Red Epic

by Joshua Clover

Red Epic invents a volatile poetry for a world on fire, written to illuminate the wreckage of the most recent gilded age. Leaping levels from global systems to street fights and back again, accompanied by a Top 40 soundtrack full of Robyn and M.I.A., it remixes utopian hope and revolutionary antagonism. Lauded by sources from Judith Butler to Entertainment Weekly , Joshua Clover 's poetry has received multiple honors including a Village Voice book of the year. He has written four books and contributed to the New York Times , the New Yorker , and GQ ; his column "Pop and Circumstance" appears in the Nation . He teaches at the University of California Davis.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

84 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2015

About the author

Joshua Clover was an American poet, writer, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis, and revolutionary.
He was a published scholar, poet, critic, and journalist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages; his scholarship on the political economy of riots has been widely influential in political theory. He appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry and two times in Best Music Writing, and received an individual grant from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. His first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1996.

Reviews

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

’You walk out the door and you’re just like what’s up global underclass?’

[ez · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of those people who just manages to capture the feeling of the movement so well. rest in power professor clover, see you in class on the other side of the barricades.

“it’s just this

it’s coming out again night after night more of us
than there are of them it’s saying no
to every deal remember nothing
belongs to you because
nothing belongs to anyone”

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Spring Georgic" is a shamanistic text with a fascinating magic: "to say it is a new era is to say | it has discovered a new style of time | we do not do this in language | but first in terrain we have not chosen and do not yet | understand | language meets us there and must be cajoled | into open air | by dangling old forms | in their wrack and wreckage" -- so this triadic, "open field" stanza (un-representable in this format), out of Williams, is just such a "dangling old form," I take it, trying to intervene upon the Unconscious of two texts about capital that Clover perceives as having divided up the long from the short Twentieth Century: these are Benjamin's Arcades Project and Bachelier's Theory of Speculation. We see in this techne a very old theory of poetry -- poetry as a magic, trying to enter the mythographical slipstream of culture.

Clover is a theorist (and a political activist), and his déclassé tone and magisterial grasp of culture ("I speak of course of Mayakovsky" -- I suppose the nervous elision of commas in this line undercuts the tone a little bit) will strike some as the thing farthest from poetry. But I enjoyed this book as an attempt to understand in the most rhetorically modest terms some of the theoretical fidelities ("What thoughts I have of you tonight Fred Jamison!") it has been Clover's habit to pursue.

[James Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Clover's poetry a bit cold, though erudite and linguistically intriguing. Not many modern poets, however, have the guts to be straight-up political in their work, and though Clover hasn't blended his political angst within the larger context of the Poem evenly, as in the work of Clayton Eshleman, I admire his attempt and will be paying attention to his work in the future. At this point in history we can't, as poets, sit in our ivory towers and write poems about birds without also mentioning the birds falling out of the sky.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read in months and months, and I've read some great books! Even the latest Tom McCarthy novel takes a lower podium position.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

Need to study more/become Francophile to understand.

The Fire Sermon
I. Red Epic
"...if Tender Buttons had been
written by capital instead of
OBJECTS FOOD ROOMS
it would have a single section
called LABOR POWER
though technical language is not conducive
to enlisting popular support
if Lunch Poems
were the poetry of the future
it would be all like
I communize this I communize that"

(In the city it was warmer)
"...
Something was having trouble ending my country the century my headache
...
We went to jail we were stupefied by what people did
Mostly to each other the minimum formula for materialism is
I didn't want to tell the story of the world but it kept making me
In the scattered forms of money we were feeling vernacular
End of empire waisted gowns and all this beauty listen hate
Grand narratives all you want but shopping is still a total system
Therefore total war or the adventure never begins"

[Leaving_Marx · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this collection, maybe not for everyone, but my perfect poet. The layers upon layers of references to pop culture, literary figures, communist theory, and social struggle. I've gone back to it a number of times and each time found new pieces, but best read with your phone open to explore references to unlock more meaning from them all. that is, unless your some brainy super-freak whose familiar with all the obscure stuff brought up.

[Malachy Moran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this collection from cover to cover in a single day. The writing style is wild, disjointed, and yet somehow coherent. The imagery is vivid, and the call to action is strong.

There were some parts of this collection that I found deeply moving and emotional. The only thing holding it back from five stars was that I also occasionally found it obtuse.

I will, however, be seeking out more collections from this author .

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned about Joshua Clover through reading his introduction to "Riot, Strike, Riot," which I though was really quite good.

This book, published by Commune Editions an imprint of AK Press, feels good to hold in your hands. There is a texture to it.

The poems are smart, militant and internationalist.

[EIJANDOLUM]

"The cold of electricity caught
In the warmth of thought

The enigma of presence
The autonomy of absinthe

O to be haunted
To be Lautreamonted."

Always.

"The poets are reading
Machiavelli when they should be
reading Clausewitz."

[Bill Shultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the language of anarchic revolution and the variant forms of cultural critique. I'm at the same time always suspicious of academic calls for perpetual bloodshed and talk of 'enemies' as some sort of pathway to utopian liberation.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hugely important way of thinking of writing politics and poetry. As part of this, there is always the desire to demand more; but, in reality, it does more than it needs already.

["Robert Ekberg" · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Stalins skägg sabbade för alla" (s. 41).

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems to read in the bright summer sun and feel revolution foment in the air.

[anon · Rating 5 out of 5]

going to probably re-read this several times in the next week

[Esma]

A list of my favorite poems: My Life in the New Millenium, Years of Analysis for a Day of Synthesis, Transistor, Haecceity, and The Red Posters.

[joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

rip JC

"...the minimum formula for materialism is
I didn’t want to tell the story of the world but it kept making me
In the scattered forms of money we were feeling vernacular
End of empire waisted gowns and all this beauty listen hate
Grand narratives all you want but shopping is still a total system
Therefore total war or the adventure never begins"

[Mills College Library]

811.6 C6479r 2015

[James Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totes brillz