KARTHIK PURUSHOTHAMAN, IN CONVERSATION ABOUT “NAZI DRIVER”
Nazi Driver
Catching the train
at Hoboken Terminal
I catch the driver
wearing an armband
tossing a copy
of Mein Kamp
into His glovebox.
Choo-Choo, I gotta go
I tell the friend I have
been Facetiming
since earlier
I gave her a tour
of 9/11 Memorial
You’re turning into
such an American
she says and I say
Thanks, I appreciate
it. Ticket please says
the conductor, a sack
of old potatoes I think
must be from Idaho
before he begins
speaking in Bangla.
He’s from Newmarket
Calcutta, he says.
Popping open
a Snapple, I give him
two facts: One, did you
know I have a Bengali
friend who recently
moved to Newmarket
New Hampshire
and Two, did you
know your driver is
a Nazi who’s planning
to plow right through
the Meadowlands
football stadium?
Can Karthik
Purushothaman
save the day?
my Facetime friend
asks, flashing me
and I hide the phone
from a family sitting
under yarmulkes.
Curly-haired baby
fist in her mouth
fogs the window
tracing L.O.V.E.
on the glass.
Can’t make this shit up
you know? If you knew
the driver was a Nazi
do you think you would
be on board? We enter
a tunnel, no light
at the end, it’s all
black and white
except for this Jewish girl.
I search her green eyes.
Can she tell what
I’m thinking?
Will he or won’t he
derail the train, this Nazi?
I’m sorry, I don’t know.
I get off at the next stop.
I first met Karthik Purushothaman in New York City, in November of 2019, at a reading he curated and hosted at The People’s Forum. Timothy Liu invited me along to read with him and a few other wonderful artists. I was struck right away by Purushothaman’s presence, his graciousness, his command of the stage and the event. I had to wait a little while, though, to read his poems. Purushothaman’s poems are singular encounters, swerving juxtapositions of image, sound, and place. I feel he is writing some of the most idiosyncratic poems of the day. Two poems—“Cold Noodles” and “Nazi Driver”—are featured in the tenth anniversary issue of the Ocean State Review. I had the privilege to talk with Purushothaman about “Nazi Driver.”
Charles Kell: First, thanks for the wonderful poems, Karthik! And thanks for spending some time talking about “Nazi Driver,” a favorite poem of mine from the tenth-anniversary Ocean State Review. Before we get into the poem can you talk a little about Timothy Liu? We met through Timothy Liu, at the wonderful event you put on in November of 2019—seems like a lifetime ago. Can you talk about Timothy Liu’s influence, teaching, friendship, what he has meant to you throughout your journey in poetry and in life? I count Timothy Liu as my most important influence (along with Peter Covino) in helping me with my poems, with thinking about poetry, thinking about the world. Words really can’t express (for me)—so I’m asking you to try!
Karthik Purushothaman: Thank you for seeing my work as worthy enough to talk to me about it. Any shred of poetic sensibility I have, I owe Tim Liu. I had no formal engagement with poetry until after my undergrad, and even then, I wrote hokey lyrics trying to be an amalgamation of songwriters I admired such as Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and David Gray. Even at the William Paterson University MFA, I graduated from the fiction program because all my life I had been programmed to pursue financially pragmatic versions of fanciful dreams, even though I have known myself never to find charm in treading those paths—amid prepping for the most competitive college entrance exam in India, I strived to be a nationally-ranked table-tennis player; during my undergrad at one of the most competitive tech schools, I tried to be a playwright.
Likewise, while diligently putting together my fiction manuscript, I rediscovered my love for verse after taking Professor Liu’s one-off poetry seminar. What I saw until then as my tendency to value the illicit over the sanctioned, Liu made me see as my soul’s truth. I could fill pages talking about how incredible a poet Liu is, but more than anything else, he’s just a great teacher. After a few times of showing him the standard 1 or 2 poems in class, I began bringing him everything I wrote that week during his office hours. The more he read, the more I wrote, and the more I couldn’t wait for his critiques. Although right after that semester I started getting a sense of what made a “good poem” and even began earning occasional publications, I cared if he liked what I wrote more than even if the work objectively had so-called literary merit.
Thanks to Liu, I learned that the common thread between the “illicit” activities I loved doing in-between the things I was supposed to do, was that they involved meaningful relationships with people who meant the world to me. A lot of teachers could probably tell you everything there is to know about the craft of poetry, but Liu could tell if something you wrote came from the core of your being. And at the core of my being, I seek to produce work that awes the people I admire and deeply care about. It’s been years since Liu last read a poem I wrote, but I can tell you even now for me to put my name to anything I produce, I need to hear first from the Liu in my head that I either blew his mind or truly moved him.
CK: The first thing that jumps out to me in “Nazi Driver” is the movement. It’s such a swift poem; I get the feeling of perpetual motion, both in subject matter and form/style. When the poem begins, the speaker is heading somewhere:
Catching the train
at Hoboken Terminal
I catch the driver
wearing the armband
tossing a copy
of Mein Kampf
into his glovebox.
I am drawn to the double use of “catch,” where the speaker is “Catching the train,” he’s running late, the physical sensation, the body is in motion, there’s the feeling of running behind. Then, the speaker catches the driver “wearing the armband / tossing a copy of Mein Kampf”: what is simultaneously fascinating about this beginning is that during this strange, seemingly disturbing moment, the speaker simply registers this observation, there is no commentary. I feel these moments, the quick movements, breathlessness of the poem, coincides with the killer line-breaks throughout, and also the shape/form of the poem. Karthik, how do these elements—form, thought—intertwine and overlap? How much is predicated on the shape, texture, “style” of the poem? How do these elements work with and influence subject matter?
KP: “Nazi Driver” is one of the first ones in which I abandoned all acrobatics meant for the page and returned my focus to sound and rhythm. The thing that first comes to mind when I consider the number of revisions the poem went through, is how much slimmer the column got over time. The result was near consistently an image per line, making the narrative cinematic, the cuts steady, and the pacing in sync with the motion of a train that the narrator can only get on or off, with no scope for further analysis. Trains are my favorite means of transport—where I come from, train journeys are long, slow, and contemplative, but also chaotic. I’ve taken the Main Line train from Hoboken to Waldwick since I started going to William Paterson, then taught there and at NJCU, and beyond. By now, I must have been on the train enough times for me to recognize its personnel by their faces.
Yet, the split second in which the driver’s deep red scarf tangled around his bicep and I caught him trying to unfurl it, got me going breathlessly on this trip, launched by a single question that was constantly in the air in 2017 (thanks to media fixation on an admittedly growing segment of current American society)—What if the driver was a Nazi?—from the platform, making my way through the train, and pulling out my earphones to make small talk with the conductor whom I wasn’t sure I heard correctly the first time, all while I was on the phone with someone having a conversation not exactly appropriate for my surroundings. Writing “Nazi Driver” started me on this series of technically autobiographical and observational poems that capture the hyperreality of present-day experience without affect or aesthetic requirement of any sort. Even I remember a time when there were clearly defined lines between real, virtual and imagined, but arguably the smartphone collapsed the three worlds into one formless whole.
CK: One of the main things that initially drew me to this poem is the simultaneous oscillation between interior and exterior. The interior is exemplified as we are in the speaker’s head, as “Karthik Purushothaman” moves and processes, yet the reader is also experiencing all the outside ephemera as well. The next few lines bring another individual into the poem:
Choo-Choo, I gotta go
I tell the friend I have
been Facetiming
since earlier
I gave her a tour
of 9/11 Memorial
You’re turning into
such an American
she says and I say
Thanks, I appreciate
it.
Again, I’m struck by the fascinating interplay of speech, thought, memory, and event. There is the fabulous juxtaposition of the playful “Choo-Choo” the speaker relates to the friend, stuck between the ominous note about Mein Kampf and the 9/11 Memorial; which, again, takes another direction as the speaker’s friend comments on how the speaker is “turning into / such an American”; I like the use of “such”—it comes off as tongue-in-cheek, jokey, in a sense. The speaker’s reply can be read in a few ways: sarcastic, earnest. I love how there are references throughout with no explicit commentary (I feel so much contemporary poetry tries to explain, to tell readers how to feel, to hand-hold readers). What was/is some of the speaker’s thought processes with the staccato leaps, the serious notes mixed with insouciant brevity? Is this a practice you balance in your poetry, Karthik?
KP: Maybe this has to do with being a millennial, but I find the ironic distance afforded by adult baby-talk to counterintuitively forge a deeper connection with my inner child. So, choo-choo or the tongue-in-cheek comeback more earnestly depicts fondness than any other overtly dramatic gesture, which I avoid not only because it would be a cliché but also because that’s nowhere close to how I want to express adoration. However, I reserve such language to the private realm, and its creeping into the 4-dimensional hyperreality we all inhabit exposes the farcical nature of the “public” to which our so-called social contract has been extended largely beyond our will. A child climbing up to stand on her seat and spy on the seat behind hers could catch the occupant of that seat receiving an intimate picture from a new romantic interest, as nearly happened to me during the “Nazi Driver” commute.
In another poem I wrote in the form of couplets around the same time as “Nazi Driver,” I try to present in one sweeping shot an older white man grimacing at a queer person clad in high-heels and covered in glitter, choosing to turn his head instead towards me leaned against the window and tearing up as I get a text from my aunt telling me about my (now late) grandmother getting hit by a bike back in India. I like to think that these poems serve as their own commentary simply by juxtaposing irreconcilable differences, which inherently defy synthesis because there is none available in the material world in which we encounter them day after day. And I think there’s no resolution of these contradictions because nobody has the will or wherewithal to take the engine and stop the train, even if everybody on board openly muses that the driver might be a Nazi. The maximum impact we’re able to make is through fleeting experiences of crossing the invisible boundaries between us. However, in a reality where such infringements happen all the time, neither these boundaries nor the act of crossing them is structurally significant, so I see it as a compelling challenge for a poet to evocatively depict the plurality of experiences mushed into one as well as the tensions between them at any given location in the ever-expanding public.
CK: As the poem moves, as the speaker’s thoughts and encounters swerve, the “physical movement” of the train is static. The first physical interaction occurs when the speaker is asked, “Ticket please” by the conductor, who is described as “a sack of old potatoes”; another seemingly silly moment, that is, until a recognition:
before he begins
speaking in Bangla.
He’s from Newmarket
Calcutta, he says.
Popping open
a Snapple, I give him
two facts: One, did you
know I have a Bengali
friend who recently
moved to Newmarket
New Hampshire
and Two, did you
know your driver
is a Nazi who’s planning
to plow right through
the Meadowlands
football stadium?
First, the speaker notes the conductor’s language, also a connection of sorts—“I have a Bengali / friend”—before the second fact: the Nazi driver on a death mission. This “fact” is related, in my reading, in a dead-pan cadence. As the train moves, the speaker’s thoughts, observations, connections, quickly move as well; he is on board, in one sense, at the mercy of the train and driver, for the moment; in another sense, the speaker is emotionally and philosophically “active” in locating all the different and subsequent phenomena at work in this enclosed space. How does the enclosed space of the train, in any way, influence the thoughts, the processing of the speaker? I ask because I am obsessed with physical spaces. Does the train influence the form/movement of the poem, how the speaker is experiencing these things, in any ways?
KP: As Bong Joon-Ho via his film Snowpiercer demonstrates, the train is a wonderful constraint for it to allegorize our fatalistic acceptance of the imaginative limits of a society fully on board with the dictates of an imperialist capitalist financial system; pretend as we may that we people have a say in the matter, the system is dictatorial. Having said that, now you’re making me see the poem as the conversational equivalent of a train-top action sequence, in which the players perform the death-defying stunt of working against limitation. Given how poetry tends towards epiphany and catharsis as individual lyrical “overcoming,” many a time I have understood my oppression as a shackling of my imagination not to be able to conceptualize the reality I’m being denied. As a first condition of seeking to know that reality let alone depicting it, I have to go beyond shared experiences of individuals reckoning with Snapple-cap serendipity of names, places and faces, because those experiences may be the very aspects of the cage that keep us locked inside. So, in the same breath as rejoicing in trivia such as how there’s a Newmarket in New Hampshire as well as Kolkata, India, and how I happen to now know a Bengali from both places, I have to necessarily corrupt an experience that would otherwise subdue us both with its sweetness. Here, the element elevating the mundane events of the train to the realm of the hyperreal—the Nazi Driver—comes in to expose to both of us that the actual “shared” reality of the narrator and the conductor from New Hampshire (as well as other passengers on the train) is that we’re all at the mercy of a fascist who might well have murder-suicide on his mind that day. At the same time, we’re also united in our confusion as to whether these characterizations of the hyperreal element are real or ludicrous, which I hoped could represent our individual relationships with narratives set by mainstream media especially around the politics of President Trump. Is the driver really a Nazi, or is the whole thing a red herring to keep the chattering in one direction while effectively stopping us from bonding for any reason other than our mutual fears of the same imagined foe? Either way, we’re stuck on the train and the only choices we can make is getting on or off.
CK: I love the self-referential note in the next part:
Can Karthik
Purushothaman
Save the day?
My Facetime friend
asks, flashing me
and I hide the phone
from a family sitting
under yarmulkes.
What heretofore teetered between levity and brevity, now pushes a little further into comedy. The proper name, followed by “save the day,” reminds one of superheroes, who, at a moment’s notice, swoop in to stop catastrophe. I laughed out loud when I first read the phrase “flashing me”—such a great moment. I get a “Frank O’Hara playfulness” throughout, but undercut with the nods to events and impending doom. Reading over and again this poem, as well, and also your other poems, Karthik; I notice these practices—you have a singular voice, a distinct “style”; I want to step outside of “Nazi Driver” vis-à-vis “Nazi Driver” and ask you a few questions about Poetry: how do you approach the practice and reading of poetry? That is, what are your thoughts on the roles of Poetry today? This question, in a distant way, might relate to the final question from our previous conversation: how do you see, experience, interact with Poetry? What do you think and feel about all the different Poetry factions, beliefs, ideologies, practices, and, ultimately, what can Poetry do? Guilty confession: I am endlessly fascinated / entertained by some of the Poetry dustups on Twitter; it is like my “reality TV,” my soap opera; recently a poet exclaimed—echoing Auden—that poetry makes nothing happen; the poet was chided, called-out. I am such a guilty voyeur on these things and also feel fascinated how a lot of folks feel the need, the crushing need to respond in some way.
I guess I’m asking these broad, opaque questions because it is something I think about—not too often—but time-to-time. On one hand, I’ve pretty much dedicated my life and all of my free time to thinking and working on poetry and fiction; so, obviously, it occupies a vital role, almost like breath; on the other hand, I can see how it all might not, really, amount to much; that it doesn’t do anything. However, I know folks who exclaim that poetry has saved their lives; we can read about the poets in Myanmar who are being killed and locked away; we can note the endless instances from the present to the past where poets have been murdered and persecuted. I was at the John Ashbery School in Hudson, New York in 2015, and got into a small disagreement with a younger poet who was arguing that Poetry can “save the world” or “save people,” and I said—I’m such an asshole—that if you went to a homeless shelter or walked up to people living on the street and offered them “poetry” or food or money or a place to stay, what do you think they would choose? But I go constantly back and forth—where would I be without poetry and my novels, my Beckett and Kafka? I don’t know; and obviously, I can only, truly, look and think about these things through my extremely subjective lens. What do you feel and think, Karthik?
KP: I like how Frank O’Hara has proprietary hold over playfulness, but I’ll take that! As I had mentioned earlier, having been born and raised in an aspirational STEM space in India, I naively believed for a long time that Western poetry had entirely evolved into songwriting and hip-hop with the advent of sound recording, because why would someone bother with putting words on paper, and go through the trouble of printing and distribution, when hearing words is far more visceral and immediate than reading them off the page? The 2010 Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl starring James Franco was my first encounter with a poet whom I quickly grew to admire as much as my favorite songwriters, and even that I felt had a lot to do with the recitation and visualizations presented in the movie. A couple of years later, Frank O’Hara became only the second poet I had read who wrote poems for the page, by which time I had already begun my investigation into creative writing MFA programs, which means I was consciously seeking out and reading writers whom other MFA graduates and aspirants I began to encounter in the literary festival crowds of US and/or liberal-arts-educated New Delhi upper classes were reading. At the risk of committing blasphemy, back then I saw O’Hara as analogous to Mark Knopfler compared with Ginsberg’s Hendrix in guitar-speak and having since acquired taste for various schools and styles over the years, I’m glad you see “Nazi Driver” as tasteful.
Relatedly, and also tying to your love for literary Twitter feuds, my first “serious” publication kind of neatly bridged the worlds of poetry and songwriting, as it was a response to the chatter around Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2016. Called “A Recommendation to the Committee” (titled after Andrea Cohen’s “The Committee Weighs In”), the poem came out in Rattle’s weekly Poets Respond column, which features timely work that reacts to news stories. “Last week, a voice won / because it was heard,” were the lines that got me started, and I finish the poem with, “and as you complain from / your golf carts, I pray / one day that the prize also / be conferred to the black man / who played guitar with his teeth / because that to me is poetry.” Back in India, the beats and the Woodstock lot are the stuff of legend, even in elite circles. In the US, they are seen as sophomoric barring exceptions, and language poetry a la the New York school is more prized. Previously, I used to think Indians remained culturally fragmented because we speak a thousand languages and dialects. Seeing the gendered, racialized and class-based distinctions in cultural consumption in the Anglosphere writ large, which have no doubt been amplified and flattened with the advent of social media, I now consider it an indisputable fact that there will be as many ways to appreciate different literary aspects as there are audiences.
So, starting from the minimalist point of seeing poetry as stacking and sequencing language in an attempt at evocation if not epiphany through surprise, I recognize that the purpose of the art form is to create motion—to inspire, move and stir into action, which at the very least would involve giving rise to more poetry, just as life begets life. Now, the categories of mover and moved aren’t in a literary space detached from material reality but are trapped in the messy complexities of their respective contexts, so I also have to ask, who’s being moved and who’s doing the moving? Dare I also ask, how many people are in this community—aspiring writers, largely university-based magazines, and a handful of underfunded small presses, or cable news, radio broadcasters and Spotify podcasts with hundreds of millions of subscribers? YouTube, Instagram and TikTok audiences have laid their own claims to the pleasures of language, arguably reducing lovers of the page to boutique niches like jazz clubs. Coming from a country in which an increasingly large crowd of people build social cred through identifying with different practitioners of art in the colonizer’s language, I can say that there’s great opportunity and a burning need for English-language poetry to seek to be wider read worldwide and its language pleasures to be translatable across more international contexts—rather than for it to want to be more revered.
CK: I am amazed and care deeply for the moves toward the end of the poem; again, the speaker leaps from image, from face-to-face, from thought-to-thought; there is the inclusion of a funny rhetorical question, followed by the anti-climactic end:
Curly-haired baby
fist in her mouth
fogs the train window
tracing L.O.V.E.
on the glass.
Can’t make this shit up
you know? If you knew
the driver was a Nazi
do you think you would
be on board? We enter
a tunnel, no light
at the end, it’s all
black and white
except for this Jewish girl.
I search her green eyes.
Can she tell what
I’m thinking?
Will he or won’t he
derail the train, this Nazi?
I’m sorry, I don’t know.
I get off at the next stop.
Obviously, the Nazi driver in “Nazi Driver” is a focal point, front-and-center in the poem, occupying the speaker’s immediate thoughts; however, the speaker’s visual / emotional / psychological “encounters” and process are the stars of the poem, and what I notice and return to. As I’ve mentioned, I am fascinated how the speaker notes and focuses on the minutiae, the encounters, and then quickly slips to the next. There is no overarching meditation, grasp toward meaning, and, I find this emphasized with the penultimate line—“I’m sorry, I don’t know.” How does the end, the latter part of the poem work to balance, practice some of your specific thoughts on poetry? How, Karthik, do you achieve that balance?
KP: I’m heartened to hear that the ending has earned the poem your care. The image of the curly-haired child is what gave me the impulse to write the poem—looking back at it four years later, the visual feels surreal, but I swear that on the same commute in which I did a double-take thinking I saw a train’s engine driver wearing the armband, there was an Orthodox Jewish family with the dude wearing the curls and yarmulke, the woman in very traditional clothes, and a child no older than four fogging up the windows with her breath and tracing the letters “L.O.V.E.” on the glass. When I say I can’t make this shit up, I literally mean that I can’t make this shit up. It’s an admission of my human limitation as an artist for whom inspiration really has to come from outside, even if our subconscious, our dreams, and the unreliability of memories all do a lot to propel our creativities. More often than not, life imitates art for me.
More significantly, the child’s presence—an Orthodox Jewish one, at that—kept my imagination on a tighter leash than letting it run riot. Not only did I have to watch what kind of conversation I was having on the phone, but the child also kept the poem in check. I was reminded of the scene in Schindler’s List where the movie is in black and white except for the Holocaust survivor girl Lavi who is seen wearing red. The child I met on my commute did have piercing green eyes, and when she caught me smiling at her scrawling on the window with her fingers, for a second, I felt like I was trivializing her existence with my thought exercise. Could she tell what I was thinking? That line didn’t get a laugh in my head when I first thought of it, but if it’s coming across as a sort of comedic punchline, then it’s surely an instance of “it’s funny because it’s true.” Would I be among those storming the engine, if the driver was a Nazi? Would I be the Chris Evans character from Snowpiercer, putting my body on the line? Or am I coming up with this just to have some fun with the concept—which would precisely be the approach to which an Orthodox Jewish child being in the picture would put an immediate stop? At the end of the day, I reckon with the reality that I’m an immigrant whose life and livelihood can be more effectively, materially threatened the more I try to be a mutineer. My apology to the child and admission of ignorance, therefore, are earnest. Sure, I recognize that it has the double effect of also signifying a raucous tongue-in-cheek cruelty, which might be what makes it seem like a comedic punchline; besides, there’s me parodying delusional individual members of oppressed communities thinking they can save themselves alone, leaving the rest to rot. But I meant the line—and did apologize in my head to the child even in the real-life scenario.
CK: Karthik, I can’t thank you enough for the poems, for entertaining these questions, and spending time with me. What’s next? What are your plans, what have you been working on? I hope to see you soon.
KP: Answering these searching questions of yours as part of a deep dive into one poem is such an astounding concept that I hope you’re able to turn into a regular series of interviews, a podcast or even a video series, because it has been an incredibly therapeutic experience having to reflect so deeply about individual line choices as much as broader conceptual aspects. Of all my poems, I’m also happy to have engaged with “Nazi Driver” in this capacity, especially for how much it goes with what I have coming next. Although I wrote it around the time of Charlottesville, I kept it under wraps and kept revising, until one day in 2018, I read it out to my friend Andrew Milea, a multi-instrumentalist and engineer who has a band called Wild Americans. Andrew had this tune called “Genius” that, at the time, sounded a little like The Beatles’ “Come Together,” but whose groove he kept shaping until it became its own beast. After hearing my poem, Andrew played his song’s funky breakdown outro jam on his acoustic guitar and asked me to recite the poem on top of it, following which he played and sang the entire song, coming full circle with the outro. We debuted the acoustic version at a poetry reading I did with Tim Liu, Paul LaTorre, and Scott Wordsman, all from William Paterson’s MFA, at Cornelia Street Café in the Village. A few months later, Andrew and I did “Nazi Driver-Genius” with his full backing 5-piece band at music venues The Delancey and Knitting Factory Brooklyn.
So, not only did “Nazi Driver” open me up to a looser rhythm-based approach to composing poems, but it also brought me back to my original love for songwriting. While I have always been a rusty wannabe blues guitar player, the existential paranoia inflicted by the pandemic got me to get real about my pursuit of the form—I love writing poems, interviewing poets, reviewing books, and occasionally sending work to editors I respect. I’m also sitting on at least 2 different manuscripts of poems, one chapbook-length and one full-length, but if I was being honest with myself, especially as Gil Scott Heron has long become an important part of why I feel okay with identifying with the title of “poet,” I decided that the artifact I most want to produce would be a musical album. That, combined with my intent to take poetry to wider audiences, got me serious about creating 4-5 tracks as an EP of “Blues Poems” that I either composed myself after getting better with the guitar, or on which I collaborated with friends. It’s called “bro,” has lyrical chops hopefully enough to earn your and Tim Liu’s admiration, and you’re the first officially hearing about it, which I’m delighted to share will be out in the next few months.
Read Karthik Purushothaman’s “Cold Noodles” alongside “Nazi Driver”
Karthik Purushothaman comes from Chennai, India, and lives in New Jersey after the MFA at William Paterson University. Karthik has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prizes, once for Best New Poets, and was a special mention in the wonderful Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He has had poems in Boulevard, Hyperallergic, Rattle, Subtropics and The Margins, among others, and has also had interviews and commentary in The Writer’s Chronicle (forthcoming), Poetry Foundation, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Baffler, Jacobin, The Wire, and elsewhere. He blogs at https://alienencounters.substack.com.