Fuck it

 Given that the current revelations look like they might take down not just Keir Starmer but his entire government, here are the pages of my most recently completed graphic poem zine, in case there turns out to be no point actually printing it because the people satirised in it get kicked out on their arses for being best mates with Peter Mandelson. 

My planned new pamphlet, stuckfearkarma, will now revert to its original working title, Fifteen New Poems by AJ McKenna. 

Letter to a Little Man

 

I drew the above as a design for a protest sign, which I want to display when counter-protesting the fash as a counterpoint to their shite, expensive, AI-generated banners of the likes of Charlie Kirk. I like the idea of toting something handmade, homebrewed, put together on a shoestring with real creative effort honouring real heroes instead of something expensive and fake bigging up a dickhead who died the way he lived - making a tit of himself on a college campus spreading hatred against black folks and trans people. Basically I'm trying to put into practice the things I said about getting as real as we possibly can in opposition to the fake, AI-fuelled social media world the fascists are all desperate to be stars of in the interview I did for We Create Together last month: 

After having drawn it, though, I read some posts about how many more people than just Pretti and Good have been murdered by ICE in the past year or so, which led me to tracking down The American Prospect's Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured. And I felt that I should also do something to honour them, too. And, because I have previous form for writing protest poems about events in Minnesota, and because a poet whose work I greatly value told me once I seemed to do my best work in the form of a direct address, I wrote this: 

Letter to a Little Man 

Your cheque bounced, Donald: as you knew it would.

It bounced for Alex Pretti. It bounced for Renee Good:

A mother shot dead in her car. A nurse killed like a dog,

And both would be the first to say they’re not the only ones. 

It bounced for Jaime Alanis: they threw him from a roof

In Southern California, and Robert Valdez too:

They ran him over with a car, and then, in Illinois

They shot Silverio Gonzalez, after he dropped off his boys

And daughter at their school, in ‘ Operation Midway Blitz’;

And then, on a highway in Virginia, a speeding truck would hit

Jose Castro-Rivera as he tried to flee your thugs;

Isaias Barboza and Keith Porter they just shot down with their guns

In Texas and Los Angeles: we know the names of some

Who had their fingers on those triggers, but most remain unknown

Because your murderers wear masks and turn their backs to hide their shame,

And what we also know with certainty is these are just the names

Of those they killed in public: behind the high white walls

Of your detention centres you’ve killed five-and-thirty more

That we can name. I’ll name them here. Their names should be remembered: 

Genry Ruiz Gullen. 

Serawit Gezahegn Dejene. 

Maksym Chernyak.

Brayam Rayo-Garzon. 

Nhon Ngoc Nguyen. 

Marie Ange Blaise. 

Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado.

Jesus Molina-Veya.

Johnny Noviello.

Isidro Perez. 

Tien Xuzn Phan. 

Chaofeng Ge. 

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas. 

Oscar Rascon Duarte. 

Ismael Ayala Uribe.

Santos Reyes-Banegas.

Norlan Guzman-Fuentes. 

Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez.

Huabing Xie

And Leo Cruz-Silva…

I’ve read lists of names like this before, by my city’s Civic Centre:

The victims of a genocide you’ve revelled in abroad,

An act that you applauded (and the watching world abhorred)

And which you sought to imitate at home, from sea to shining sea

With your American SS, your pampered paramilitary

Who panic if they think they hear a car alarm or whistle,

Their mascot your sham Superman who couldn’t pass the physical

(I queued to see you once, Dean Cain, at Gateshead Metro Centre;

If I ever see your face again I swear I’ll fucking end ya);

Who cry unfair at protesters in blow-up frog costumes,

Who fifty motivated Angelenos forced back into their HQ,

And who are being beaten back in Minneapolis and Maine

By a people who have woke up and who know ‘never again’

Is more than just a formula of pious, empty words

And that a riot isn’t violence but the cry of the unheard

Who will remain unheard no longer as we make some fucking noise

In Minnesota, Philly, California, Illinois,

Virginia, Texas, Venezuela, Greenland, Palestine,

And everywhere around the world where people choose to rise,

Refuse to bend the knee and make it known we’ve had enough

Of your clan of child molesters and your camo-suited thugs.

The cheque that bounced in ’26 is not the one King tried

To cash back in the sixties, the promise, long denied,

Of life and happiness and liberty to be enjoyed by all,

No: your bouncing cheque’s your undertaking that you’d make us crawl.

You can’t. We won’t. We never will. No matter what you do

All people of good will will never kneel for men like you. 

And now your cheque is bouncing, Donald, as we always knew it would,

Because when, Mr President, was your credit ever good?

Yes, the allusion to Wilhelm Reich is intentional. I've been thinking a lot about his work on the psychology of fascists, and particularly his own angry direct address to them and their ilk, Listen, Little Man!, a lot lately. 

The YouTuber Shaun is doing a fundraiser for the Women's Foundation of Minnesota's Immigrant Rapid Response Fund, which seems like a good thing to donate to, if any of the above has moved you to do so. 

Heartcore Zero

Hand on heart

they pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth:

to colour, pattern, line and shape, 

to (what they do not see as) abstract art

They (would not say they) touch themselves

and that is all they do. 

I, instead, extend my hand to you

because I know your struggle is mine too. 

Blood, guts, Seven Sisters

Again, one thinks of Bacon, those figures in rooms

devouring themselves, each other, the marks

they are made from, paint slapped to canvas like a hand

to flesh; of Bellows, those smears crashing each

against the other, of some scene rehearsed

somewhere deep inside the body and translated

into image, into practice, into play 

that is not play. One thinks of Brite

described by Straub: true artists circle 

like a bird of prey. One thinks of Gunn. 

A Christmas Poem, sort of

 

Nativity by Sadao Watanabe

Look, I'm as surprised as you are. But for the past three months I've been involved in street activism in defence of the people my government has chosen to bang up in a condemned hotel for the 'crime' of seeking asylum, and I've been thinking a lot harder about what all my ethics boil down to, and in the end, late one night or maybe early one morning, I found that at the most basic level my answer to that question was a cheesy little hymn they made us sing in primary school, based on Matthew 25: 35-40. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. 

I guess you never entirely outrun the ethical instruction you receive during those formative years. And while I ain't running back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church anytime soon, I have found myself struck by the poetry of a child born to parents put on the move by a tyrant who rules under the sign of the eagle, denied reasonable accommodation and forced to settle for the only thing available to them. Have you ever been in a stable? You know how they smell? You know what animals do in them. And you also know what people do when they die. I've always been struck by something Alan Moore has a character remark on in Promethea, that 'crucifixion was something you'd do to a dog', that sites of the eagle-tyrant empire's preferred method of execution also reeked of urine, blood and excrement. That the Most High both began and ended His time in human form down in the goddam dirt. If such an observation seems blasphemous to you then I'm sorry to say you're not paying attention - it's the whole fucking point. 

So I was thinking about all this - about the parallels between modern-day migrants and the Holy Family, and those between the empire that nailed a guy they saw as just another Jewish radical to a piece of wood and the one that currently pepper-sprays priests, and the ongoing genocide in the place we sing sentimental songs about at this time of year, and what my government does to people who are protesting that genocide, and indeed what that government is doing to people like me, and, well, this happened. I don't know if it's entirely finished or if I might go back and heavily rewrite it, but it felt important to get this version of it down now even if it does change a great deal. So: 

The Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Evangel

forthe Filton 24

Heaven comes to Earth in shit and piss and rotted straw.
A light to change the world shines through a creaking and neglected door,
while bureaucrats whose papers bear the ruler’s eagle sign
turn over in their sleep and dream about tomorrow’s lines,
and hoteliers chide servants to prepare the breakfast rush,
and vagabonds alone look on the miracle and scratch
skin on their wrists where fleas have bitten them, and drawn a little blood,
as, almost unremarked, love is delivered up of love
 
to keep a meeting at a different hour, still marked by blood and filth
when, under the eagle’s imprimatur, love incarnate must be killed
with whip, with thorn, with nails, with spear, with gun and bomb and drone,
with lines half-dreaming drawn on maps, with cries of bring them home,
with bodies bulldozed into pits, with pits where poisons burn,
with environments made hostile and legitimate concerns,
with a voice that yells incessantly that freedom isn’t free,
with the criminalisation of the act of empathy…
 
but love is not killed with a nail, nor gun or bomb or drone;
love will not be turned back by any border we have drawn;
love excavates the bulldozed pits and gives the bones a name,
love sees through all our rhetoric and shifting of the blame,
goes willingly to prison for the sake of those we hate,
as it was twice confined in filth at the insistence of a state:
love came into the world behind a creaking and neglected door
and changed the world by showing us we have to change it more.

Face Front, True Believers!

 

It's no exaggeration to say that The Author Has Been Tweeting: A Graphic Poem, copies of which began shipping this very morning, represents the beginning of something I've wanted to do for something like a quarter of a century. I don't mean the subject matter, obviously: who could have predicted, back then, how the person who inspired its (entirely fictional, and there's a disclaimer on the back to that effect) main character would turn out? No, I mean the form: the idea of doing a poem as a comic. I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'm surprised people don't do it more, because it just seems to me that the two forms - sequential art and poetry - go together so well, and complement each other in fascinating ways. A poem moves from verse to verse on the way to its conclusion: a comic does much the same thing, moving panel by panel. So many great passages in comics feel like a kind of poetry anyway: why not try doing that deliberately? As I say: a great idea. 

But not an original one. Because, like most great ideas in comics, it comes from (or at least I got the idea from) Mr Alan Moore. 

When I said 'something like a quarter of a century' in the first paragraph I was allowing for the possibility that I might not necessarily have picked up a copy of Caliber Press' Alan Moore's Songbook when it first came out, in 1998; but, you know, I could very well have done. I was an inveterate haunter of my local branch of Forbidden Planet in those days, regularly popping in to spend some of my student loan money on the new issues of Preacher, The Invisibles or anything else that caught my eye. And, at some point, this collection of work written by Moore for Caliber's series of Negative Burn anthologies must have fishhooked my ocular socket, because I bought it, I devoured it and, years later, it's still one of my favourite entries in Moore's canon. Note that I don't say the best: it obviously isn't that, it's a caprice compared to, say, Promethea, a mere bagatelle when set beside From Hell (which also, incidentally, combines comics and poetry - Gull, the absolute madman, is always slipping into iambics to deliver his various speeches, especially on his epic coach ride through London with Netley; as indeed does V in his eponymous series), but, well - how can you not love a comic which features a jaded Godzilla, fantastically drawn by Art Adams, declaring that he's tired of 'Trampling Tokyo'?

Moore's Songbook - and yeah, sure, he called them songs and he even actually sung some of the fuckers but a song that you read on the page, if it's good, if it hangs together and is deep enough, is still a poem, just ask Leonard Cohen - was proof of concept, and for years I dreamed of working with an artist to set some of my own work, not to music, but to images in the same way as various artists, commissioned by Caliber, had done for Moore. But it remained a dream, a project for a rainy day or that moment all artists dream of when someone with access to several suitcases full of large-denomination bills asks you 'so. What would you really like to do?' until last year, when I started drawing and learned, to my surprise, that not only did I not suck at it, but that if I worked at it I could get pretty good. 

And now here I am with The Author Has Been Tweeting, my first graphic poetry zine (there will be more), which you can buy from my store on ko-fi right now! Putting this together has been a fascinating process and I'll probably talk more about it in future entries - in particular, as someone who regularly creates videos to go with her poems, I want to talk about the cinematic qualities of comics as a poetry medium - but for now it's just turned five on Friday evening and I feel like having a celebratory beer. So, until the next time, Gojira, Gojira, GO! 

Books and their Binding

 I have two habits, both bad, when it comes to my projects. The first, and probably the most annoying, is that of announcing I will do a thing, then it never happening. Some of you will probably have realised by now that the second volume of Albian Dreams has slipped into this category. Ditto definitely the anthology of my criticism I was going to put together, and most probably the idea of making a YouTube video of my essay about what I'm going to refer to here as that Todd Field movie to save myself the hassle of looking up how to do that bloody accent over the 'a' on here again. Chalk it up to my ADHD, I guess. 

But running that habit close in terms of annoyance is a similar but slightly different one, probably also a result of the aforementioned neuroatypicality, which is that of not announcing something I'm actively working on but assuming I have at some point, such that I wind up, as I did in my last entry, offhandedly referring to a project I have not only never openly announced on here, but have not in fact even alluded to. 

Which brings us to stuckfearkarma. 

stuckfearkarma is my newest poetry pamphlet, and the first pamphlet since names and songs of women which I have chosen not to publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, because I am increasingly unhappy about having any association with Jeff Bezos and the rest of his creepy fascist chums. It's true that KDP is an extremely convenient platform, but frankly I'm sick of using platforms associated with a class of people who are, on a daily basis, making the planet harder and harder to live on with their bloated egos and their TESCREAL bullshit. I think the moment that finally made me decide that I want to start transitioning my publishing output, such as it is, away from this deeply spiritually bald man was the moment when he decided to boorishly pop a bottle of champagne to cut off William Shatner's ruminations on his extremely high atmosphere (emphatically not 'space') flight: 

Here was a man, Shatner, whose defining work as an actor is inextricably linked with sci-fi dreams of space colonisation confronting, in real time, the deep depression he felt on looking down at our fragile planet from a point of our atmosphere on the very border of space. I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe what Shatner is dealing with here as cosmic horror. It is notoriously the case with him that what he says when out of character is usually at best wrong-headed and at worst utterly repellent but here, for the first time in years, it seemed he had something genuinely interesting, even revelatory, to say. 

And because the richest man in the world couldn't stand the fact that for a few short minutes he wasn't the centre of attention, he barged into frame and started spraying fizzy plonk around like he'd won a fucking grand prix. 

Wanker. 

In fact, more than just a wanker. Let's face it: Jeff Bezos is a cunt. 

And it has been a long-standing principle of mine that I don't work with cunts. I won't be on the same bill as them. I won't be published by them. I won't be friends or make nice with them. It's harmed my career in many ways, but I'd rather stick by my principles than sell out for success. And things have reached a point where I feel I have to apply that principle to the platform I have self-published most of my work on for the past decade. 

So stuckfearkarma will be self-published in a much more old-fashioned way. And as I was considering that, another thought struck me: what if, as well as publishing it, I bound every copy myself? What if I celebrated this change by making a genuinely handmade object? 

So I learned bookbinding. 

Which, for what I wanted to do, turned out to be a bit of a faff. Because in order to learn all the techniques, I had to make two hardback notebooks before I could learn what I needed to do to hand-bind the pamphlets, which is basically just a simple bit of sewing. 

Although to be honest, I've never been that great at sewing, either. 

Still, I learned a lot. Not just how to passably sew up some fascicles but hammering out spines, enrobing boards in fabric, and lettering both by hand and machine. I'm not going to be volunteering for any restoration projects any time soon, but I'm grateful for the experience. And, despite my cackhandedness and my long covid making some of the tasks involved physically exhausting, I think the final products - at least of this apprentice work - looked pretty good in the end. 

That being said - I don't know if I will go with my original plan of manually binding the pamphlets. stuckfearkarma will still come out - but I may just get it printed in the traditional fashion. I might even just have it stapled. What with moving and various other things I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and I simply don't feel I can spare the time to sit my ass down and sew up dozens of spines. And besides, there's one other little matter to deal with before the pamphlet comes out.

Which is that I am publishing The Author Has Been Tweeting, the graphic poem I've been working on for the past few weeks, as a zine. So GET HYPE for that!