"Vermin"

Writing against the inequities of attention and value that allow us to believe there are those we can exterminate. (Look at Harryette Mullen’s S*PERM**K*T or NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! for models: ways to engage this issue.) What we don’t seem, mostly, to get is that where the value fails (where we think or act so as to make it seem we think life is unimportant) we put the worth of our own lives in question. Ask not for whom, no: Send not to ask for whom… (consider the distance). No part of the poem that isn’t meaningful: nothing we can dispose of, no byproduct. Poetry always depends on (exposes, celebrates) what the philosopher Michel Serres calls The Parasite. Check it out.