“Poetry and Other Antagonisms”: An Interview with Commune Editions

Juliana Spahr, Jasper Bernes, and Joshua Clover founded Commune Editions in 2015. They began by publishing their own volumes of poetry and have since published chapbooks and full-length titles by Cheena Marie Lo, David Lau, Ida Börjel, Christopher Nealon, Leslie Kaplan, Wendy Trevino, and Jasmine Gibson. Together, the three founders write, edit, teach, and organize around anarchist and left communist struggle. Juliana Spahr is the author of several books of poetry, including Fuck You-aloha-i Love You (2001), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), The Transformation (2007), and That Winter the Wolf Came (2015). She is a widely published essayist and author of the critical study Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001). She also coedited the literary journal Chain with poet Jena Osman. Jasper Bernes is the author of two books of poetry: Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015). He is currently finalizing a manuscript called The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. His other critical writings have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Endnotes, Radical Philosophy, and Viewpoint. Joshua Clover is the author of three books of poetry: Madonna anno domini (1997), The Totality for Kids (2006), and Red Epic (2015). He is the author of two books of cultural theory, The Matrix (2004) and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (2009), as well as Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016), a study that treats riot as a historical phenomenon. Joshua is also a regular contributor to The Nation. I interviewed the founders of Commune Editions (CE) in May and June of 2016.

Stephen Voyce: Commune Editions is an imprint of AK Press. How did you come to work with them? Why do you consider them an appropriate fit with CE?

Commune Editions: We’ve known the good people at AK in various capacities for many years. In fact, one of us lives with and raises a child with one of them. Others of us have very fond memories of wandering