✒ Paperclip

A poem

Artwork: “Paperclip” by Brock Barber

I’m chipping away at a poetry collection.

I’ve written about twenty poems about banal objects. I’m currently working on “Traffic Cone” and “Industrial Doormat.” I have an artist attached to the project. He drew the image of the paperclip pictured above.

In related news, something wonderful happened! One of these poems (“Paperclip”) was published in a lit magazine out of Millen, Georgia. The magazine is called The Quarter(ly). The press that produces it is called Quarter Press. The guy who runs the press is called Chris.

For a few more days you can pre-order the volume with my poem. Chris prints a limited amount (50) but will make more if he gets sufficient pre-orders. This means that by ordering a copy you will be summoning it into existence.

In honor of “Paperclip,” I’m posting the whole poem here along with some brief thoughts.

---

Remember The Minimalists?

Me neither.

Like many other Netflix blips, The Minimalists swooped in with a fancy documentary that dominated a certain sector of the cultural conversation for the length of a hollow fart and then promptly vanished into the ether. They were two decent looking white guys monastically devoted to you having less stuff.

But follow this link and you might realize (as I did) that, though The Minimalists is a distant memory, there is no “remember” about The Minimalists (sans italics). They are still alive and well and pumping out a glut of consumable content which analyzes the wretchedness of gluts and consumable content.

I have mixed feelings. There are pros and cons.

The Pros: Someone, anyone who speaks out against consumerism will always be at least half okay in my book— a book which sits on a shelf next to ten thousand other books made of paper and card stock.

I feel like the 90’s / 00’s were sort of peak “anti-consumerist” decades. I base this assumption on vague comparisons to the hyper-consumerist now.¹ In our current landscape, consumerism is oxygen. You can buy a MAGA hat, or a Pussyhat, or a Bernie Meme t-shirt, but whatever you’re buying, you really need to buy that hat / t-shirt because did I mention that you can buy a hat / t-shirt?

The Cons: The Minimalists made a thing that turned into the thing it was against. They racked up paid speaking opportunities, sold several books, ran a blog / podcast / website, and made a completely unnecessary sequel packed with noxious Dave Ramsey interviews. They leaned into minimalism as odd cult-lifestyle-religion (which is fine— I love versions of all of those things) but their religion seemed to have its own neurotic obsession with products— with their negation and with the exhibition of their negation. They even began to recount their experiences with “stuff” in the self-flagellating “I found Jesus” rhetoric of the Bible-camp-bonfire.

It got bad.

As always, the silver quarter of truth can be found in the random nooks and crannies of a Reddit thread.

Stuff (the upcoming poem collection) is anti-consumerist and pro-consumerist. It is minimalist and maximalist. It is all of these things because I am all of these things. The poems in Stuff are fragile attempts to recognize the close relationship I have with things.

Such as paperclips…

***

Paperclip

I 

For you, I have nothing at all to say; 
I don’t spare you a single wit; 

I’ll take my non-thoughts 
and clip them to that other bit 

of non-thoughts with the fine
silver line of your elegant oval 

turning ever in on itself
like a monk in cloister

or a patient 
stretched upon the couch; 

never arriving, always there:

a semicolon made 
of more than ink and space; 

a cold, metal 
comma conjunction
without the car crash. 

II

Bent into another shape
you put a needle to shame; 

unsharp and long as needed
for resetting old electronics

or cleaning lint from any port. 

III

Wrapped into an odd “U” 
I hung Christmas lights 
from you. 

IV

paprecloup 
peeper clout
pprclp
pepper clamp

sit as you are 
in that jar 
beside the envelopes
and a stamp. 

***

A note for people who hate poetry: the last section where the paperclip is misspelled in various forms attempts to pay homage to “lighght” by Aram Saroyan. If you haven’t read “lighght,” you actually just did—twice.

That’s it.

The whole poem.

“lighght.”

So why not pprclp?

1. … and the fact that David Foster Wallace seemed pretty bummed about it.