Seed Banks & Perennial Poetics (I)

The weight of this moment is undeniably heavy, and there is no other recorded time in human history I yearn for. This is the hand that I, and we, have been dealt. We were born into generations that necessitate we be all sorts of people at once. And in that burdened yet miraculous existence, I feel the only way to create is to reduce waste, upcycle and reuse, blend ourselves and our interests. Let no part of our lives, our obsessions, our creativity, our labor, go to waste. Perhaps you could call it cutting corners, to blend and reuse like this, but it’s all in the interest of self-preservation.

This craft essay, in its essence, is about finding ways to write and create when the pressures of the world, and of capitalism, are too weighty. But it’s also about being unabashed about our interests, whatever they are. Because life is short, and it would be silly if your friends didn’t know you only listen to electronic dance music, that you only really read comics and graphic novels, learn most of your fun facts on TikTok, or often watch hours on end of national cornhole championships on ESPN Two. It’s okay to love what you love, especially while realizing our global finitude.

When I was a kid, my father was abusive. I feel that this is such a familiar story that there’s not much left to tell. So now, I’m more interested in the slivers of light that peek through those times. If this craft essay is about sustenance, growth, and perennial poetic seeds, then these memories deserves a cameo. One memory of him is pure, happy, and (maybe most importantly) useful:

In 1972, Jack Kirby created the DC comic book series: Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. Running for 59 issues, Kamandi struggles through a post-apocalyptic future, surviving all sorts of evil machinations. My father read me all 59 issues.

His reading me those comics has sustained me in so many ways. It is the memory that tethers my empathy to him. It is the memory that shows me he knew I was a boy before I did. It is my first memory of the meaning of apocalypse, and the first (albeit fictional) roadmap to survival. It is memory. It is a perennial seed.

When my father sold everything in the house for drugs, the Kamandi comics were untouched, and always mine. He told me to sell them one day. And though they never did appreciate in value, my father was trying to explain the caste system of America. People born poor should, if at all possible, sit on something: an old comic book, a Mickey Mantle card, the glassware passed down from generation to generation. People born like us need one glimmer of hope when the pothole takes out the spare, or the cavity needs a root canal.

We have to be so many people these days. We have to be good friends and sturdy family, to both our blood and our chosen families. We have to be emotional and physical caretakers, and facilitators and stewards of community care. We have to grieve more than is acceptable—for our dead, and for our Earth. Unfortunately, we also have to know how to pick an accountant.

We have to dig out our old Pokémon cards and flip them on Depop to pay for printer ink, or maybe a six-pack. We have to know what cryptocurrency is, and how it will affect our future. As artists, we should learn about NFTs and how our art might one day live on the Blockchain. We have to drink way more water.

We have to find ways to survive capitalism, all while bucking against it—as quiet or futile as our bucking might feel. And when late-stage capitalism crumbles, we need a plan for the apocalypse. We should know how to start a fire with a flint, to be wary of Poison Sumac, but also how to turn it into lemonade. It would be useful to know all the antibiotic properties of ginger. Useful to keep some perennial seeds in a junk drawer. To keep the latest Farmer’s Almanac on the back of the toilet. It would be useful to know more knots than the one we use to tie our shoes.

When the end comes, however it may manifest, I look forward to a world without money in the contemporary sense. Perhaps, we’ll deal in cans of expired beans and old prescription glasses. But until then, here we are, and still lucky to be so.

In Kamandi’s thirtieth issue, published in January, 1975, Kirby writes:

“Kamandi and Ben are on the lip of a sand crater large enough to hold the remaining evidence of Man’s past glory... The embodiment of his works and scattered energies… A junkyard of lost dreams.”¹

What is a junkyard if not a land filled with opportunities to transform our waste? Junk is the genesis of all I’ve ever made. Junk lines, junk ideas. What’s the old moniker? One man’s garbage is a queer person’s treasure? Or something like that.

Nearly all of my work was written using poetry magnets, Haikubes, outdated Sherwin Williams paint swatches, Oblique Strategies, ekphrasis, found photos, and black out poems from the water-logged pages of pulp fiction trashed outside my local thrift. I delight in the tactile. These silly objects are my poetic seed bank. They are how I sustain and nourish myself. These are the tools I use to remember that my art, at its core, is about being thankful to be alive, right now, in this moment.

So, over the next few weeks, if you’re feeling overwhelmed or in over your head, go find a newspaper and practice erasure over the Sunday funnies, take a sharpie to the book of Leviticus and leave yourself a queer manifesto, rearrange all the poetry magnets on your buddy’s refrigerator. Collage with the stack of old Vogues your neighbor put out with the recycling. Life is short and art is all around us for the remaking.

*This blog post was adapted from a craft talk delivered to North Carolina State University, in the Spring of 2021.

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¹Kirby, Jack. Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. Vol. 13, DC, 1974.