My only desire for putting an issue together of Evening Will Come (or any magazine) is to write to artists whose work I am—right now—at this moment reading and obsessing over, which guides me in my own thinking, reflecting my own sense of movement and peril: reading Frank B. Wilderson’s “We’re trying to destroy the world,” listening to legendary psychfolk musician Kath Bloom, teaching Ye Mimi’s poem films in Taiwan, walking with Brandon Shimoda down alleys in Tucson, discussing the desert with Michelle García in Marfa, watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, recalling the one-line paragraphs of Anne Germanacos’ Tribute, re-reading Simone White’s “Flibbertigibbet In A White Room/Competencies,” searching bookstores for every woman in Kate Zambreno’s Heroines who was driven to drugs/the asylum/bed fires. For this issue I’ve collected journal entries, unsent letters, rejected chapters of novels, poem films, poems composed by phone, essays from the road, notes to self, dictations, lists, video outtakes, artifacts, and trash—everything which calls forth the fugitive state…

To the above artists, I originally wrote the following:

This a recovery mission, to rescue work already in existence as it is—beyond revision, editing, or never meant to be subjected to any such process—work that isn’t developed and doesn’t progress—basking only in its having-been-createdness! As a record of thinking in a moment of time—an eruption! Art and writing with a date, sealed within that protective film of a time stamp. Perhaps something sitting in the archives, in the folder titled SCRAPS, a document on the computer without friends or a home, something never intended to be published or exhibited, that came out fully formed or was created for reasons unknown, i.e. unintentional art. Something just sitting there because you told it to awhile ago, and—for technological reasons or according to the slow rules of decomposition—it obeyed, and so is there disobeying, as a piece of unnameable history. Consider this the HUMANE SOCIETY. Drop off your beloved but carpet-urinating, child-biting art.

DOT DEVOTA, on the road in ST. LOUIS CITY, MO
2:53 PM CDT, AUG 11, 2015