Last month my third book of poetry, Sociocide at the 24/7, was released by DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press. The University of Notre Dame book launch can be viewed [here]. The book was also recently featured in Dennis Cooper’s “Five Books I Read Recently and Loved” series.

“I guess it’s part of every country that if you’re proud of where you live and think it’s special, then you want to be special for living there, and you want to prove you’re special by comparing yourself with other people. Or maybe you think it’s so special that certain people shouldn’t be allowed to live there, or if they do live there that they shouldn’t say certain things or have certain ideas. But this kind of thinking is exactly the opposite of what America means.”
— Andy Warhol, AMERICA

One of several major inspirations behind Sociocide at the 24/7 was Warhol’s writings — fascinating meditations on both celebrity and death — that appear in his 1985 photography book AMERICA. At one point he compares tourists in Washington to tourists in Disneyworld. But, perhaps most memorable, is when he says he’d wished he had died after he was shot in 1968. Two bullets ripped through his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, left lung, and right lung. Juxtaposed with photographs of a cemetery in Lenox, New York is this quotation which opens Sociocide at the 24/7:

“I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment.'”

Upon learning this, I was doubly reminded of Baudrillard’s writings on simulacra and Disneyland, but also Disney’s somewhat failed mascot “Figment” — first introduced in 1983 as part of the “Journey into the Imagination” attraction at Epcot.

Many of the poems of Sociocide at the 24/7 attempt to expose the dangers of unchecked imaginations — especially the imaginations of American influencers and so-called entrepreneurs.

Today, video of Warhol’s gravesite can be livestreamed 24/7. The project is a collaboration between the The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam. The collaborative project has been called “Figment.”