Reassembling the Fragments

Anastasios Karnazes interviews Alan Gilbert about the new edition of his ongoing epic poem, “The Everyday Life of Design.”

By Anastasios KarnazesJanuary 27, 2025

• Poetry

ALAN GILBERT’S The Everyday Life of Design (2024) is a poetry book by all appearances, though better understood as a growing database of the digital and material entanglements that have characterized American life from the financial crisis to the lockdown. Unlike other databases, its information is not organized according to defined tables, nor is it searchable by keywords or susceptible to data breaches. The proportions of this information store are epic in scale and purpose, determined to contain everything, whether that involves posting viewless videos of blowing up an inflatable pool or sticking a peeled banana in a police van tailpipe. In its commitment to the duty of compressing and storing all the earthly muck in its relationally modular forms, The Everyday Life of Design is a successful, high resolution database for our time, reconstructing the old framework for a nonlinear, exploratory, and updating design that accurately emulates the experiential core of its subject.

Alan and I became friends during the lockdown where we were podmates in “The Jazz Poodles,” a group named after the late poodle of supreme majesty and noble spirit, Shadow. We have continued our friendship one-on-one primarily through exchanges of viral internet videos and key phrases. The interview, which took place over email in early December, feels like a return to the more spacious conversations we had during pandemic time. We talked about the political and consumer events that situate the origin of this book, the formal strategies that can upset the natural orders of ideology, and the indistinguishability of algorithm and desire.

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ANASTASIOS KARNAZES: In “The Foundlings,” you have a sneaky internal rhyme between “rubble” and “political.” You say, “I must like the look of this rubble […] / I thought it might be political.” In figuring out how to start this conversation, I’ve been most interested in hearing you talk about rubble and the political as they relate to your writing. This book is a large project devoted to accretion, both at the level of the line working endlessly to capture this multitude of fragments or rubble from everyday life and also at the level of the book itself, which you’ve said you intend to be an ongoing project, a kind of live and updated collection of poems or poem. Rubble, in connoting brokenness, may be too negative a term to describe your poems, but I do feel an archaeological impulse here to use the poem as a collection and conservation site for the minutiae of contemporary life. I’m thinking now of the game we used to play where I would ask if Darth Maul, or chopped cheese, or whatever reference had been included in your poems yet, and you would answer or say you would try to work it in somehow. So I want to hear more about how you decided to create the large and updating store for your poems, and also what this accretion of rubble may have to do with the way you think of the political and its relationship to the poetic. Or, what are the political stakes of your writing out the rubble, if you identify any?

ALAN GILBERT: Thank you for this capacious opening question. At the same time, I like the precision of its noticing of the consciously unintentional but most likely unconsciously outputted off-rhyme of “political” and “rubble.” I think of these poems as constantly shifting between the macro and the micro, between a vast historical landscape and “the minutiae of contemporary life,” as you say. The poems are simultaneously driven by sound, image, and sense, which the opening of your question also captures.

We are living in the ruins and rubble of neoliberalism. Or maybe it’s more precise to say that we are living in the ruins and rubble created by neoliberalism, although neoliberalism is clearly dying too. I don’t think rubble is too strong a word for what these poems collect both socially and historically. I conceive of this project as an epic poem about life in the early 21st-century United States, which is clearly in a state of decay, although the more important question would be when it wasn’t. Certainly, a nation reliant on genocide and slavery and then brutalized immigrant and indentured labor is functioning in a state of decay, and not just morally, obviously. The more recent reliance on finance to prop up its economy and foreign wars to maintain its political hegemony are late-stage-empire maneuvers. As longue durée historians have shown, in the modern, Western era, these are the signs of an empire coming to its end.

At the same time, I don’t think I would spend so much effort collecting and assembling all of the pieces, fragments, and samples that go into The Everyday Life of Design if I didn’t hope they would contribute to building a new and better world. So much of the current one still needs to be undone, and part of this is upsetting the way power and ruling-class ideologies become normalized.

I would like to hear more about how the idea of the epic poem developed. Was there a specific point when you were taking account of what you had written and realized the “slim volume” that seems to continue as the default was no longer what you wanted? I am also thinking of how the classic epic is written with nostalgia for a political order in transition or a vision for a future one. Your word “hope” would lead me to place yours in the latter tradition, but it feels clear that this book isn’t interested in describing a specific image of a political or social system so much as documenting the death of our own. If it is not hope for a revolutionary transformation, then how would you describe the hope in The Everyday Life of Design, and where do you locate it?

I definitely didn’t sit down to write an epic poem, although back in 2001, I did sit down to write a book that would consist of four long poems (and which was eventually published in 2012 as The Treatment of Monuments), so I must have had some inkling about working in forms larger than individual poems collected into individual books—the “slim volume” that you mention. But the earliest poems in The Everyday Life of Design were written in 2008, one year after the iPhone was introduced and our lives began their drift toward a blurring of the real and the virtual. The year 2008 was also the height of the financial crisis, which reshaped life in the United States just as dramatically. In retrospect, it’s clear to me that the poems are building out of those two events, which are much more enormous than simply historical moments, but it wasn’t until maybe 2016 that I started to think of the work collectively as a map, video game, document, comment stream, counterhistory, and archive of the early 21st-century United States.

How is the book hopeful? That’s a very good—and difficult—question, especially at this moment in time when the world is on fire both literally and figuratively. The poems are hopeful in imagining a human subject that understands the interdependence of all things, in mocking arbitrary authority, in refusing to simply reflect what already exists, in spotlighting the overlooked and passed-over, in finding joy in friendship and love, and in prioritizing horizontal connections over vertical and hierarchical systems.

The poems even refuse to reflect or restate what exists line to line. One movement repeated prominently throughout the book is a retraction, denial, or turning away from what was previously stated. To give a sense of this impulse over other poetic themes, “but” appears 454 times, “yet” 130 times, but “love” only 43, “poetry” worse off at 22, and “sex” worse still at 6. In “Difference in the Same,” all five of these key words appear—three where you write, “I guess no one wants to watch me / blow up an inflatable pool, / but I also love poetry for what it can’t do.” What’s your relationship to what poetry can and can’t do? I ask because it seems like this boundary is also a subject or preoccupation of these poems, which always seek to cut off or deny themselves a certain continuity.

I might be tempted here to distinguish anti-essentialism from negation. The impulse is less denial than redirection and endless linkages. “But” may appear throughout the manuscript as a “turning away,” but I think of it more as a turning toward something else, adding something potentially dissimilar yet related. In grammar, “but” is a conjunction. It joins, even if awkwardly, and an awkward connection is better than none at all, and movement is better than stasis, yet everything is always interconnected and in a process of becoming, so why not illuminate that?

But you’re right that the poems are constantly making a kind of “retraction,” which is ultimately an anti-essentialist movement that seeks to avoid the trap of denotation and the imposition of categories, which are modes of containment within a politico-economic system that we know is voraciously and brutally extractive of attention, labor, and natural resources. It’s very easy to slide into the categories that are produced for us, but what they are produced by is an engulfing capitalism.

How, then, to stay mobile, low, and slightly invisible? False logics, sham analogies, and irregular relations are some of the formal strategies here, and I like that your question is addressing the form of the work as much as the content because in poetry, for me, the two are inseparable and mutually determining. What poetry can do is upset the common sense—the “natural” order—in which hegemonic ideologies disguise themselves. It can also help create readers, who help create discourses and counterhistories, which help create communities and institutions, which can push for change; of course, this sequence usually happens in reverse. But I don’t think a poem can do much out there on its own.

Do you think Instagram’s Explore page is poetically similar to how you describe redirection and endless linkage? Of course, Meta is exactly the type of hegemonic institution from which poetry would hope to distinguish itself. But I want to say with the hope of provoking you that the Explore page’s curation of successive reels accomplishes this endless turning toward something “dissimilar yet related,” with the added bonus of its combinatorially mixed authorship. Surely false logics and irregular relations flourish here as well.

Absolutely, and as I mentioned, this book wouldn’t be possible without the overlap of online and offline worlds that has occurred during the past two decades. But the kind of disjunction, nonlinearity, associative leaps, and collage aesthetic that you’re describing have been a part of poetry for more than a century. And for now, although how much longer remains to be seen, the linkages we can still try to create as subjects are at least partially distinct from the ones created by algorithms, even if separating human from machine—and desire and algorithm—would be nearly impossible at this point, right?

Yes, I like how you put it in “Listening In”: “I’m an algorithm feeder.” We should never forget what side of the equation we are or were on, existing now primarily not as consumers but as producers of training data. It’s strange, though, that “algorithm” has taken on a split and paradoxical meaning between its strict sense of a fixed rule set to determine an expected outcome and this more behavioral and opaque new sense we attribute to platform revenue maximization. What specifically in your words marks a linkage made by a subject as opposed to an algorithm? Or alternatively, did you use any algorithmic generation in the writing of these poems?

All the linkages are being made by me, but perhaps a fundamental question here is what is making me. If that is an ongoing process like all things are, then maybe I’m not technically making the links because I’m a believer that the body doesn’t end at the skin, and I tend to think that we are more produced by our surrounding material conditions than we produce them.

Yet I like what you say about us being producers of training data because long-term, it looks as if the machines will eventually take over. But for now, that training data is fed back to us while we still occupy the role of consumers. So maybe it’s more precise to say that the linkages I produce are the ones I’ve previously consumed in some way and am trying to modify and redirect because the imagination has a crucial role in shaping a better world. This is one reason why I incorporate a lot of “samples” in my poetry. That, in turn, gets us back to the unanswered second part of your first question in terms of the game we played where we used to give each other references to try to include in our poems as if we were being fed information. There’s a reason why social media scrolls are called a “feed.” If I remember correctly, it started with the question of whether anyone had yet referenced in a poem The Rock’s hammy “People’s Elbow” wrestling move.

The number of new references a poet introduces to poetry should be the standard metric by which we rank their inventiveness. I believe you would be at least top-five. On the topic of this latest edition of The Everyday Life of Design, though, it includes two new sections that begin and end the book, many new poems inserted into the previously existing sections, and some reordering within those sections. How are you approaching the update process for each successive iteration?

The idea with the second edition was to make it more of a document or map and less of a large collection of poems because this book is definitely not a collected poems in disguise. It ends with the long poem “Last One Standing,” written during the winter COVID-19 peak in 2020–21, but overall, the book moves nonchronologically. To me, this reflects the way we now experience history as more of a recirculation as opposed to a narrative or even a sequence. Either way, these poems are searching for a way out.

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Alan Gilbert is the author of three previous books of poetry, The Everyday Life of Design (Studio/SplitLevel Texts, 2020), The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts, 2012), and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011). He is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and an adjunct associate professor in Columbia University’s Writing MFA Program.