Miranda Mellis : Economics for Whales, a Sonnet

 

 

The VC structure, I learn from Chris’s
dissertation, The Age of 

Technical Neglect traces its lineage
Back to 

Whaling, the ‘wave of blood’ that was
19^th century’s extinction song 

VC culture, the imaginary of Silicon Valley
Is seeded in the death of the whales 

Consult Melville, to probe that mad complicity
In the annals of a U.S. whose exploitations 

never cease
manifest destiny’s economy 

that is to say
the great us was just surplus

 

 

 

 

 

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies at: https://youareinlovewiththeimpossible.substack.com/

 

 

Miranda Mellis : Coincidence is Poetry

For Denise Newman

 

 

 

we three are assigned to signs, second attention sees
co/incidence
deities woven throughout the web of creation 

when we discover continuity, our ordinariness
we simultaneously observe the fragmented guesswork of consciousness, how it
speculates, makes collages, connects experiences
to make a house inside infinity 

Denise says coincidence is poetry
self-other boundary collapses as she calls across the field
the answer that is no answer confirms space itself, refuge
of all silence and noise 

Denise says death is a kind of language
writes her elegy into the universe 

readers, writing is a mystical act
writings are conceptual whirlwinds, vortices
we enter them and spin
dialogue between living and dead, past and future 

Denise says
your adversary is you
the monster is a puppet 

is this why teachers say
invite the demons to tea?
give them an offering 

respect their need
to be known and seen 

the shapeshifter Proteus
caught in the mesh
has no final form
keeps changing
is mind

 

 

 

 

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies here.

 

Miranda Mellis : DRIVE SATISFACTION

 

 

 

He opens his mouth
He is a mouth!
A tongue in a mouth!
Licking stone. 

Can stars be habitat?
Habitus biomagnified.
Planetary magnitude
Stars alive, truth is structured like fiction. 

Today is think the lack day.
Make spiral calendar life plan
On big curves
There’s no wound in the absolute. 

Something missing drives us on
Loss is the interpretation of that.
Desire is interpreted as lack
Is ontological in that way. 

Absence is most generative
Puts you into play
The scent of fantasy
An impulse in the staging. 

What’s missing is lack
Repairing what was never there
Seascape with an ear
Early deprivation 

Has a mythical quality
Fidelity to the analytic event
Semblance means sense of the real
Experiment with ways out. 

The symptom: it doesn’t work.
It’s the exceptional thing
It’s the banana peel
On which the structure slips. 

Hospitality for the symptom is an ethos.
Something to do with the mind
A donkey tethering post
Or you could do nothing for thirty seconds 

You can’t ignore cause and effect
But then there’s an event.
Iron wall sitting means: stop at will
Move the assemblage point.

 

 

 

 

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody. With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies intermittently at: https://youareinlovewiththeimpossible.substack.com/

Miranda Mellis : on Unconsciousness Raising

 

 

 

 

Unconsciousness raising riffs, of course, on practices of consciousness raising which was in the air when I was growing up among feminists and activists in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. That was my first encounter with the term. Its psychoanalytic, psychedelic, and aesthetic valences came later.

Coming of age in a space where critical consciousness around norms is the norm, where consciousness is, ostensibly, raised, where in principle one is liberated–one is among the liberators–is full of paradoxes.

Some of us, maybe most of us, learn things ‘out of order’–one encounters a method, a term, in its present usages and only later learns its roots. Certainly, if you were raised by radicals as I was, you read against the canon before you learn the canon–if you ever do. You read French and Black feminism and queer theory, not Chaucer. You read Julia Kristeva before you read Freud. You read Audre Lorde before you read Plato. You read Adrienne Rich not Ezra Pound. You read Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire before you read John Dewey or William James. You are a creature of emergent properties. You never needed to come out of any closet; you were never in one. You are a product of revolutions, of revelations, of liberations. As Hélène Cixous put it, “My desires have invented new desires . . . I write by the other light.”

So, what will your awakening consist of, you children of revolutions, demystifications, and dis-alienations? Consciousness raising inaugurates reckoning, transparency, political change. (The unconscious ‘stops not being written’ as Lacan put it.) As a teleology, consciousness raising is a fantasy of arrival, but arriving, like insight, like understanding, is temporary.

In fiction there is the notion of the epiphany–a surge of awareness. The classical idea of a reversal of fortune, and of anagnorisis–the moment of recognition–is a result, narratively, of prior distributions of unconsciousness among any number of protagonists that all contribute contingently to the revelation. In the narrative trades, the colloquial notion of ‘the reveal’ gets at this.

Psychoanalysis is described as the unconscious of two people talking to each other, trying to . . . what? Find something out. Psychoanalysis as a detective story in which ‘the reveal’ keeps–now in a Borgesian way, now in a Zen way–dissolving into and becoming something else or becoming nothing (Cf ‘Detective Nothing’). That Oedipus is the core myth of the history of psychoanalysis is telling. Not romance or comedy, but rather tragedy is the genre of self-discovery. Nothing frees us from the knowledge that is tragedy, not politics, not philosophy, not religion, not technology. Perhaps an orientation towards non-knowledge helps–what do I know?

Another dimension of this collection–its ‘eco-poetics’–concerns the tragedy of creature life under the reign of capitalism and its requirements, its highways, factory farms, fragmentations, and enclosures. Thinking about light pollution, or ‘roadkill’ in these poems I am imagining my way into the beings of those creatures who must navigate ever more dangerous and alienating traversals, and the terrible loss all beings incur because of the dominance of anthropocentrism, profiteering ontology, and geographies of the car which proliferate unchecked, despite all the liberation movements which have benefited so many of us, animal liberation remains undone. Next on the liberation agenda: half-earth socialism? In which the claim is made–one that is hard to disagree with–that without robust provisions for more-than-human life, humankind has no future.

 

 

 

 

Miranda Mellis is the author of four books of fiction including Crocosmia (Nightboat, forthcoming 2025), The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist. Other publications include a book of aphorisms and prose poems, Demystifications, and several chapbooks: The Revolutionary, The Quarry, Materialisms and Unconsciousness raising, which recently appeared from above/ground press. She co-authored The Instead with Emily Abendroth and was an editor at The Encyclopedia Project. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in Olympia, Washington and teaches at Evergreen State College. http://mirandamellis.com