The following is an expanded set of original remarks presented by Jacqui Germain at the opening of the keynote event at Aestheticizing Politics/Politicizing Aesthetics: St. Louis Symposium on the Radical Arts, followed by a selection of poems Jacqui read that evening.¹Jacqui Germain, “On This Land We All Get Fed: Remarks Presented at the STL Symposium on Radicalism in US Arts,” (introductory remarks, Aestheticizing Politics/Politicizing Aesthetics: The St Louis Symposium on Radicalism in the U.S Arts, St. Louis, MO, August 23–24, 2024).

“The Streetlights Christened Us Saved (or at Least Salvageable),” “On the Chemical Properties and Uses of Dried Blood,” and “How to Make South Grand a Ghost Town,” were originally published in Jacqui’s full-length poetry book, Bittering the Wound (Autumn House Press, 2021).²Jacqui Germain, Bittering the Wound, (Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2021). Thanks to both Jacqui and Autumn House Press for allowing us to publish this selection of poems.

First, my deep thanks to the organizing committee, Marc Blanc, Simone Sparks, Ryan Prewitt, and Ousmane Gaye, for allowing me to read this evening, and to Left Bank Books for hosting. It’s no small feat to organize the logistics for a single event, much less a series of events, much less a symposium; so again, thank you to the organizing committee for managing all of the email threads it surely took to make this possible.

This symposium asks us to consider the relationship between aesthetics and radical politics, between cultural production and left-wing movements. As “the right continues to expand its cultural prominence,” writes the organizing committee, through right-wing books, podcasts, and other cultural ephemera, how should we make sense of the left’s presence or, some might argue, its absence in that space?

Many radical left-wing movements believe that the political-cultural landscape is a significant terrain of struggle, that we cannot afford to cede that space to the radical right. The purpose of cultural production on the left, some would argue, is to struggle against the cultural production of the right. Here, cultural landscape is taken to mean the marketplace, where things are produced, published, bought, sold, acquired, licensed—always competing for views, sales, market shares, and profits. As such, this landscape is not a neutral one. It is, broadly speaking, a field that’s far more conducive to, not only the right’s cultural production, but to its own cultural, economic, and political priorities, rather than those of the left.

If the cultural landscape is nurtured and defined by the marketplace, the academy, and the web of monied foundations and institutions that make up the professionalized cultural economy, then there will always be a degree of inescapable dissonance for the leftist artist, and for the leftist writer and poet, like myself. But that dissonance is instructive or, at least, it should be. The coercive and conditional nature of the market, the academic institution, and the prestigious foundation is designed to discipline the left-wing artist, and persuade them to construct a creative self that is ultimately conducive to and dependent on that capitalist, careerist terrain. At best, it simply tames or otherwise neutralizes any such dissonance. At worst, it enlists the leftist artist to construct a bastardized, supervised dissonance that instead survives, reinforces, and stabilizes the very structures that should be troubled. A dissonance that is decorative, observational, permanently underdeveloped, and loudly commodified.

Slowly, the leftist artist, writer, or poet is no longer able to imagine a successful artist-self outside of that captured cultural landscape. What career can be made without the specific, conditional approval of a malformed, professionalized class tasked with generating cultural reproductions of the state? Even as the leftist artist, writer, or poet levels their well-meaning condemnations or “demands” against these bodies, the underlying hope seems to reveal an allegiance. Is the dissent simply meant to offer an opportunity to righteously criticize, reform, and ultimately “improve” the academy, the foundation, and the marketplace in hopes of eventually resuming competition for those specific, conditional approvals? Finally, the artist can reengage with the landscape guilt free, having seemingly dispatched that initial dissonance. What might’ve been a cultural left primed for collective class antagonism becomes a cultural left that has abandoned leftist principles to preach individual class mobility instead. This is neither new, nor personal. Capitalism is exploitative, coercive, and punishing. Unless the “leftist” artist, writer, or poet deliberately opposes (or in being excluded, decides to nurture an artist-self apart), the “leftist” artist, writer, or poet is captured.

And yet, I would still argue that the above entirely misses the task. An award-winning, captured cultural left prioritizes which spaces and audiences? An award-winning, captured cultural left is most legible (and illegible) to which communities? An award-winning, captured cultural left maintains which class allegiances?

The only way a radical or revolutionary left could win a captured landscape is to have freed it. Our task is not to struggle over portions of the pie or seats at the table; our task is to challenge the legitimacy and hubris of such a small group of people owning the kitchen itself, and having the audacity to guard it with guns. Our task is to show people there are other ways for us all to be fed.

So, again, what does it mean to be willing or unwilling to cede the cultural landscape to the right? Can the cultural production of radical left-wing movements today compete for power and influence on a captured cultural landscape? Can it do so without being coerced by the priorities and logics of the market? What does it mean to produce leftist political art that deliberately orients itself differently, towards different metrics and audiences, towards the people and the publics intentionally formed outside of professionalized fields? What, in fact, do we lose or are we coerced to compromise when our cultural production is laundered through a captured field?

Can we instead consider, cultivate, and nurture those past, already existing, and brand new cultural landscapes that thrive outside of—or perhaps thrive in opposition to, or even antagonize—the modern marketplace and its allegiances?

I mostly only have a string of questions, and poems, and no answers for you, but I’d leave you with this: I understand being unwilling to cede space and visibility to the right, even on this version of a captured cultural landscape that we understand as a capitalist market—but again, I worry this misses the task. The cultural production of radical left-wing movements ultimately should struggle not over space on the terrain, but over the authority of the marketplace in people’s cultural and political lives. The only way a radical or revolutionary left could win a captured landscape is to have freed it. Our task is not to struggle over portions of the pie or seats at the table; our task is to challenge the legitimacy and hubris of such a small group of people owning the kitchen itself, and having the audacity to guard it with guns. Our task is to show people there are other ways for us all to be fed.

Whatever meaningful radical left-wing cultural (read: political) insurgency that might subsequently blossom in this moment will require a preserved and protected dissonance, one that is encouraged to be instructive, generative, and necessarily destabilizing. Competing against the right on a captured, capitalist cultural landscape requires that we preserve the legitimacy and governing power of the landscape for the sake of competition. We risk treating the cultural terrain as a siloed project instead of one field in a broader political struggle. A cultural terrain that exists as a siloed project only calls for poets to fashion radical poems. A cultural terrain that exists as part of a broader political struggle calls for us to first fashion radical and revolutionary selves. From there, the radical poetry may follow.

As I said, very few straightforward answers, mostly questions and metaphors, but I do think moments of political unrest, of mass public dissent, and of political rupture can create incredibly dynamic opportunities to struggle with and clarify some of the questions I mentioned. There are, thankfully, already pockets, networks, and undergrounds in which these cultural and artistic insurgencies are newly taking root, have recently taken root, and have for years been growing in soil already ploughed. For my own part, I’m still searching for and learning of them.

This brief poetry reading is an attempt to relocate us back at a point of public political rupture—the Ferguson Uprising—in hopes of grounding us in a moment where even the headiest theoretical political stakes and risks were instead, viscerally felt. Where any cultural production rooted deeply in and born out of the rupture of that period couldn’t help but be oriented towards the people and the public first, instead of—, instead of—, instead of—.

This brief poetry reading is an attempt to relocate us back at a point of public political rupture—the Ferguson Uprising—in hopes of grounding us in a moment where even the headiest theoretical political stakes and risks were instead, viscerally felt.

The Streetlights Christened Us Saved (or At Least Salvageable)

We start here, at the burnt-orange
streetlight, thrusting the night
into a rust-colored glaze.

All of August is elastic and overstretched,
jumbling the calendar’s chronology into a blur.
Last night’s string of hours hangs limp,

while tomorrow peels itself across the clock’s face.
We start overhead at the burnt-orange
streetlight and wander down to the slow parade

of marchers on the sidewalk, drifting
down West Florissant’s length, turning to cross
to the other sidewalk, and drifting back the other way

up the street again. Then another turn
at the far end, the same sidewalk, the same
debris, the same crack a hundred times,

the streetlights’ orange hum
battling the shadows’ hunger at every turn.
St. Louis’s muggy perfume glistens

on our shoulders, in the crook of our arms,
the folded flesh beneath our breasts—a sparse
baptism beneath a handful of electric angels

lighting our small, nightly planet.
Hundreds of bodies churning
the sidewalk’s dust to a rhythm,

pulling West Florissant around its own edges.
Here, a whole world in our midst. The gravity
of our heels spins the oceans, presses the tides

forward, shifts entire seasons according to our nightly pace.
A small universe blistering
with smoke and glass,

decade after decade congealing
beneath the streetlights, the burnt-orange
light biting through the night’s thick weight,

each fluorescent bulb sharp and persistent
as a single acrylic nail piercing a layer of weave
to disturb the scalp—a pointed green ornament,

generously bedazzled and fighting against the night
for its own color. The burnt-orange light turns the tender
head of flesh into a dome of fading embers

still simmering with color.
The whole street, laced
with a parade of dimly lit orbs

bobbing below the streetlights, circling
relentlessly under threat of arrest, dragging
the street’s tiny planet around its axis.

We understood the sunrise
as a distant blessing, the airy blue
morning hue such a strange, thin color

for the streetlights’ density
to surrender to. But it is only temporary.
We start here,

at the burnt-orange streetlight, and will end
there, on another night that doesn’t yet
know its own name.

On the Chemical Properties & Uses of Dried Blood

Months later, West Florissant
is a swollen jaw of chipped teeth.
Its tongue, still stained with
the taste of blood, licks its lips
slowly, reminds itself of
the borders of its own face.

August scratched open
all its throats, stretched the tar
in its skin so tight it pulled
blood out from between
the crevices, from the doorways
of gums & split lips.

Within hours, the whole country’s fist
was plunged into its messy gut.
The fingers flexed, began to poke
the warm heat of the pavement.

By November, the fist had retreated & with it, palmfuls of blood:

for testing, for study & inspection,
for research,                             for relic,
for blessing,       for art    &    decoration
to document,                to share,      to      note
its      odd   color,   to       archive,
to display  on  Instagram, to taste,
to   shine   at   your friends  over coffee,
to remember,    to     remember        &    to    belong.

How useful the bleeding,
how fascinating the shape
a city collapses into after it is drained,
how some bodies are
most recognizable when
there is blood, how some body-cities
are only seen when they are screaming.

In the fist’s wake was a hollow,
hand-shaped crevice of scalped air,
so clean that it appeared
at first, as tear gas inverted,
some kind of weird ghost
existing only in the moment
between a freshly launched
canister & its paralyzing bloom.

How to Make South Grand a Ghost Town

On this night, the canister
lands between my feet,
sprouting a bulbous, billowing white heaven,

empty of harps & mercy,
void of any god & uninterested
in finding one.

There is a flash of light,
a sudden moment when
the whole world is swallowed

in a bright clap & bang
& then is remade piece
by piece in the moonlight.

I’m running & the ground
appears again, the bits of grass
sprouting like small, fractured

Edens between the pavement,
the handful of cars my waist swivels past
& the night is not over.

The whole world,
yes, the whole
world is here.

//

The fourth time it happened, I discovered
the body cowers involuntarily, will give up
its senses in exchange for relief
& despite the blinding burn,
will wholly survive.

It is a horribly bearable ruin—
the tinny sour of tear gas,
both handless & choking,
dares your body to escape itself
& empty the skeleton of all its parts

& rid your flesh of mist, this smoke
that brandishes nothing but a stinging
cloud & still lacerates your chest,
spasms your lungs into hard fury
’til the cough & the cough & the cough

& the cough breath the cough & breath
cough cough turns to gag & gag.
Even your kidneys shudder with force.
You think your whole gut has uprooted
& will leave you tonight.

All of this while blinded. All of this
in a noisy darkness that is clamor
& crying & a chorus of throats
all sucking acid until they
find clean air.

You forgot your burning sockets
when your chest ruptured open;
you forgot your chest with all the desperate
gagging; you forgot the gagging while
your eyes drowned themselves

until the acid drowned, too—streamed

down your cheeks
& softened, cooled

your lungs, metronomed
your breathing & released

your eyelids, your fists,
the whole night sky,

so big & finally
visible again.

Selected Poems from Bittering the Wound (Autumn House Press). Copyright © 2022 by Jacqui Germain. Reprinted with permission from the author.