Description

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Drama. Art. Hybrid Genre. After the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016 and following his subsequent inauguration in January 2017, 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 orders--at times serious, lampooning, absurdist, sincere, satirical, utopian, and so on.

The project, titled "Executive Orders," was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, prose poem that would unfold real-time responses to current events and the U.S. socio-political scape. We began the project on Google Docs (where active writing on the project continues), imagining that we would publish the project at various points in time, in an effort to further disseminate the work, draw in new collaborators, and document the project in various states as it continued to expand and evolve.

The first volume of Executive Orders was composed online between Jan. 24, 2017 and Feb. 9, 2017, and was then published by The Organism for Poetic Research as a staple-bound zine in an edition of 50 copies. It had 15 contributors and was 43 pages long. While VOLUME 1 captured the document in the state it had reached as of Feb. 9, 2017, the Google Doc remained (and still remains) a continuous working space. The second volume was composed between Jan. 24, 2017 and Dec. 28, 2017 and contains all that was in this first volume, with additions and revisions. It results from the contributions of more than 50 authors and collaboration between the Organism for Poetic Research and the Operating System. Our small press collaboration goes beyond a traditional co-publishing model and involved organizing and hosting an open writing session at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on November 4, 2017 wherein we solicited orders from library patrons and passersby outside the library.

"In EXECUTIVE ORDERS, we find ourselves on a wild ride through a landscape deformed by the destructive prerogatives of an obscene government, but lush with wildlife from some not-fully-seen political beyond--some of it beautiful, some of it hilarious. It offers a composite picture of one community's struggle to keep sane in the growing shadow of mere anarchy."--Ian Dreiblatt

The Operating System encourages readers to submit: bit.ly/executiveorders4u.