Executive Orders
edited by Rachael Guynn Wilson and Andrew Michael Gorin
punctum books 2025, 250 pages, ISBN 9781685712785
Teetering in a liminal space between a long poem and a consortium of compact lyrical statements, Executive Orders makes use of a kind of ludic legalese intended as a counterpoint to the unilateralism of Donald Trump’s heavy-handed use of executive power. By the same stroke, it broaches broader questions about how the social fabric of our lives relates to the impersonal ubiquity of technology today. By opposing poetry’s negative capability — its capacity to flow against factual uniformities — to the crushing realities of executive legislation, the book maintains a subdued sense of communitarianism. This is evident in its use of an open Google Doc to source poetic lines (and, toward the end of the text, even a one-act play) that frequently engage with a renewed sense of the sacred, as in the following sequence:
By the power of the celestial sea, the Great Pacific and Atlantic
Garbage Patches are hereby dissolved
In their stead, this loose conglomeration of bodies proclaims
that we will no longer privilege the human and we will no
longer privilege language as a means of communication.[1]
Given its digital, Google Doc–based locus, Executive Orders becomes a concretion of forces specific to our current moment — material as well as literary.
Technology functions here as a facilitator for a kind of unmapping of ideology. Digitally assembling a whole out of fragments — not only poetic and dramatic, but also visual — recreates a process that mirrors one of the primary engines animating the flow of capital today: technology itself. At the threshold of this technological mediation, Executive Orders seeks to articulate a symbolic order irreducible to the prevailing alternatives to liberal democracy. The specter of fascism haunting the globalized West, in particular, prompts a series of sustained critiques within the text:
No more war spectacle
…
We demand total harmonic freedom
We demand that the demands of the 1960s be made retroactive real
We demand full communism and until it has been achieved we
demand excellent snacks.[2]
Some of the more representative lines of the book are essentially dreamlike restatements of our world, counterfactually describing a new species of liberalism, a new democracy, and even new communism:
We resolve that the facts of the former state of our lives, of
our mistakes, be never bought or sold, used as collateral, or
begged from a distant administrator.
That our paychecks be issued back to the 18th century in a
timely manner.
Roll back the clock: institute Climate-Savings Time!
That what we are primarily concerned with is being, not with
what has been or may be lost.[3]
Across these and similar lines, being and time are placed on the same formal footing as economics. These three thematics triangulate an existential dilemma that transpires across the book as a whole: how can poetry set in motion an assault against the established political order, and what are the available technical means by which this assault can be levied?
In light of the technical means at their disposal, the urgency of these overlapping themes — history and economics parsing the disclosure of being — is fulfilled only to a limited degree by the editors’ curatorial strategy. Operating simultaneously as a machinic assemblage and as an egalitarian form of anarchism, the editors issued an open call allowing poets and writers to contribute freely under the rubric of Executive Orders. In the book’s afterword, Rachael Guynn Wilson and Andrew Gorin articulate their editorial motives. As Gorin recalls:
It’s strange to come to the end of this project at a time that reminds me of its beginning. When we created the Executive Orders Google Doc, not long after Trump’s election in 2016, everyone we knew was in shock. Since then we’ve lived through several similar choral outpourings of grief and rage, including those occasioned by the Black Lives Matter protests, the global climate strike, the school shooting in Parkland, the COVID-19 pandemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and, most recently, Israel’s US-supported genocidal campaign in Gaza. In the midst of these compounded crises, we’re now heading into the election of 2024 and it feels like history is again repeating itself.[4]
In this manner, Executive Orders positions itself as both document and intervention. The poem’s fragmentation functions like a stream of incidental monuments stippling the diapason of a univocal voice. Technology, however, perhaps even more than capitalism, tends to flatten experience, introducing behavioral linearities where there might otherwise be ethical agency — or at least a sense of conscience problematic to itself.
Despite openly problematizing performative judgments in opposition to the operative consequences of executive mandates, the denotative content of the poetry itself sometimes comes off as a little too self-assured in its demands. This tendency is particularly apparent wherever the poem feels mechanically like it’s listing things — where the intimacy of awareness and the jouissance born out of our co-existence with others seems reduced to automated declarations:
By the power of ignorance, we hereby declare that the
Governor of the US Virgin Islands is now the President of the
United States of America
We declare no hesitation in declarations
We declare the B minor scale!
We declare knowledge and insight and love and care in and for
all humans, aliens, life forces
We declare the end of the news cycle
We declare “fuck ton” as the new standard measure
We declare that our declarations will be the declamations of
old women drinking tea by the fencepost
We declare angular and methodical and curved
We declare no gender
We declare that we have bodies that will not be wagered for the
gain of the rich.[5]
The issue here is not that allusions to concrete experience give way to abstraction, or that performative judgments strive to enact what can neither be perceived nor verified — such maneuvers are highly desirable, even necessary, as a means of transcending the strictures of everyday life. Rather, by instituting a simulation of operative decision-making on a footing nearly equal to that of political and legal legislation, the miasmic ordure of authoritarian overreach starts to inadvertently reveal itself. However sympathetic the reader might be to the poetry in parts, even to these lines just quoted, the anti-formalism of Executive Orders becomes a mythologizing of democratic inclusivity.
Myths mystify; they render perception with evidence difficult, if not impossible. Technology is a myth that conflates dependence and independence, technocracy and community, war and peace. Just as the mechanics in any simulation tend to posit a mythic interpretation of reality rather than a discoverable one, the myths underlying Executive Orders are embedded not only in its content but also in its collaborative structure. Contributors, often unknown to one another, were linked primarily through Google Docs more so even than by editorial discretion. As a situational poem proposing poetic intervention against a new brand of authoritarianism, Executive Orders does not effectively liberate itself from the empty alienation one readily experiences in both the private and public sector, in the political as well as social sphere.
This indeterminacy starkly contrasts with the more aesthetically satisfying features of the book. The poem moves across slogans and flourishes of pixelated imagery with a sort of Beat sympathy. At best, the reader feels shunted through dreamlike corridors where a paradisiacal vision collapses into history, where the momentary feels momentous. Yet while the reader is supposed to encounter open-endedness rather than a singular message, this polyvocality too often conceals the obvious: the ubiquity of technology mediating our social relationships by the same means through which it makes us visible.
Perhaps the ultimate mythology produced by the material presence of Executive Orders is the myth of memoriality itself. An alternative history is imposed on the materials absorbed into the poem, while the words embedded in its structure function as ghosts from which a garden emerges. The poem seeks organicity, presenting itself as a memorial honoring the loss of political freedoms that many Americans, both documented and undocumented, might have taken for granted. Lamenting how a nation premised on individual freedoms has given way to corporatocracy (to say nothing of other forms of slavery), it raises more questions than it answers.
Notes
[1] Executive Orders, 99.
[2] Executive Orders, 77–78.
[3] Executive Orders, 88–89.
[4] Rachael Guynn Wilson and Andrew Gorin, afterword to Executive Orders, 223.
[5] Executive Orders, 88–89.