The title above refers not just to the poem below (although that is unfinished), but to all of us collectively on our strange journeys through these mortal lives.
It could also refer to today’s publishing industry, which is facing serious threats, especially in the U.S. AI is perhaps the preeminent challenge and I don’t believe any of us, including American publishers, have fully grasped the possible magnitude of the looming transformation.
The fact that half of U.S. adults don’t read books, along with the fact that reading levels in American schools have been falling for years, are also stark warning signs.
Finally, there is the unwarranted clubbiness of the publishing world. I have had a successfully published novelist tell me that, no matter how good your work is, it will not be published without the right connections. That could well be true. There is also the new challenge of marketing your own work, as I am reluctantly doing with a new Substack account (and with Bluesky, X, Instagram, etc.). Social media eats up time that could be spent on the work itself, and I resent that. I also resent the trendiness American publishing endorses, from book covers that all look largely the same to subject matter du jour, such as every possible “queer” point of view. That’s why it’s good to see some occasional resistance, like this recent takedown of Ocean Vuong.
I could go on, and I will in a future post. But for now, let’s turn to the aforementioned work in progress. The poem below does not yet have a title. When it does, and when it’s been polished up a few more times, I’ll send it off to a literary magazine somewhere. Changes are excellent I won’t be paid for it, and probably won’t even receive a copy of the publication. This is another branch of American publishing, just as dismal as the book world. Here is the poem. For now, let’s call it “Someone’s Shoes.”
Try to imagine the drone’s descent
as it speeds on a diagonal toward
Gaza or Kiev or Tabriz.
Imagine these lines packed with explosives,
so that reading on the page or the screen
posed an actual hazard—would that help?
It’s doubtful. The problem remains: even if
we imagine we see, we don’t. Not really.
This is true for most of us, most of the time.
Yes, there are exceptions. Some people
understand things which lie beyond our ken.
They know they’re in its shadow. Death has
already launched, and any moment now their
lives, all they know and feel, could simply cease.