling—the two are in conflict with each other, and the meme comes across as the more realistic representation of our lived experiences and desires. This is the consequence of an arbitrary and false force the mainstream (corporate) news media invokes: objectivity.

With objectivity and neutrality in news media comes an emotional void, a denial of emotion. A denial of the rhetorical and aesthetical capacity of emotion. This is a fault of the technical register I described in OINTMENT WEATHER, of its technicity. But: emotion, feelings which intensely press upon us, and the impacts these have on our cognition and worldview and decision-making are always present. So, it’s a false choice, made possible by the framework empiricism and structuralisms have imposed upon us, which rejects a huge swath of what, viscerally, is going on when we are thinking. Still, it is true that memes rely on source inputs, including news media, which always represent a challenge to some of this thinking. It exists in opposition to the dominant Western world order, and is probably subsumed and merely a facet of it—it must be, as this thinking, poietic thinking, seeks to escape a trajectory of definitions and constructions, including gender and race and capital/economy, and thus defines itself only by and through the problems of the dominant system. This is the impossible task of determination, and the grace which affords its potential to not be merely and always in opposition to the imaginary phallogocentric logic is that it comes from whatever is Being. Anyway, to be incredibly terse here, since we can acknowledge the perpetuation of content production in the technical and prosaic registers (a symptom of modernity), we can recognize that memes are poietic manifestations of news media, contemporary culture, and so forth, that transcend news media through their inclusions of emotions. They make us feel in order to know, we laugh and connect with them, we are compelled to share them, to participate in their perpetuation and continuation. News media merely informs us, it does not compel us forward. News media obliterates ontological aspects of daily life and global happening. Memes contribute an aesthetic and somatic and psychological engagement with events of daily life and global happenings. Memes and poems and paintings and films and musics. I guess a most practical point to make here is that memes afford a comfortable entrance to poietic production when considering the desire to disseminate the concept to a wide audience or to demonstrate the existence of the concept and the wide capacity for such speech/production—memes decidedly reject any ‘genius’ ideations some hold about such radical/revolutionary thinking. They deny authority based on virtually all factors of privilege. This is part of their vernacular nature, which renders them authentic in that way of folk art, against institutionally mandated forms, which trend towards standardization through rules and gatekeeping and imagings of power typically wielded and maintained by those institutions. It is no surprise to see the popularity of memes amongst small press communities, as well as their weaponization by corporations and political entities (as with Trump’s White House page, or the social media habits of fast food companies and popular brands today). 

And, I have performed them. When Henry Goldkamp was here in Buffalo for a reading [Thom organizes and hosts a performance series called Limited Palette], I projected five or six memes, four of which I read aloud and the others I described. When I look at them, the impulse and construction, they are memes. But, they are also truly visual poems. I am there, I made them. And I am known to have made them, I privately circulated them, and in a way they are so tagged and imbued by myself as to exit some of the anonymous global communal exchange and become more aligned with a poem. Poems, like memes, are participatory, circulatory, feedbacking off of other poems and materials. And they are inflected by their authors. So, I presented them as poems, as texts, as to be viewed that way. I don’t mean to deny anything about their meme status. I want instead that people see my meme-poems for what they are, and for all these various types of productions to be recognized for their poietic aspects, to bring us back to a point where we have this richer appreciation, and more importantly belief in, aesthetically manifest speech. I really do think, despite a lot of bluster about the topic, that this isn’t anything but something people say. The way lives are conducted, the immensity of violence and the failure to even speak about it or see it move into the work people do, the work that poets I see write.

Memes do also have a sort of dangerous energy to them, maybe one that contributes to that division in the wider populace between A) knowing or sensing this about art and B) actually having this dynamic awareness be intrinsic to life and conduction of production. I’m thinking about the ironic, apathetic aspect to memes, about the double-edge of memes relying on images of the opposite ideology (memes of the right or left politically re-present the opposing view within the framework of the desired ideology)—memes often rely on stereotypes, bigotry. The prevalence of memes which represent and embody, simply, frustration with life and the world. Yes, there are so many memes and meme communities and spaces which impassionately carry forward energy around, pedagogy in support of, and incite needed supportive actions towards oppressed communities. But, for every meme that supports trans rights, or skewers the Trump admin’s abhorrent purging of undocumented individuals and citizens through ICE jackboots, there are memes that reject trans rights, memes that celebrate ICE agents and mock immigrants. White supremacists numbering the far right are deeply involved in memes—just look at how Nick Fuentes alone traffics in them, and their omnipresence all over the Discord servers and accounts of his supporters.

Memes are a universal language, touching upon everything. Memes are not obliquely or solely “good” nor morally right. They are merely a venue which happens to consistently show this result/function/schema: poietic speaking, the mediatory-re-mediatory chain. I’d suggest that the universality of it causes a number of questions about what Being conveys, what it gives—for it is not all rosy whatsoever. It does seem to cause some people a lot of concern and pause when I raise the point that Being and our questioning pursuit of it reveals that what is given from Being [es Gibt] are also the horrors of the world and all the reasons for their occurrence.

When I performed mine, I did some in a voice mocking that viral character H00pify, who I was somewhat enchanted with ahead of his being more direct about his already presumed new-right (young white male conservative) politics. He does those videos commenting on and presenting viral sensations and people, memes etc., with all the bell dings and in an affected deep voice. I parodied that, the voice. The material does not survive on its own (as static image), it has to be presented, characterized(, circulated). Something must electrify it. The static text-visual comes to life with the voice, which led to laughter in the audience ( a good deal of it!) and inevitably consequated far greater impact and residue within them than the material read on its own. A poem read aloud, as I had recent noxious experience with a dogged prosecutor of my work, may cause someone the feeling of needing to read and reread it to understand, and there the poem shifts towards an analytic engaged in empirical knowing rather than sensating the call. But the spectacle upon which the performed concept arrives, is received, conveys in an instant what it is meant to and what it must. Knowledge or not, the felt truth and understanding, and the shifts that will then take place through those in the audiences’ lives, occurs there and through that conduct. I am in many ways not a performer, unlike a good deal of folks I admire in the poetry community who are quite capable and compelling performers (Alyssa Perry, Tracie Morris, Henry Goldkamp, and Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo come to mind). You remember and were there for enough of my readings this summer: only that last one in KC did I really become comfortable doing all these voices and intonations in my poems. I usually do a disservice to them, my own poems. And I’m still working on that side of myself, mostly through listening to others, talking with them, learning from their wonderful works and ways. This meme stuff has been a way to both share ideas when other poems I would do fail to appear to me, and also to perform more, to be up there in front of an audience differently, more vibrantly and communally. To have everything and everyone better connected and plugged in to the matter.

Alex Tretbar wrote the chapbooks According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and Kansas CityGothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). He works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Annulet, Bat City Review, Callaloo, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, ISSUE, mercury firs, NOIR SAUNA, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.