Joshua Clover

Poem Ending With a Line from Niedecker

I keep my mind under my arm

where I hold my

head when I walk

down to market when I

walk when I walk down

to the market

the actions are social

but the mind is private

when I walk down walk

down to the inferno

the mind is private I had

a vision the mind

is privately held

under my arm when I

walk I had a dream had a

Baudelaire had a

Rimbaud the action is

social but Apollinaire walks

he promenades down to market

promenades

in the market

walks out walks home

walks through streets named after

market towns

the names are social

but the century is private

the inferno is social

but the mind follows

the head thinks we can leave

thinks we can go

down to the market

and leave just leave thinks we can

be in it but not of it

You know all too well

that the best poetry is not

the least revolution

you know also that poetry

is the best way available to you

to affirm this truth

now we start to see how

the trap is sprung how it was

sprung and all

before you were born

mind under your arm

in the poetry market that exists

despite the spontaneous

wailings of the poets who believe

there must be no

market because they

cannot afford that for which they

should not have to pay

the action is social but the market

exists as the secret

police exist though

it will never send you

to jail for your poems though

we all believed in

private that we were

worth jailing for the terrible

 sedition of our dithyrambs  

believed we deserved this honor

in a ¡NO PASASRÁN!

todos somos Pussy Riot

sort of way but the good

reader gear’d for riot

cometh not for us

The world of the poem is

the world the world is abstract

and real the poem

fails just when it is victorious

because one cannot live

the absolute of Victory

over the Sun until

one can and we do and many

will die when this happens

poetry will be renewed

in the blood of the negative

“and dreadfully much else” 

Joshua Clover is a poet, critic, journalist, and author, as well as a Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. He writes a column of film criticism for Film Quarterly under the title "Marx and Coca-Cola," is a former senior writer and editor at the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, The Nation, among others. Along with eleven students at UC-Davis, he engaged in a sit-in to protest the campus's financial arrangements with U.S. Bank. Clover and the eleven students, known as the "Davis Dozen," have each been charged with 20 counts of obstructing movement in a public place and one count of conspiracy.