about
not your average police blotter…
crime comes in all forms, from the invisible * cough * corporate welfare * cough *, to ted bundy, to everyday expressions of internal chaos, to civil disobedience, to acts that might not even be criminalized in a different time and place. these haiku are as much about the lines that define criminality and the sleights of language that make some crimes invisible and turn others into spectacle as they are about the crimes themselves.
as a resident of the northside of minneapolis, i started following police scanner pages in social media as a practical means of risk management. i try to capture some of the texture of what the lived experience in this environment feels like. headlines capture the 50 or so annual homicides, but they don’t capture the daily disruption, surprise, humor, and overarching sadness. in this sense, life on the northside was the best preparation i could have had for the current political turmoil, and in a sense, now looks like the canary in the coalmine for the current death-throes of our democracy and, indeed, the planet. i no longer live on the northside. in a sense, though, i think we are all starting to get a taste of what living on the northside felt like: the stress, the glaring, in-your-face inequality, the inescapable awareness of our lives being shaped by “the suits.”
probably below average haiku…
the writing here is probably better described as “haiku” rather than haiku. i like to count. maybe it’s just a coping mechanism for dealing with chaos, both internal and external. i sometimes allude to other conventions of this very specifically japanese cultural form, but, while adopting some features of the form within a very different cultural context, most often find myself pushing against them, almost always with a sense of loss: the banal in place of the poignant, the found in place of the individual, the commodified in place of the crafted.
although not my conscious intent, i think what i may have been groping toward, by juxtaposing these two seemingly unrelated literary and/or podcast genres, is how each points up the impossibility of the other in this moment in history: what crime is “true crime,” when the law is written by kleptocrats? what is traditional about “seasons” in the era of climate chaos?