The Irregular and/or Anti- and Ante- Regulative
Did not but didn’t not or did not not did? Woke up a rando hour in that ol’ double-bind of suspicions of activity (didn’t not did, did not’d). No sich thang ez reppytishun. Didn’t not not’d no such thing as. Only insistence, amplification of. Rigor, please!—I’ve been in a steady residency studying doing sans getting done (-) in. When abroad for the conference RE: conspiratorial unsuspicious activity, I insisted our syncopated metrics tender on the International Measure Exchange. To the registration: “Our data tight AF, Boo-Boo; toot sweet with my tote bag,” my lanyard swang Jesus piecey as I crooked bootied to the keynote. I sat in the not doing of doing what I did not. By&by came Q&A, I Q’ed: “can self-disciplined inactivity be considered inactivity as the disciplining of the self is a praxis and—.” In come Security a rented roughshod, all There they are, misconjugating where I stood. I stayed to rephrase my Q. I believed this a discourse. Security fixed to quantize my “offed” conduct with they copse of batons. I was a present ruckus, recused for actively inactivating me by vice and versa. This collabo took the discipline to the next level!
Copyright © 2018 by Douglas Kearney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘The Irregular and/or Anti- and Ante- Regulative’ is drawn from a Fred Moten essay called ‘Black Kant.’ There, Moten lists sixteen categories for what he calls ‘A Natural History of Inequality.’ The categories—which range from 'the stupid' to 'the social whose life in exhaustion of the given has often been mistaken for death'—seemed to me titles for parts of a poetic series. Content-wise, I knew I wanted to write as a means of working with/through the concepts Moten’s thorny 'natural history' presents. Structurally, though, I managed to use the sequencing of the list to determine how that content would move through each piece, sentence by sentence.”
—Douglas Kearney