In poetry (and elsewhere), among the most common rules are things like “show, don’t tell” or “be concrete, not abstract” – but then there are subtler ones, more like superstitions, that are trickier to capture with one succinct phrase. Such as:

There should not (or cannot) be much distance between ‘the speaker’ and the author.1

These can also be fine, but they’re usually issued somewhat randomly or instinctively, without clear reasoning. These kinds of rules are mostly received rather than arrived at or intuited. Another way of saying it is that they get repeated as part of some received theory of “good” poetics, though it’s unclear whose poetics, or how and why the rules came to be. When applied automatically, we’re subconsciously saying that we’ve come to some consensus about a unifying and “solved” theory of poetics, even though that’s not really the case.

The important thing is that craft advice is never entirely objective, but it’s also not entirely subjective. There are certain “features” of being a human that eventually entail certain kinds of poetic techniques and how well we receive them; this is the idea that when we say “poetry” or “poetics,” we forget we mean “human poetry” or “human poetics,” though the existence of one kind of system does not necessarily preclude all others. (Some other kind of creature may have a poetry or poetics that we find distasteful or incompatible with our own sense of embodied language or expression, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the other poetic system is not internally consistent or aesthetically generative, let alone that it can’t even exist – we can pretty easily theorize an “alien poetics” that we might be able to map or deconstruct without being able to experience it ourselves).

Craft advice can only be helpful and unrestrictive with the above in mind – and when the person giving it has a coherent ethos (or consistent personal philosophy of poetics) behind how they approach the “subjective” part. At their best, a personal poetics is not just an arbitrary set of preferences or things we’ve chosen to do. They are a way of expressing things entailed by the person expressing them.2

In other words: If we agree with “show, don’t tell,” then we should be able to rephrase that idiom in our own language and use it in a way that agrees with the rest of our poetics – and to avoid cliché, we should actively rephrase it whenever we issue it as advice to someone else (i.e., we should demonstrate our own work whenever we give advice).

With all this in mind, I’ve been trying to pin down a new way of thinking about my own approach to poetic craft that is hopefully original and largely in agreement with all the miscellaneous writing rules I’ve received and generally try to follow. I’ve started thinking of it in terms of three major concepts:

Here are a couple other quick sketches along this line of thinking:

A blank page for a poem as being like an empty circuitboard with various components to arrange and wires to attach, with the goal of channeling an emotional current through a complete, formal circuit so that when someone reads it, everything “lights up” (or “the overtones resonate”).

A carefully chosen word or set of connotations across lines in a poem as being like a pinch harmonic on an electric guitar plugged into an amplifier – an overtone is possible for certain notes if struck the right way, and importantly, not really possible for “every” note (or at least, it remains undiscovered how to articulate every possible overtone for every possible note while casually playing guitar).

These concepts work for me because they don’t try to argue that how poetry works is fundamentally different from how anything else works: Poetry is a part of reality, so it obeys similar fundamental rules (the objective part), and things that harmonize with or have a congruent understanding of those rules tend to transcend times and cultures, or are recognized as “doing something,” whether good or bad (the subjective part). On a more personal note, I’m interested in reunifying art and science (or spirituality and materiality, more broadly) by identifying where they share the same language, both in my theorizing and in my actual art.

For me, this brings some context back to a lot of craft rules that have lost some explanatory power. To me, it’s not that “show, don’t tell” is wrong, but that it’s downstream of a poem’s harmonics and circuitry. To illustrate:

When we’re editing a poem, we’re often trying to improve the poem’s harmonics, sonically and semantically speaking. We edit out filler words, we make sure the sounds of words near one another flow in the right way, we remove unnecessary repetition, and so on. In poetry, those things often dampen the resonances we’re really trying to draw out. What’s interesting though is that in normal speech, filler words and workarounds work the same way but by design – often, they actually serve a purpose there.

We’re trying to communicate our message and our social understanding of reality at the same time, and the latter is often more important than the former (we want to express ourselves appropriately, not grandstand, or wax poetic, or be overly cryptic, etc.) We still do strike on deeper resonances in normal speech without trying to though, and when we do, people often point it out, letting us know that it’s unusual (e.g., we stumble on a novel insight and phrase it well, or make an accidentally great pun, and someone says, “Hey, I like that!” – or someone repeats what we said out loud just to feel how it feels, to weigh it in their own mouth).

In normal speech, our purpose is usually to deliver the basic, normal, or consensus “tone” of what we’re saying. We want the main thing, the message, to be the main thing. We want perfect control of the ambiguities in whatever we say, and we don’t want the way we say something to be louder than what we’re saying.

In poetry, our goal is often the opposite: we are trying to make the medium louder than the actual message. We’re trying to create microtones, undertones, overtones on top of or beneath the message by carefully arranging words and sounds. In fact, it’s often perfectly fine if the “consensus” signal gets completely drowned out by the hidden resonances we draw from it.

So, the short version of “show, don’t tell” that obeys these poetic ideas might be something like: “showing amplifies overtones, telling dampens them.”

As another short example, we could think of “be concrete” as downstream of harmonics, circuitry, and symmetry. Harmonically, we could analyze how concrete vs. abstract a part of a poem “should” be in terms of: does this amplify a coherence pattern I already have going, or does it distrupt it? Does it amplify the harmonics or does it add noise? Is it legible or organizationally useful or not? Does it add an additional layer of compression onto the line that can’t otherwise be achieved, or not?3

In terms of symmetry, we could say, “a poem should not be too abstract,” or, “a poem should feel balanced,” or, “being concrete adds weight to a poem, being abstract takes it away, and between those two poles, a good poem should feel balanced in the palm of the mind of the reader.”

The goal of all this for me is not to invent a bunch of new rules, it’s just to give the old rules an underlying physics that feels intuitive rather than dogmatic.

So just for fun, here’s a bunch of creative commentary on poetry “rules” about which words are “good” vs. “bad” to use in a poem, from the lens of circuitry:

Nouns: Central; each is a core component in each line of a poem, and in the machinery of a poem as an energetic circuit.

Verbs: Also central; structural channels between nouns, what “links” components together; partial outlines of the flight path a reader takes through a poem– the flight path of consciousness through space, its shape and contour; making that shape visible and tractable is definitionally what poetry “does,” and what it’s a technology for.

Adjectives: Very defensible, often generative (when concrete, object-oriented, primary details) rather than detail-oriented (e.g. “the cat” feels more elemental than “the stinky cat”); useful for modulating the prosody or meter between other parts of a sentence; often, adjectives are like the dongle you plug into a newer-generation iPhone to make it aux cord compatible again – functional, but too many stacked together can often dampen the harmonics of a line (i.e., you can stack many dongles together and the aux cord will still work, but the sound quality will deteriorate, there will be decoherence, interference patterns, etc.).

Prepositions and Articles: Mostly secondary channels or interfaces between nouns and verbs, also secondary channels or interfaces used to control the “current” of a line (but not as potently as adjectives, usually).

Conditionals and Operators: Potent, but to be used sparingly (e.g., only, always, never); they often have a global effect on a poem, and can become hacky; a cheap way to evoke an emotion when a line isn’t doing it on its own; can have a different effect when “wrapped” or “embedded” in a subjective register (e.g., if a character speaking in a poem says “always,” it carries some distance or irony almost automatically instead of it objectively meaning “always” – the scope of “always” is contained to one element of the poem, one speaker’s perspective: a “meta-always”).

Adverbs: Hard to justify structurally, often a flourish; tertiary potential for modulating current; most useful when novel or otherwise unexpected, when able to introduce the illusion of a complete component into a line that otherwise wouldn’t be able to fit into the harmonic or structural pattern already established.

Exclamations and Interjections: Underused! Risk of becoming emotive “tells,” but have potential as color, modulation, directional switches (topographically speaking: an inversion of a poem’s current into another direction).

Interrogatives: Often very natural? But too many risks being gimmicky; poem needs to both “see” and “not see” (balance and symmetry), so it’s hard to make a complete poem out of all “not seeing” questions (an interrogative is a concrete negative space).

I have more to say on all the above, but ideas still percolating – just had to get this out in the world before it felt too stale.

Immediately, we can see that “art” is different than either “poetry” or “creativity,” and not just in their literal senses. “Art” is an aesthetic object or practice; “creativity” is a deeper structure, an expressive principle or modal force behind an aesthetic object or the practice from which it—partly, but not entirely—arises (i.e., every creative action produces an aesthetic object, but not every aesthetic object is automatically “art”).

In the most permissive sense, we could say that the actions, events, or processes by which aesthetic objects emerge, whether the objects are held to be “good” or not, automatically and tautologically are art (again, whether we find the actions or the processes which—in part or in whole—give rise to aesthetic objects “good” or not). Great art can still emerge from bad technique; great technique can still make bad art.

In other words, “poetry” entails “art,” but “art” does not necessarily entail “poetry.” Likewise for “poetics” and “creativity,” where both “poetics” and “creativity” are generative forces rather than objects.

“Creativity generates art,” but it feels less correct to say that “poetry generates art,” even if we interpret it very generously to mean, “Ontologically speaking, the force of poetry is what generates aesthetic objects and processes.” (More bluntly, “poetry” is a higher value to aspire to than “art” is, though I mean that in the sense that any artist of whatever medium is capable of creating poetry within that medium.) Counterintuitively, it feels more correct to say that “art generates poetry,” in a non-encompassing sense (i.e., “The practice of art can sometimes create poetry,” where poetry means roughly, “the art of arts”).

This tells us that poetry is not a subset of art, though it does depend on “creativity,” in a limited sense. Poetry emerges through or with creativity, but that creativity can be directed or undirected (i.e., a person’s directed creative practice can yield “poetry,” but we can also speak of a place as a “poetic landscape,” which is either undirected or is directed in only a very different sense of the word. Ultimately, “poetry” comes to mean any abstract aesthetic object of which a “poem” is only a single written example—where the abstract object is itself a process or action or set of events whose intention or meaning we can sense or detect but whose intention, if it exists, we can’t prove).

We sometimes use our creativity for art, but we always use art to search for poetry. In a sense, it is maybe more accurate to say that “poetry” is more of an abstract ethical object or category that can only be beheld aesthetically. Aesthetics are subjective, as is art; creativity is objective, as is “poetry.”

Finally, “poetics,” then—despite sounding more abstract than “poetry”—are actually more concrete. We can think of poetics as a homogeneously coherent form of creativity, a creativity that is all signal—so it is not “creativity” that really gives rise to poetry, it is “poetics.”

The irony is that at the end, while this feels the most solid and makes the most sense, “poetics” do not really “give rise” to poetry; they are simply the coherence pattern that we experience through our ability to sense some range of play within or between the rules of a language system (writing or any other creative practice), temporarily offering us a glimpse at one of poetry’s many “surfaces.”

So in a way, poetry is only subjective from our perspective; the rules which constitute it are real.

Another way of saying it is that poetry is either what is “sublime” or a space that has been delineated to temporarily contain the possibility of the sublime—and by merely or temporarily containing the possibility of the sublime, it proves the sublime is more than a possibility, that it actually exists (because in what world could the sublime be “contained”? That it can and we recognize that it can proves that it is, in fact, sublime—and being both transcendent and containable at once is entailed by the very possibility of the subliminal: in it’s perfection, it can do the impossible; is a miracle, a paradox).

How does it feel to separate art, creativity, poetics, and poetry in this way? And what might it imply about the possibility of “alien poetics” (which we might grasp, even if we may not be able to grasp “alien poetry”)? I think the above is all just fancy linguistic groundwork for a much bigger issue I’ve been grappling with, and a recurring theme of the poetry collection im working on, “biological pilot.”

On the news recently, amid the reveal that UFOs or aliens might exist, or that LLMs might be conscious, or that plants might feel pain—and meanwhile, that humans are somehow uniquely on the brink of self-destruction (nuclear war, capitalism, environmental catastrophe, global economic collapse)—there is something alienating about the entire philosophy being expressed even if some of the issues are real. It is in a way ”self-alienating,” which feels almost like an ontological sin. It’s a very solipsistic view that puts humans at the center of the universe in an extremely incoherent way, on one hand; on the other, even making a counter-argument against it feels partly self-alienating (since I am a human myself, I resonate with many of the terrifying theories when I engage with them; this means they are coherent enough to resonate, but they are not poetic; in a way, they are “anti-poetic”).

Regardless, it feels as though mankind is on an inevitable collision course with “other minds” of some kind, whether that means AGI placed into a body with memory and sensory inputs, or extraterrestrial beings with physical forms like us (and if so, they prove physical space travel is possible, and they essentially prove that there are other ontological positions than our own in a way that doesn’t feel refutable or ignorable anymore), or trans-dimensional beings that are non-physical but can appear physically (essentially, what we might’ve called “angels” or “demons” in the past, and whose appearance would essentially “reveal” certain aspects of reality that we had started to assume had been structurally or cosmologically necessary to conceal).

Even if the vast majority of these concerns end to be pure conspiracy theory, technology has advanced enough that at some point, we will essentially prove from first principles that other things do have “minds” and we are not the center of the universe (or even central to our own subjective experience). We will be reduced to “biological pilots” rather than “humans,” which opens the door to either transhumanism or extinction, in my view (two possibilities that are so existentially terrifying that both feel almost equally bad).

In light of all that, what I’ve been asking myself is: How can I continue to (or at least justify, from whatever small percentage of my experiences that could be reconstructed scientifically) embrace an affirmative or positivist ontology? How do you look at so many different narratives of impending apocalypse and the impossibility of individual agency and “yes, and” it all?

I’m interested in this question not because I despair or even fully believe any of these narratives, but because now, everyone on the planet (or close to it) has to face these same, omnipresent existential issues. You can see it on a macroscopic scale that across society, many of the ethical principles and cognitive pillars all of us are familiar with are deteriorating, and as they do, the experience of being alive in these times becomes worse and worse—and yet our best and brightest can’t seem to stop it (or if they are trying to stop it, they’re not telling the rest of us about it very clearly). And at the same time, contemporary poets seem ill-equipped to respond to or refute these issues.

I think my subconscious answer to all this in poetry has been that having an ontological position entails some measure of existential anxiety, if it entails some measure of consciousness (as in panpsychism). In a way, that anxiety also implies the presence of some degree of emotional feeling, and of inter-ontological empathy and communication, which can be transformative. So regardless of the terror everyone feels, we can be rationally optimistic about even the worst case scenario: If evil things are coming, we can still change their course through empathetic communication, and by understanding that if their “evil” is our “good” and vice versa, then our positions have enough related correlates to be mutually transformable, perhaps without abandoning our own humanity in the process. And interestingly, we can start practicing now—by turning to the countless “aliens” we have around us on earth (other humans, animals, plants, insects—perhaps even non-biological minds and inert objects).

My hope for “biological pilot” would be to capture this anxiety and terror and transform it into curiosity, but not too naively or in an unethical way. I’d like to build myself a better framework for the future, powered by optimistic, grateful, faithful curiosity that I can actually ground in coherent language, so that I can share it with others, creating a positive ripple effect (or at least a rebalancing effect). I find this belief better than, “Oh no, were doomed,” though when I’m thinking less poetically, I often do think we might be—I’m just not willing to admit that it’s a certainty or that positive transformation is no longer possible. And also: it’s an extended example of extreme attention as pure love that can transform things. Maybe even inter-dimensional beings are scared, and maybe we have enough language to be able to comfort them, and who knows what effect that might have on reality?

Care, curiosity, and the full participation of our embodied position is not contingent on any of the apocalyptic circumstances we live with today; instead, they are constitutive elements of having an ontological position. I think this is a crucial insight: Many minds and systemic forces have already taken a lot away from us, but our embodied attention is the one fundamental freedom that can’t be taken away. It can become distracted or permanently damaged or irretrievably broken, however, which is maybe a worse potential fate than death (this is what “hell” is essentially, a place where body, mind, and attention have been hijacked to focus only on their own infinitely intense suffering, forever). We need cognitive and spiritual security to have a chance, and poetry is one technology that can help us do both.

Each of these are a bit unusual, designed to be difficult or formally frustrating in some way to shake something loose. Hopefully one of them resonates—and if it results in something interesting, please share!

1. New Religion:

Imagine there is a new religion for this era that differs significantly from the ones currently on offer in both the East and West, one that is well-suited for our era and is perhaps an improvement on or synthesis of many ideas that have come before.

Write a short poem (10-12 lines) that encapsulates one complete, foundational tenet of this new religion, whether a lesson1 or a dense, compact allegory.2 Name your religion and use it as the title of the poem.

Just as Christianity’s main religious text has given us the “Biblical” register of tone and syntax, write your in a way that would engender its own new stylistic adjective3.

For a bonus prompt, write another short poem (in whatever style) from the POV of someone strongly opposed to and afraid of the growing influence of your new religion.

2. Manifestation / Memetic Warfare:

Write an explicitly hyperstitious poem.4

Since hyperstitious texts are explicitly magical in trying to manifest something from the imagination into reality, many use existing magical “tools” (symbols, motifs, codes, ciphers, number systems, etc.) to harness the psychic energy others have already invested in those tools, bending that energy towards new ends.

Make the scope of your vision as all-encompassing as possible, from minute to macrocosmic. Be as precise and detailed as possible to increase others’ ability to fully see what you envision and make it come true.

Since magic can be scarily effective, carefully consider the vision you want to come true and be cautious what you wish for (i.e., if you write about a vengeful or apocalyptic future, consider that what you wrote could be the very thing that brings it about; consider writing a compelling alternative instead).

Finally, make sure your vision begins from or incorporates our present reality in some way. Ground it in reality before expanding those conditions with a future of your imagining. The poem should illustrate how our present status quo will be transformed, transcended, or shifted out of.

3. Metaphysical Exposition:

Write a poem that offers or illustrates an unusual explanation for time—why it exists, how it came to exist, and/or how it works.

Include hints at how people’s usual relationship with time could be disrupted, evaded, or temporarily escaped via some loophole.

It can be written in any style (explanatory and direct, allegoral, metatextual, allegorical, etc.)

4. Word Portals (for a Suite Poem):

Skim through a favorite book on your shelf and find a “favorite” word you come across. Focus on that word for longer than you usually would and write your associations for 5-10 minutes. Focus on the “nature” of the word itself in isolation, and try to avoid getting pulled into memories and other loose associations. Write down any observations or insights that come to mind.

Write a short suite of lines (5-10 lines, maybe) using only what you wrote down and focus on using one specific aspect of the poetics, whether stylistic, rhetorical, figurative, sonic, whatever. (This exercise will result in a “suite” poem, with multiple numbered sections; this is the first section of it.)

Next, think more intentionally about the book and pick your favorite sentence, again thinking about the sentence in-and-of-itself. Follow the instructions above the same way to write another short poem (5-10 lines), but use a different poetic element or style to focus on than you did before. (Your goal is not to repeat any stylistic twists you use; keep using new registers, voices, and motifs until the exercise ends.)5

Next, do the same for favorite paragraph (5-10 lines), favorite scene (5-10 lines), and favorite chapter (5-10 lines). Finally, do the same for the book in its entirety (5-10 lines).

(If you’d like, write for a few minutes about the full series when you’re done and all the things it makes you think of.)

5. Numerological Erasure:

Before doing this prompt, agree up front to:

• Write a poem by hand and have it transformed by a fundamental force beyond your control.

• To allow your poem to transform and not to attempt to preserve the “original” in any form beyond what remains after completing the instructions.

• To exercise restraint and not read ahead in the prompt, but to relax and allow your poem to be acted upon.

• To try to learn something from whatever happens and to complete the prompt in full once you begin.

Once you agree, follow the instructions below.

1. Pick a number from 1-9 (don’t pick 0). You can also choose a well know complex like π, or refuse to choose a number yourself and let randomness choose it for you (e.g., using a random number generator set from 1-9). For whatever number you get, think about what that number means or signifies to you for a few minutes.

2. Spend five to ten minutes writing a short poem inspired in some way by that number and whatever it means to you, without editing or erasing anything you put down. Write slowly and intentionally, with lines and words as close to the same length and evenly spaced as possible (resulting in a centered block of text, like a section of brick wall).

3. When done, choose whether you’d like to erase the first and or last word or not. Do it or don’t. Then, proceed.

4. With the number you got, count forward in the sentence from the first word and stop (if you chose a complex number, use the first number in it; if you’d picked π , which is 3.14, you’d count forward three words). Erase that word.

5. Repeat this process. If your number was four, keep counting four words forward and erasing the fourth word (if you used π, you would first count 3 and erase, then 1 and erase, then 4 and erase, etc). However you do it, do this one word at a time, not all at once, until there is nowhere left to jump to in the poem. Finally, if you chose 1, erase your whole poem.6

6. Once you’ve finished, sit for a few minutes and relax into whatever you feel. Breathe, close your eyes, reset. Lean into whatever you’re feeling and consider what the number has done to your words.

7. On a new sheet of paper, write about the number again with whatever words are left, however you’d like. If there are no words left, write a completely new poem.

Even before taking Carson’s Basket Case class on “mad women” (which ends this Thursday), madness had been coming up a lot in my reading.

It started after Alice Notley died in May (rest in peace), when I picked up The Descent of Alette. I was blown away by it, but I also happened to be reading it alongside the Alejandra Pizarnik anthology Extracting the Stone of Madness after hearing friends talk about it.

That one floored me as well, though it was different; still, I couldn’t help but notice some strange similarities between the two collections. The connections only compounded when, looking for something else to read, I found a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems on my bookshelf and noticed it was also in conversation with the other two collections. Finally, I’d been looking forward to Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot and read that, which turned out to be a capstone.

As I digested all of the above (and loved all four, mostly, though I’ll get into nuances later), I was overwhelmed by how intimately connected they all seemed to me, despite being written by four women of very different experiences and time periods. Some of the themes and schema between them were so congruent that it was almost eerie—eerier still because there isn’t much evidence (that I could find, at least) of contact or exposure between these earlier poets despite being each others’ contemporaries.

I suspect Hood had already read the other three by the time she wrote Trauma Plot, and Notley had likely read Plath by the time she wrote Alette, but it feels less likely that Notley had read Pizarnik; A Musical Hell, the first of Pizarnik’s collections translated into English, wasn’t available until 2013.1 Meanwhile, Plath was writing from 1941 onward and died in 1963, and Pizarnik was writing from roughly 1955–1972—some overlap, but again, it feels unlikely they’d read one another.2

Regardless, the themes and motifs that united these poets were so consistent, it was like their collections were all written at the same retreat: how social institutions and ideologies (patriarchy, perhaps most of all) constructs and attempts to delimit female consciousness; how institutions do this through language, the same language with which women are expected to understand themselves; how trying to analyze or de/reconstruct that language fractures the self and leads to depersonalization and “madness”; and the life-or-death importance of reconstructing a more authentic self by reclaiming or reappropriating language (through poetry/art/creativity with varying degrees of formal and stylistic experimentation, and with mixed results).

Putting mysteries of influence aside, thinking of these books chronologically drew out a clear evolutionary arc that bent closer and closer to a theory of how we might escape some of these lingering ideological and linguistic traps. In light of other recent conversations I’d been having (about the viability of poetry and human-oriented writing in an increasingly technological, surveillance-oriented, and fascist-leaning world), it felt almost epiphanic to synthesize these poets’ ideas, as if I’d come across a real Truth with a capital T.

On one level, the thrust of this multi-part essay will be to trace the formal elements, motifs, and themes of each collection in relation to the poet who wrote them and their context, and to track how those elements “evolve” over time through the works of all four. As these concerns get worked and reworked through Plath, Pizarnik, Notley, and Hood, what started to emerge for me through the shifting ideology was an internally consistent philosophical framework (though complicated—in Plath, alongside the good, there was a nascent or proto-“white feminist” ideology and a poetics marred by not-so-subtle racism and self-destructive tendencies; by the time Hood reworked the terrain, the ideology had become much more inclusive, empowered, and possibility-affirming).3

There are a lot of stops on the way, but I’ll skip to the ending at which I’m hoping to arrive: Human-oriented writing (and poetry in particular) will remain viable and necessary, even in a post-AI world, for being a uniquely flexible technology of self-preservation. We are always at risk of being cut off from ourselves by institutional forces, language itself, and the traumas we go through. We experience these things as narrative ruptures (that is, as ruptures in the self); overtly narrative, linear, or “logical” writing can not “write through” these ruptures. Resolving them requires associative leaps and truly generative creativity at the level of language itself rather than narrative.

Here, poetry—defined in the broadest sense possible—becomes a powerful potential tool to help us reconstruct a self from our fragments, even if we remain at risk of being overcome by madness or neurosis.4 These poems often speak primarily to or about women, but they’re rife with other implications—about how to creatively evade the barriers that keep us from connecting with ourselves and others and how to live a better life.5

I’ve been thinking about this essay for months and still don’t have a handle on it; it is going to be messy and digressive. But I hope it will have some insight (or at least be entertaining) when all is said and done. In the next part, I’ll get into Sylvia Plath and we’ll go from there—but not today. Stay tuned!

Share generous interpretation

The poem isn’t about a specific situation; to me, it’s inspired by a specific, temporary, and dynamic context that often emerges in relationships between men and women1—whether those are relationships that are mutually attempting to be romantic, or platonic, or just collegiate—that creates anxiety and uncertainty about what the reasonable or “safe” boundaries of interaction are (either between the two people in the relationship or between the networks of people around the relationship vs. the people in it).

Since I’m the one who wrote it, it is unavoidably from a male perspective to some degree,2 but I tried to code it as fluidly as possible, as I think a lot of these threads are likely relatable in all kinds of relationships, between people of many genders. Form-wise, the title “vector”3 was a way of trying to depict relationships as being dynamic paths through time and space rather than strict or static categories governed by mutually agreed-upon emotional boundaries.

As a note about form: I like to use mathematical and scientific terminology in my poems mostly because these are fascinating topics that I (and maybe most poets I run into) don’t explore very deeply or understand very well, myself included. I used the form to try to illustrate some of the more complex ideas visually—the relationship and the poem itself moves in a jagged, diagonal line across the page; the em-dashes inside, outside, and between stanzas suggest both physical and emotional entanglement (and/or “submerged” or “embedded” stanzas and narratives that might lead to other places if followed), em-dashes as the paths of new subatomic particles “shooting out” of collisions between bigger particles and then quickly disappearing (as in experiments in particle physics), and so on.

Lastly, I put caesuras4 in both to show the awkward little gaps we all experience in social interactions even in our relationships that are well-established, and as a way to indicate that certain phrases can be read discretely or in other directions. Sonically though, the poem might read best or most smoothly as a long run-on and not necessarily pausing at the end of each line within each stanza, as I tried to make the syntax flow over the end of the line in most places (with each stanza a new “scene” or space the relationship enters).

Not finished but not too far from finished, hopefully! If anyone reads and feels compelled to comment, I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback—excited about the potential of this one so want to develop it a bit more. Enjoy!

It could be someone who is or has been a towering figure in your life, but it need not be. It could also be someone for whom you have affection but has always been a minor foil in your life; a cashier at a store in a city you used to live in who you never really knew but were always fond of seeing; a former crush who is now a fond but somewhat distant friend; a colorful extra in the background of your life you only saw once.

A secondary character in the story of your life, a memorable tertiary character, whoever — just pick someone with whom you’d be entering a conversational space you rarely enter.

What you say could be something you want “off your chest,” but again, it doesn’t need to be; it could be something smaller, important for being more important for the person to hear than for you to say.

It is not necessary to force yourself to say something that would require a superlative amount of courage, nor to say it to someone before whom you would first need to steel yourself. Instead, imagine you haven’t said anything because you were just doing anything else. It was never crucial; there was always still time; the right occasion never presented itself. Imagine that now — so suddenly — the occasion and context are become perfect. You see now that they always have been, though this detail does not disturb you.

In the perfect situation, the table set, you sit — you must. You must sit and write this person your important letter, right away.

Your only obstacle is you are a child, perhaps between six and seven years old.

Your mind wanders freely; outside calls you; both of your hands still tire easily. You have only partially mastered necessary motor skills. You are in a giant chair at the giant table, a blank expanse of white before you. Somehow, you want to write more than anything and would rather do anything else but do so.

Fortunately, you sense your parents, sitting in the chairs beside you. You can see their bodies only faintly — as if they might be made of daydreams. Their patient faces you see clearly: they feel no time, so they feel no pain. It is possible they are made of love. They are here to see you through this letter.

You have only the language you had as a child.

You have only the will to fill one page.

You have years to catch this person up on.

Now, like carving wood, you write.

You will tell them all there is to say.

Ryan1

It’s probably a bad sign, though, that Kill All Normies, written as recently as 2017 and hailed as a watershed book at the time, already feels outdated rather than prescient.

Kill All Normies is a recap of some of the major milestones of the online “culture wars” of roughly 2000-2017 (tiresome subject matter, no matter who's doing it and how), and it’s complete enough to serve as a rough map for those not already in the know. But for those of us among the chronically online (read: me), outside of a few interesting but tangential insights (the alt-right's growth strategy has been Gramscian, for example), there isn't a lot of substance here.

The moments Nagle selects are mostly there to support fairly narrow, specific, and disconnected claims rather than painting a broader picture or offering any sense of synthesis or clarity. The book tends to give the sense that a handful of unfortunate, semi-public individuals had their lives ruined by online mobs1 but neglects to sketch the cumulative effect of it all in enough detail to be particularly insightful or convincing. Mostly, the rhetorical strategy is centrism masquerading as heterodox leftism. It's bothsidesism with a generous helping of hand-wringing.

Nagle sketches (handily enough, I'll grant) the recent online events that have led to the political polarization we find ourselves in today. On its face, this is helpful, since internet artifacts are so ephemeral and have only become more so since this book was released. She also traces the rhetorical and ideological “genealogies” (a la Nietszche) of these different warring online factions—the major players of the alt-right vs. “alt-light,” the manosphere, SJWs and what she terms “Tumblr-liberalism,” the chan image boards from whence all dark memes emerge, and so on.

She does make a few interesting connections there as well, though they are mostly academic. The general thrust of it is that on the left, the organizing logic of materialism and class struggle have gradually been supplanted by an identitarian2 logic, which has ultimately weakened the left. And on the right, the organizing logic of classical conservatism has been supplanted by a more syncretic ideology that has co-opted the once-leftist aesthetics of transgression3 to gain enormous popularity. Still, strings of 50-cent words aside: Does anyone who spends a decent amount of time online and is even marginally familiar with or involved in contemporary politics need that explained? Certainly not in 2025 (and arguably, not in 2017).

Most frustrating about Kill All Normies is that Nagle’s best points feel speciously argued, her historical context methodologically shallow, and her “original” ideology and conclusions at best naïve (less generously, it feels like she is punching left for the pleasure of punching left, and often in the same way that a classical liberal or a centrist might punch left—punching left from the right, in other words, which undermines the book’s entire, if alleged, purpose).

Tumblr culture has engaged in puritanical in-group witch-hunts that have, on some level, damaged the left and distracted its would-be adherents from higher-minded purposes and more rigorous aims, yes—but is that really all it has accomplished? Are there really no unintended side effects or possibilities that have emerged out of the Tumblrization of our discourse that we might bent toward some more interesting end?

And yes, to some degree, some of the online machinations of the new right may have been in reaction to—and have come to be seen as more appealing in light of, perhaps—the excesses of the new left, themselves largely a result of a lack of intellectual honesty and/or philosophical rigor. But is the point really that the VC-backed, algorithmically lubricated, stochastic terrorism of the alt-right could've been avoided entirely if the new left—we're talking about a demographic composed primarily of 13-21-year-olds here if Tumblr is mostly to blame, bear in mind—had been less aggressive?4

On one page, the book will argue against elitism and pin the blame for our current discursive situation on the perils of over-valuing the pursuit of in-group social capital; on the next, it'll argue that the left should've protected more of its in-group social capital against, essentially, the barbarian hordes: the clout-seeking e-girls and catboys on Tumblr, cultural relativists like Judith Butler injecting relativism and deconstructionism into our college curriculum, and so on.5

Where’s the chapter on algorithms and social media gamification? Why no significant analysis of Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin? Of astroturfing and international cyber warfare? If we're concerned with bringing materiality and class consciousness back to leftism, where are the historical precedents and parallels about how and why countries get balkanized into a bunch of ethnostates (surely there's helpful scholarship on that)? Why rail against narcissism and solipsism sapping the left's organizing power if all you're going to give us is a hyper-individualist argument for going back to some old, more enlightened way of discourse (left mostly undescribed)?6

Culture moves fast these days, I get it, and it's hard to penetrate the fog of the online flamewar. Even so, we deserve a book on the online culture wars that treats them as the (historically predictable) symptom they are rather than some kind of first mover—and a book that stakes some clearer claims from the middle of the battlefield.

If we’re at war, which feels accurate to say, and from a class-conscious, materialist leftist perspective, war is sometimes unavoidable—though the book seems to hint that perhaps we might cut the Gordian knot and avoid war altogether if each of us would just do... something—all of this begs questions like: Could doxxing ever be ethical and necessary during digital wartime? What does doxxing look like on Twitter/Tumblr vs. on, say, 8chan? What about the ethics of a less extreme tactic, like leveraging social pressure to deplatform someone? Okay, now what about something more extreme, like live-streaming a mass shooting on Facebook?

After we have answers to some of those questions, here's another important one: does anyone really believe that the ideologies of both sides are, on some level, equivalent or interchangeable? Is anyone really prepared to claim that the alt-right (an organized, billionaire-funded, internationally coordinated neofascist movement) is just the mirror image of the new left (disorganized, not well-funded, with only limited international coordination)? Be serious, please.

We challenged each other to write sadder and sadder haikus every day, and despite the brevity of the form, it was pretty taxing, both creatively and emotionally—writing haiku has a way of focusing the mind, so after writing one, it was hard to break out of morbid meditation for the rest of the day.

All the same, I loved this little project and would recommend a healthy haiku exchange to anyone, regardless of their familiarity with or need to be faithful to the form. Also—at the end of this experiment, I learned something! The way J and I traded haikus, back and forth and in dialogue with one another, is already a traditional Japanese poetic form that dates back to at least ~1300. When two poets exchange a series of linked haikus, they are composing a renga.2

Without further ado, here’s what we came up with—until next year, National Poetry Month 🫡

If there’s a prompt in this without biting Carson’s prompt, it’s to try to write a looser, longer poem by stringing a bunch of responses to incomplete statements/questions together, all about one central subject. God is a fruitful one, but in theory you could wax poetically about any big topic (which I think I might experiment with; these prompts get you thinking a lot more automatically, which leads to interesting places).

If there’s a prompt in here, it’s to try writing a meta-poem in a similar way. Can you write a poem where every word is only one syllable? Or turn a list of rules and descriptions into a poem? Or bend some other guideline to result in a poem that works with very simple language?

Another day, another poetry draft. If there was a prompt behind this one, it was about inverting or elaborating on a cliché: if you can’t capture “lightning in a bottle,” what else can’t you capture or bottle that you wish you could?

Feel free to use your own stock phrase and fill with your own desires.

never liked playing games

collegiate, to learn to be a boy

full of joy and terror, a man who dreams

of disappearing in the forest

the archimedian in a bowtie

out of the stuck word

between two loops

like a path in a dream

I forgot I have been having

stand on the cliff until my skin is wind

it is so boring

dressing mystery

people aren’t kind

rarely knew though

still want to be the source of things

your spells smalled me

to four-legged end

that simplicity

before

Today, sharing one that came together in Mind Palace Poetry as a response to the God prompt.1 The essence of it is you start with a bunch of blank God statements or questions (e.g., “God told me…,” “God and I have an agreement…”, “I feel God…”, etc.) and you respond to them with whatever pops in your head, letting it take you somewhere strange.

Here’s mine, from July 2024-ish:

I don’t particularly like the movie Grosse Point Blank, but I like the idea of it—which is mostly the same way I feel about John Cusack, I guess? If he’s in the movie, he will improve it almost without fail. He’s not particularly flashy, but I appreciate him more as I get older.2 I tried editing this poem before and ended up not liking what I edited it down to, so I went back to the original and made way smaller changes.

Here’s the scene I think I was vaguely remembering when I first wrote this:

I’ll admit: on the one hand, I loved reading Context Collapse. I will also admit that stylistically, it was often very frustrating. For me, the history Ruby takes readers through is about as revelatory as all the hype promised. Where it didn’t succeed was as a great epic poem or a genre-breaking “new” or “revived” poetic form, despite what its marketing seemed intent to imply.2

The book’s central poetic conceit—that it is an epic poem or at least a “verse essay” disguised as a parody of an academic essay, or perhaps the other way around— falls a little too squarely into the “gimmick” trap it later deconstructs, unfortunately, and Ruby shoots himself a bit too much bail in the intro with all the who-can-say-what-a-poem-or-a-poet-even-is equivocation. Likewise, Ruby’s stance of “I’m parodying academic texts with this poem, but it’s a serious joke, and you should read it seriously as both a poem and an academic text” is a pretty transparent attempt to critic-proof a conceptual approach that straight up doesn’t work. All this is a bit of a bummer, since both the subject matter and the creative potential of the conceit seemed so intriguing from a distance.

These things aside, I resonated deeply with Ruby’s central arguments: that poetry might best be understood as a technological innovation, and that the ontological “purpose” of poetry3 is primarily ethical. Reading the second point was particularly refreshing, even if it seemed obvious, because after countless classes and workshops in recent years, I’m not so sure it is anymore.

The collision of poetry throughout the ages with other cutting-edge technological advances (through the written word, the printing press, and up to and including AI, LLMs, and even bioengineering and designer genetics) is the crux of Context Collapse, the most recent examples of which were particularly startling. They were also particularly easy to appreciate, because however much creatives instinctively resent technological innovation, I’ve resented the reticence to investigate any of it in a more methodical way. Often, the sentiments you’ll encountered are reactionary, without any real curiosity about how these developments will change what “being a human being” means, how they are already shaping our consciousness, how the momentum of these changes-in-progress will make them virtually inevitable to succeed, regardless of whatever resistance we might mount against them—and importantly, why none of this means human-created-and-oriented poetry is no longer worthwhile or necessary.

Ruby’s disclaimer that his “history of poetry” is incomplete feels a lot more genuine and in good faith than his creative disclaimers, and whatever incompleteness there is as he traces the origins of Western poetic forms has only inspired me to do some additional reading. I agree with the implicit argument: I’d like to have a more complete picture of the real, lost origins of the art form I love, and I’d like to examine whatever forgotten implications those origins have on whatever poetry I’m trying to write in 2025 and beyond.

Also: on some level, Ruby is right. Who am I to turn someone away from a “bad” poem when the guidelines for what constitutes a poem or a poet are so fluid—and when I myself have such an incomplete understanding of the medium’s conventions? I’m able to see the poetic merit of the Ashberys, Baudelaires, and Carsons of the world as well as the creative merits—and I’m being genuine here—of a poet like Rupi Kaur at the same time. Can’t Context Collapse have its own set of merits as well, even if they are presently lost on me? More pointedly, doesn’t Context Collapse have at least as much poetic merit as something like Kaur’s Milk and Honey?4

If this seems like an absurd comparison, know that I make it (partly) in jest—it’s just ironic, given some of the book’s arguments, that Ruby is so glib and dismissive in his assessment of Kaur’s work and where we should situate her in the arena of poetry’s digital transformation.5 Normally, these would be slight details, but in the context of a sweeping survey of watershed developments in poetry from antiquity to the information age, not addressing them head-on and with a little more nuance feels like a pretty significant oversight (one that could potentially call some of the scholarship supporting the book’s more substantial arguments into question).

To be clear, I’m not arguing that Kaur’s poetry is unusually “good”, that she’s innocent or guilty of plagiarism,6 or that she’s had an overwhelmingly positive effect on the world of contemporary poetry. The comparison is only to make a point. Whatever alleged crimes Kaur has been accused of committing against the poetry world writ large—that she has somehow cheapened the medium, that being an “Instagram poet” (or, God forbid, a “content creator”) is somehow creatively disqualifying, or whatever other arguments people will try to make—are vastly overstated. I also expect a serious cultural critic to notice those nuances, rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon to build rapport with some hip, imagined reader.7 8

It’s a little too easy to implicitly and dismissively frame yourself as automatically better, creatively speaking, than one of the most technologically influential and objectively successful poets of our time, regardless of whether or not you respect her—especially when your book is centered on the collision of poetry with technological capitalism while considering what remaining routes exist that we might take out of the labyrinth (Kaur’s career seems to hold some possibilities, here).

The unexamined flip side of this is that Ruby makes a passionate case that Gertrude Stein is actually the most accomplished and influential modernist of her era, a take as contrarian as the one above, albeit in a more elitist direction. Again, I’m not saying there’s not a case to be made, nor am I denying Stein’s impact or claiming Kaur can stand beside her as a stylist, but Stein has also written her fair share of poems that are only "readable or influential in the loosest sense of those words. Without caping for any one camp or fandom, one should take care when throwing stones from a glass house, even if you suspect your neighbors will turn a blind eye when you do it—but I digress.

All of the above are admittedly minor quibbles, and truthfully, nobody needs to stump for either Rupi Kaur or Gertrude Stein. All other things considered equal, Context Collapse is both concise and staggeringly broad, which makes it pretty difficult, as an author, to avoid every possible rhetorical or artistic trap as you unearth them all, so I leave this whole project with a willingness to be extremely forgiving.

I’m also aware that I’m forcing a connection here that I doubt virtually anyone cares to make, but I think it might be relevant to help adjust readers’ expectations. If you’re coming to this book for thought-provoking theories and heterodox history delivered in rapid-fire succession, Context Collapse will likely feel like an overwhelming success. If you’re coming to it expecting the first great epic, conceptual hybrid poem in the first third of the 21st century, you may be sorely disappointed.

For the informed reader, there is a ton to like here as well as dozens of avenues for further reading. For my part, I will still be recommending this to many a poet out there (though I already dread the discourse that will ensue).9

When you jot a lot of them off this way and consider them all together, the haiku almost starts to feel like a new form. It’s the American haiku, the conversational haiku, the meta-haiku.

Here’s the latest batch:

kamilla [,] kyle

I hope that one of them wins

if you know, you know2

We should hide a fake

idol soon, to mess with all

the other people…3

Plots and schemes and crimes—

the only way to get by

in Survivor land4

it is eight o’clock

I heard that it is starting

it’s survivor time5

its diarhhea [sic]

just a very difficult

word for me to spell6

california girls

Shauhin cries by the campfire

a diva down bad7

I am tired and gay.

That is not a pass at you.

It is delirium.8

[picture: 5 of Diamonds, 7 of Clubs, 5 of Hearts with a halo on top]9

bi wife energy

as in: ryan christopher

aliapoulios10

a beta blocker—

it isn’t donipan?

but more a godsend!11

Poetry was an oral practice long before the printing press—long before humans had even developed written communication systems. In that context, the relationship between audience and poet was clearly delineated1 but also extremely unmediated. To be a poet2 was to tell a community’s stories and essentially practice divination within very specific contexts.3 There would’ve been some agreed-upon pragmatics (e.g., “Please remember the names of important people from our shared history correctly”) but likely far fewer formal constraints or critical expectations. The proto-poet’s social contract, so to speak, with the proto-audience was basically one clause: deliver to the community both stories and access to the divine, reliably and on demand.4

The legal metaphor is a little hinky though,5 because it implies an exchange of capital,6 a framework that falls apart pretty quickly here. To be a good audience for these poets, you basically just had to show up, but what you got out of doing that (i.e., God’s divine light) was clear. But if a poet can deliver the divine (in some form)7 on demand, what could they possibly receive in return for it? An extra barbecue rib for a rousing performance? A pat on the back from one of the same four or five people they see every day?

I’m being a little facetious; I’m sure the job of prehistoric poet had at least some material and vibe-based benefits, even without Rupi Kaur-level fame. Overwhelmingly though, it was a different relationship, one with actual, existential stakes. Recording the stories and memories of an entire community without writing anything down is no small task, let alone distilling and synthesizing it into wisdom or reciting it in an entertaining or mnemonic way. They might’ve lived on the social outskirts on a day-to-day basis, but as soon as someone died, they had to become the center and answer the unanswerable questions. Essentially, they had to say something that would hold society together.

In 2025, with our relationships mediated by technology and remote work and all of our social structures in an uncontrolled free-fall, real community is still a matter of survival, though it feels harder to come by. Living within walking distance of six to eight friends (in LA!) has been a boon, which Lily deserves props for making the most of by setting a standing time and place for us all to meet each week at HiTops to watch Survivor.8As an adult, I’ve found “community building” mystifyingly hard and have looked for ways to do it more capably (though you can’t really do community; you participate in it through reciprocity with other people).

Touching grass, reaching out more, and rediscovering poetry, in particular, has all been a good start, though online classes sometimes still feel slightly distanced. Making art with/for other artists is thrilling and fun, but even the most supportive spaces will always activate the ego slightly. Mostly, this is no problem unless it’s your only outlet; in a sense, sometimes you want to play a pick-up game instead of entering a tournament.

“Playing” with your friends in a free, low-barrier way that involves actually making something feels, to me, like an elixir. In the haiku game, there’s no winning or losing. Everyone’s a “poet”—or else we are all realizing maybe no one ever was.

😎

I’m hidden, immunity

on the line—only question:

will the lock open?

biological

pilot by ryan

aliapoulios

kids on Charlie Brown

all have bisyllabic names

not good ( for haiku :( )

I am not a poet

but I know how to count on

my fingers for this

count on your fingers

but even more worthwhile

count upon your friends

this is in cursive

I did not print until

public school, so weird

Hecatoncheires

the unwanted children grope

for air from earth’s womb

survivalism

simulated in Fiji

many such cases

just one germ can spoil

the hermetic barrel of ale

(see: humans, our world)

this pen is too much

oh no! I wrote pen and is

next to each other…

Jeff Probst is Tom Nook

he is a colonizer

and landlord (I bet)

Jeff Probst is sixty-

three years old but looks younger

than I do. That’s fucked!

Lagi, Civa, and

Vula. Seems like tribes are fake

trying to follow

hitops is a pun

about restaurant tables

hitops is a pun

about canvas shoes

hitops is a pun

about being on top

of a really high

tower while smoking

a joint

hitops is a pun

about being stoned while

topping your partner ❤️

it is crazy that

I went this long not knowing

hitops was a pun

David the stuntman

living in his mom’s front yard

scuba dives all day

no more haikus please

I’m way too tired for this

it’s not even nine yet

The game: Bring a mini-notepad and a pen with you the next time you go out. One person writes a haiku commemorating or capturing some aspect of the night or the moment you and your friends are experiencing. When they’re done, they pass the pad and pen to the right to the next person. That person reads the haiku out loud, then writes their own. When they’re done, they pass it again, the next person reads it, and so on.

On some poetry nerd shit, the beautiful thing about this game is that it both celebrates and subverts the haiku as a poetic form.3 Since the poems written in this game have to be off-the-cuff (you can’t “spit a written”, so to speak), whoever plays has to effectively retrofit the haiku to be more fluid and better-suited to the constraints of English.4 Overall, we followed the typical 5-7-5 rule and ignored a lot of the other conventions (though we often did follow the haiku’s little-known kireji convention, if only by accident).5

To illustrate the possibilities of this game, below are the unedited notebook pages of our—Ryan, Lily, J, and April’s—haikus. In case any of them are hard to read, I’ve transcribed them below as well.

Happy poeming 📝

green beer Irish yuck

Guinness beer revolution

we’ll taste the rainbow

—Lily

they pour strong drinks here

Buffalo Trace is top shelf

booze. wowie zowie

—Ryan

luck of the Irish

it makes you want to be drunk

blurred vision regret

—J

never enough booze

on a day you didn’t choose

always more to lose

—J

Saoirse, Orla, Maeve

Siobhan, Cillian, Aiden

say these names out loud

—Lily

merrily, and then

reluctantly, do we trek

to the next hot pub

—Ryan

black coffee, Irish

actually that has Baileys

still I do like them

—Lily

after three glasses

the troubles awake tonight

our past and present

—April

transcribing letters

and other conversations

in a vinyl booth

—Ryan

Lily’s Jameson

hat is upside down today

St. Patty’s, baby

—Ryan

the Drawing Room couch

old popcorn, really strong mixed drinks

you only need two

—Lily

damn you, Sean Baker!

union-busting piece of shit!!

Anora was mid

—Ryan

I liked Anora

Mikey Madison was good

I hate you Sean Baker

—Lily

Sean Baker the type

of guy who thinks the dancers

actually like him

—Ryan

suck these nuts ya hoe

I critique the world

because it all sucks!

—J

we totter onwards

spinning, swaying, left jolted—

say, “let’s fucking go”

—April

“you are not a ho—

even if you were a ho

I would still like you”

—Ryan

Grays, once nondescript, were sharper now, humming against one another. In them, he sensed—felt—the inevitable strain warping the face of the water to ripples. The surfaces of things were coming clearer now, giving way to what trembled beneath. Images floated from the depths, a register of memories: swimming underwater in a luminous pool and giving his ghost to the chlorinated water, watching it rise in a discretion of bubbles. The surrounding blue was pure saltwater taffy, drawn and quartered between pistons; he’d seen it as a child, through confectionary windows in Michigan’s northern summer towns. Below the dance, synaptic and alive, of light split through the ceiling’s ripples.

Brother was now in over his head, holding his breath with less effort than anticipated. From within, the ocean struck him as an infinite and empty ballroom. He could see no fish. In deliberate rhythm, he walked against the tide, comforted that, even transformed, the physics of the world remained. Make the Iceman proud, he thought wryly. Cold exposure. The ultimate breath hold.

At a once-unimaginable depth, the salt stopped burning his eyes. Brother still felt no urge to breathe, however great the temptation to let the ocean in, the idea pulsing around his mind as the tide anchoring his feet. He listened for his heartbeat, eyes turned skyward. The sun would rise to its occasion soon.

In the thirty (or so) forsaken minutes he estimated left in his existence (assuming his lungs could hold that long), Brother would stand and wait, shouldering billions of gallons inside the steady thrum of the deep. He planned to abide, in his final moments, in peaceful acceptance—interrupted only by his thoughts: Are lungs even lungs if they don’t breathe?

Brother began to count to still himself. He counted sixty Mississippis, internalizing the rhythm, the space between the instances. As the count entered his body, he kept it quietly, saving the numbers, turning to his heart. Some six weeks prior, when he’d come to Los Angeles—in another life, before the world had inverted—he’d sit in the glow of his computer screen watching the lecture of a jazz musician. In music, the teacher explained, the sparsest rhythm the human brain could still interpret as predictable was around 33 fewest beats per minute. Beyond that limit, the structure appeared to collapse into randomness.

After another minute, Brother had counted 27 beats, unable to stop his lips from curving upward. Though his skin could hold no temperature, he felt himself warming. The water had increased one tenth of a degree, he knew; the sun was close now—but that wasn’t it. It was an alien rhythm, unexpected. A nearby presence. Another heartbeat.

The shadows sharpened.

His own rhythm sped and swelled without eclipsing the visitor, the dance evoking a slow war drum, an auditory hallucination. For the first time since his soul had been siphoned from his carotid, Brother felt a familiar tinkling through the numbness in his chest: fear. He felt it nearby, frozen in the water, at a glacial eight beats per minute, before he saw it: white and undulating, nose-first out of the darker water, its grin a crag of broken needles glimmering in relief against eyes blackened by life in an abyss. Brother passed through them, connecting to the creature before him, as his humanity descended back into his body.

Great white . . .

The words flitted through and vanished, banished by an opposing consciousness, the one that insisted on its own true and secret name. After dragging them numb against the ocean floor for hours, Brother hadn’t realized: his feet had begun to bleed.

The shark twitched only once before hurtling ballistically at Brother, incisors bared, who raised his arms instinctively and caught—impossible!—the cone of the beast’s nose, his eyes dilating as the animal drove him backwards, his heels tracing their thrashing in a pair crooked trenches. Even as the creature’s teeth needled his hands, sending up thin crimson ribbons like dark prayers and inspiring a common bloodlust, Brother’s strength surprised him. With a flick of its head, the creature’s spine whipped through the resistance, turning his body fishlike and jerking Brother from the ground to lock him into a death spin.

A polyrhythm snaked through his skull, slower than the human ear could detect:

DUM-da-DA-dum-DUM-da-DA-dum.

Brother felt the sinew in his side split as the shark’s jaw found purchase under his arm, driving its appetite through flesh and rib and lighting up whatever remained there of a nervous system. The morning grays were now transforming to the reds and greens of nausea and rage. A panicked chant echoed inside him—I’m going to die, I’m going to die—until Brother’s teeth cut through his gums, coming in to quiet thought. As though piloted, he wrapped his arms around the giant fish trying to buck him off and sank his fangs above its eye where a turbulent vein, he knew, was hiding, puncturing the rubbery surface.

At once, the marriage of tooth to blood turned Brother’s world dark, his energy suffusing the giant fish who now subdued, knowing it was too late. His inner landscape unravelled psychedelically before Brother’s mind’s eye—decades of scrounging, of fluttering below the surface, of never resting—of once watching with something like curiosity as what Brother called a Whale blotted out the light above—of a summer’s day tearing the thigh from a child floating on a foam board, spitting her her out again to die for her sour taste as her parents swam frantically to save her . . . but there was more.

As Brother’s veins filled with ancient blood, the shark’s years seemed to unspool in reverse, his cold killer heart softening slightly as its psychic heft began to transform—through blank certainty and youthful determination and every tone between—before settling into a fetal shape, a squirming serenity, a seventy-year-old memory: the moment before he was pushed in the surf to devour his siblings as his mother swam away.

Around the limp body, drained of its lifeblood, the ocean was imbued with a holy glow. The sun had risen, and to Brother’s surprise, he remained uncooked by the water’s magnification. He had still not yet taken a breath. Never again would he need to.