A Brain in Flames: Remembering Joshua Clover

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

I don’t know how to say goodbye to Joshua Clover—comrade, friend and fellow traveler in poetry—whose work as both writer and revolutionary expanded my sense of what a poem could do.

Over his career, Joshua published three poetry collections along with music and film criticism, but no matter what form his work took, it was grounded in an enduring commitment to Communism. Like Guy Debord, Joshua believed that only through revolution could poetry be fully realized beyond the constraints of life under capitalism. To honor him is to recognize the full scope of his project, from poetry to riot theory to direct action, as well as his infamous provocations: “People think that cops need to be reformed,” he told the San Francisco Weekly in 2015. “They need to be killed.”

I first encountered Joshua’s work in Cal Bedient’s undergraduate creative writing workshop at UCLA in the late 1990s. He had recently published his Walt Whitman Award–winning debut, Madonna anno domini, and Cal brought “Unset” to class. With its flames and bright, burning birds, the poem forecasts the decisive political turn his work would later take. Near the end of the poem, the speaker asserts that systems like city planning and rote memorization limit independent thought and insists they must be “unset,” that is, unsettled or disrupted through more radical ways of thinking:

“I am nothing but must be
everything” is pure thinking:
the brain in flames like a permanent
seizure, like a tree filled
with bright birds burning
near the edge of the gated city
when the sun has not set

Here was a younger poet quoting Karl Marx—“I am nothing but must be everything”—while engaging US imperialism, philosophy, and class struggle with equal parts beauty and cutting wit.

I was raised by a single mom in cheap LA housing and regarded Joshua’s poetry as offering authentic insight into the world’s underlying structures. His work challenged the idea that society’s inequalities were inevitable, and proposed that poetry could help reshape our collective future. I wanted to know, who was this “physicist of syllables,” as Jorie Graham called him, who would one day stage an author photo with his head in his hand modeled after Walter Benjamin?

I first met Joshua at AWP in 2006, when I was pursuing my PhD and organizing a labor union. Over the years, we exchanged poems, debated politics and aesthetics, and sustained a conversation that never let poetry retreat into quietness. With Joshua, friendship was a form of accountability. He asked you to say what you mean and mean what you say. When we crossed paths again at the Nightboat Offsite AWP reading for the journal Lana Turner in Los Angeles in 2016, I asked if he was going to the conference book fair. He replied, “Why? To watch poetry get monetized in real time?”

Once, at some absurd hour, I sent him a draft of a poem, apologizing for its rawness. He wrote back immediately, “I like it, but it needs more burning Best Buys.” We spent the next hour on the phone working through revisions. 

When he visited my Poetic Forms class on Zoom, I thought we would talk about line breaks or meter. Instead, we discussed Marx, metaphor, and Public Enemy. He treated my students, many from disadvantaged backgrounds and with little formal exposure to poetry, with genuine respect. I remember him calling the sonnet “a jail cell with better acoustics,” which my students loved. Later, when I asked if he had any teaching materials on Gertrude Stein, he sent me a PowerPoint; it was 50 slides long.

That was Joshua, uncompromising yet giving, always reminding us that poetry should bravely confront the world. Whether reciting poems from a bank lobby or singing along to Justin Bieber in LA traffic, he met the world with intellectual rigor and extraordinary attention.

Joshua’s first book, though political in parts, is preoccupied with aesthetic surfaces and atmospheres, the imagery saturated in blue. Forests are blue, hair is blue, even Louise, whoever she is, is blue: “there she is anyway, diagram of desire, a blue body.” The oblique lines recall John Ashbery, and the collection’s sometimes easygoing casualness is reminiscent of Frank O’Hara. But this sensibility would soon transform into a more overtly political voice.

With The Totality for Kids (2006), the mood shifts as the blue suburbs burn with the “brutal red dream / Of the collective.” That fiery vision found its fullest expression in Red Epic, Joshua’s final book of poetry, published in 2015 by Commune Editions, a press he co-edited with Juliana Spahr and Jasper Bernes. Many of the poets published by Commune Editions, like Sean Bonney and Madeline Lane-McKinley, adopted a didactic and confrontational style to express their commitment to resistance. In their work, the line between poetry and prose is often blurred or simply nonexistent.

By 2015, Joshua had spent years immersed in emancipatory struggles, from the anti-Iraq war protests to Occupy and Ferguson. The elliptical, Ashberian lines of his early work are superseded in Red Epic by a more urgent, militant clarity. This book aligns itself stylistically with the direct speech of other authors published by Commune Editions. But the poems are also deeply indebted to leftist, antiwar poets of the 1960s like Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka whose works brim with urgent demands. This influence is explicit in poems like “Haecceity,” which begins:

If what you want is calm
to be restored you are still the enemy
you have not thought thru clearly
what that means

The stanza is nearly identical to the opening of di Prima’s Revolutionary Letter #19. It serves as Joshua’s resolute declaration of poetic lineage while energizing and activating the left, warning that complacency is complicity.

Red Epic is also a witty indictment of contemporary poets who fancy themselves writing “political poetry” from the comfort of their bourgeois lives:

[…] the market
will never send you
to jail for your poems though
we all believed in
private that we were
worth jailing for the terrible
sedition of our dithyrambs

Lines like these had many poets clutching their tote bags and nervously googling “dithyramb.” But the satire also functions as consciousness-raising, forcing writers to confront the uncomfortable question of what they are willing to risk professionally and materially for their art.

Such antagonisms, in poetry and life, were commonplace in Joshua’s relation to the world. But this was not mere posturing. The comments he made about the police led to a public campaign to fire him from his professorship, and Joshua and his students were arrested and jailed numerous times, including an arrest in 2009 as part of the California university protests preceding the Occupy struggles. In 2012, he supported his UC Davis students, later known as the “Davis Dozen,” whose weekslong blockade of a US Bank on campus resulted in charges of conspiracy and obstruction.

When I consider the spirit of Joshua’s radical poetics, I return to his 2011 video “Spring Georgic,” filmed in three locations, the first inside a Chase Bank. In lines that cascade across the page, the poem traces the history of revolution’s relationship to literature. He walks by a twinkling Christmas tree and poster that says, “CHASE WHAT MATTERS,” then recites, “no matter the circumstance / do not grant emergency powers to anyone,” just as a security guard asks him to leave. The second segment unfolds inside a library. “What thoughts I have of you tonight Fred Jameson!” he exclaims, echoing Allen Ginsberg’s "A Supermarket in California," which opens, “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman.” Joshua’s substitution of Jameson, a Marxist theorist, situates himself in a shared revolutionary lineage with Jameson and Whitman, reframing literary genealogy as insurgency. “If we speak […] of the dispossessed […] / free […] / to haul their flesh to market,” he recites from the third location, just outside a Wells Fargo Bank, immediately after a man opens the door and strides inside. You can almost feel the cold gust of air conditioning whoosh from the bank. By the end of the poem, Joshua faces the camera as he walks backward into the Wells Fargo, much the way Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is pulled into the ruins of the past. He then delivers the poem’s final line, “seize the fucking banks,” which, in his red vision, would mean the end of poetry as we know it to begin it anew.

I carry Joshua’s words with me to classrooms, to protests, and to the poems I have yet to write. In these times of escalating political repression, genocide, and ecocide, the revolutionary project he imagined is not only unfinished, but on fire. Still, his poems continue to burn on its horizon, keeping alive what could still rise from the ruins.