Unlike so many writers who have memorialized Joshua over the past few months, I cannot lay claim to intimate friendship. I have no moving stories about him stealing transphobic TPUSA signs or confronting Oakland PD at a demo, no firsthand experience with his extraordinary organizing and pedagogical capabilities, no cherished memories from Marx Camp. Despite our having, at minimum, a dozen mutual friends, Joshua and I never even met in person. We knew each other as communist poets trying to practice the poetics of communism, a relatively small group whose practitioners tend to find each other, one way or another. Yet care, loss, and grief are feelings not strictly governed by personal interaction. Anyone who has ever loved poetry knows that you can grieve a poet born centuries before you, one who died a few months ago, even one who’s still alive. Anyone who’s ever loved communism knows that you must grieve all your comrades, no matter where the forces of history and geography may have thrown them.
So much has been written about Joshua and his life-work that I am overwhelmed at the prospect of adding to this archive. In her tribute for The Nation, Juliana Spahr untangles his “many lives” as a militant, political theorist, poet, and animal lover.[1] His comrades at the Marxist Institute for Research have written beautifully about his immense contributions to contemporary Marxism, in particular to theories of capitalist crisis and the value-form. They discuss how texts like Riot. Strike. Riot fundamentally reoriented our understanding of class struggle and popular uprisings from the eighteenth century to the George Floyd rebellion.[2] My tribute rests on a much more modest foundation: his last published poem, which appeared in my magazine last year.[3]
“Poem (Sept 26, 2023)” contains little in the way of “poetic” language, no explicit governing metaphor or image system. This absence of aestheticization is one of the reasons I published it and why it remains one of my favorite Clover poems. Its force depends upon what we might call a historical index, a particular way of organizing the relations of global struggle within the poem. The piece begins in Santiago, Chile—which is, to put it mildly, a historically overdetermined place. It’s where Chilean socialism came to power for a brief three years until it was gruesomely dismantled with US imperialist backing. It is also a central location of the estallido social, a working-class rebellion nominally against metro fare hikes but which took on the generalized character of revolution against neoliberal austerity and capital’s circuitry.[4]
The poem’s speaker sits in the sanctuary atop Cerro San Cristóbal, looking out over the city. He had, I imagine, just been inside the church, which doubles as the base of a huge statue of Mary. Before Spanish colonization, the area was known to the Mapuche as “Tupawe,” Mapudungun for “place of tupa flowers.” The statue and sanctuary were constructed in 1908 on land donated to the Chilean state by the Archbishop of Santiago, and John Paul II prayed there in 1987. Now, in this tangle of history, the speaker finds himself on a bench reading “the poet Kanafani’s” Revolution of 1936–1939. He is thinking about the inevitable next uprising less than two weeks before October 7, 2023. The poem then indexes Kanafani’s book, listing its chapter titles (The Workers, The Peasants, The Intellectuals, Revolution) and remarking its structural similarities to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Suddenly, the estallido bursts through these formal descriptions: “In Santiago it is four years since / the estaillido social. There is still smoke everywhere and downtown / spontaneous goth style.” Through the stylized smoke, rebellions in Palestine, Oakland, Standing Rock, and Minneapolis appear, bound together by grammar:
The revolution
in Palestine is not over. It is twelve years since the Port of Oakland
which is not over. It is eight years since Standing Rock
which is not over. It is three years since the George Floyd Uprising
which is not over.
In evoking these events, Joshua’s lines sway between “it is __ years since” and “which is not over,” between a memorial and a provocation to comrades and enemies alike. The latter phrase stacks up on the page like layers of sediment, forming a geology of unrest that mirrors the colonial history of the cerro itself. These grammatical displacements disrupt the linearity of time, dragging the revolutionary past kicking and screaming into the present. Indexing history in this way, the poem asserts the continuity of global class struggle.
Continuities emerge, too, in Joshua’s universalization of his speaker’s identity: “I sat there with the history,” he writes, “and I / sat there with the book like everybody does.” Importantly, this is the last time the poem will use the first person. The speaker quietly abolishes himself by dissolving into the movements of history and literature. The rest of the lines invite us to take the speaker’s place and observe the landscape’s past and future at once:
Santiago is a vast city, vaster than you imagined. You can see
there will not be enough water soon. You can see the stadium
where many people were tortured and killed, some of whom were
Victor Jara.
Here, even Víctor Jara, the martyred folk poet of Chilean socialism, is generalized, multiplied, actualized as a collective being. Through the speaker’s self-abolition, we come to understand the conditions of our emergence as participants in struggle—as one of many Víctor Jaras, Ghassan Kanafanis, Joshua Clovers.
The poem ends by asserting its central thesis, derived from the historical index it has developed over the preceding lines: “Nothing is over, that is the only certainty. / The other certainty is that everything ends, even this.” Nothing is over; everything ends. It’s difficult to grasp the historical pressures weighing on the poem, both at its moment of composition and through its continued circulation. Publishing it in 2024, I felt history squeezing the text from all directions. Writing about it now, those pressures have only intensified, rendering Joshua’s prescience all the more staggering: US warships and reaper drones menace the Latin American coast in an absurd reenactment of gunboat diplomacy; Palestinians heroically resist Israel’s genocide, the apogee of a colonial process they have resisted for nearly a hundred years; American cities are riven by military occupation and throttled by the same purgative violence that created and maintained them for centuries. We are living under the dictatorship of these never-ending endings, in which the coming water wars merge with the Chilean coup and the Palestinian revolution converges with the Palestinian genocide. This is the dialectic of the poem as class struggle, which is the dialectic of history, which is the dialectic of our composite and contradictory selves. As we continue to mourn Joshua’s absence, we should remember that the long poem binding us together isn’t over, either, even when it ends.
Notes:
[1] Juliana Spahr, “The Many Lives of Joshua Clover (1962–2025),” The Nation, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/joshua-clover-obituary-uc-davis/.
[2] See Chris Chen et. al, “Joshua Clover, Rest in Power,” Verso, 2025, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/joshua-clover-rest-in-power.
[3] Joshua Clover, “Poem (Sept 26, 2023),” Protean, 2024, https://proteanmag.com/2024/07/06/poem-sept-26-2023/.
[4] See “Chile: A woman climbs high up a pole, disables a police camera and falls into the arms of the crowd” Youtube, October 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3daPpBspHg8.