dialectical poetics: Paradise Now by Brian Ang

photo by Jeanine Webb


Reading Paradise Now is much like attempting to write a speech for an activist rally after you've drank 6 shots of espresso, minus the nausea.  Words zipping by, as if put together by search engines, in long paratactical lists that should never be made, yet here they are: the memorable pairings.  Much more so than images born from language's accidental children, these are concepts that disjoint and persuade.  In fact, I think I have dreamt these poems, the subconscious enumerating, revisiting a learned language in books of political economy and porn-site comment streams.  I've made them, put them together despite better judgement.  Paradise Now is a catalogue of languages that do not, on their own, deserve to stand but which together (in his poems) can carry the 21st Century proletariat, drunken Facebook monk into a common language that reflects the isolating conditions in which the individual disintegrates at the end of the day only to be put together again in the digital updates of the morning.

I spoke with Brian Ang in Boulder, CO, as he was participating in Tit Mouse Bay Area Poet Exchange.  He was due for a reading at the new Innisfree Bookstore: a darling, poetry book store -the only one of its kind in the city- where I got an almond milk latte (I am non-dairy) and asked him about the process of writing Paradise Now.  Ang worked on random text he got from different sources and lifted words off it and built a compiled secondary text in paragraphs.  A process that often took all day/night.  Then with this secondary text he produced the poems, one after the other, for three months in the late Summer and Fall of 2010.  Fueled by the energy of the protest he attended, the work of Kasey Mohammad and by what at this time was some heavy drinking, Paradise Now became a re-signification of the language of political economy, within a self-aware text that is undoubtedly a contemporary to our world, inside which any experiment in vocabulary is possible.