poetry of course is made of formal textures that offer non- or quasi-logical modes of knowing. a

linebreak, whether visible or implied, is an arbitrary fissure in the order of things. as soon as a

poem drags something into that clearing, the break itself becomes a social problem, part of which

involves figuring out how poems become supplements to the real antagonisms that make them

possible: what, after all, is an empire without its lines, its borders, its fences, its ropes and

pulleys, the lineal threat of its crosshairs. poetry, then, is as much an antagonism as it is a

thumbtack the size of the sun. as it is that same thumbtack piercing a thousand colonels’ skulls,

searing through the hard flesh of a wolverine tank or an MQ9 reaper, that same thumbtack

tearing at the throat of a kerosene fire just before it swallows the land. which is to say: yes,

sometimes.

if poetics is a method that emerges from deep study of real social conditions, the nature of this

method is never entirely clear. this disappoints us endlessly. empire, capital, racial terror, white

phosphorus, armed surveillance cameras, armed delivery drones, armored vehicles armed with

long range acoustic devices, the cold wet arms of the state, these don’t dictate in any strict sense

either the form or the content of a poem’s knowing. but there is a relationship there, among these

modes, that poetics, resting as it does between the poem-as-poem and -as-critique, would like to

make visible. not in the archaeological sense of unearthing, whose economies of gouge always

serve the settlement in one way or another. but as an imaginative counterviolence in the dynamic

sense Vicuña describes as “a nail / hammered / on a / banana leaf. / A rough / movement / to

capture / the delicate.” a relentless avoidance, what i’ve just done, a total copout of the highest

order: resorting to some elsewhere figuration to explain how and what the poem knows because

i’m afraid of how and what it doesn’t. from this we can conclude that it is possible neither to give

a general formula for what a poem is not (for ex., a thumbtack lodged in a thousand colonels’

skulls) nor to produce an account of what it is, without making reference to another (for ex., a

nail hammered on a banana leaf). maybe it is precisely because the poem’s knowing does not

conform to the logic of gouge that each poetic instance collapses into its own associations.

maybe to believe otherwise is to betray the poem’s only meaningful qualities: endlessness,

displacement, negation.