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Red Epic
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.
84 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2015
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About the author
Joshua Clover
20Ìýbooks58ÌýfollowersJoshua Clover is a professor at the University of California Davis. He is a published poet, scholar, critic, and journalist.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 13, 2021
’You walk out the door and you’re just like what’s up global underclass?�
December 30, 2015
"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.
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.
June 23, 2016
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.
March 26, 2015
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.
October 25, 2021
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.
February 18, 2021
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.
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.
Read
February 14, 2022"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."
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."
August 19, 2024
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.
April 23, 2019
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.
May 15, 2021
"Stalins skägg sabbade för alla" (s. 41).
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May 22, 2015811.6 C6479r 2015
February 8, 2016
Totes brillz
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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