After the election of Donald J. Trump, a group of poets and activists conceived of a project wherein we could respond to the sudden and seemingly relentless barrage of Trump’s dystopian executive orders with a series of our own. The project, titled “Executive Orders,” was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, emergency prose poem that would unfold real-time responses to current events and the U.S. socio-political landscape. Published between 2017 and 2020 in a series of three volumes by the Organism for Poetic Research and The Operating System, Executive Orders is a record of one literary community’s efforts to cope with and respond to the tidal wave of reactionary policies enacted or proclaimed during the Trump years. But it is also an experiment in digitally-crowdsourced collaborative making that will be among the first literary works to employ online tools to such ends. Crowdsourced projects such as Executive Orders provide an alternative to norms of authorship that valorize individual genius and thereby serve the ends of marketing conventions. They also tell stories about the ways we can—and can’t—come together to form virtual collectives that may have a voice in political deliberations.
This presentation takes Executive Orders as a jumping off point for a discussion of comparable collaborative-writing and art projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critically examining the nature of the collectivity-making and archival curation that such projects often pursue. Attendees are also invited to contribute to the
Executive Orders project during our presentation or afterward by finding our exhibition space at the conference.
Please join us and contribute your own words to this ongoing project, which will be published in final form in 2024. Stop by our location and contribute in person, or do so online here:
bit.ly/executiveorders4uThe text of already published versions of the project can be found here: https://organismforpoeticresearch.org/opr/executive-orders-opreditions
