After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a group of poets, artists, and activists conceived of a project wherein they could respond to the sudden and seemingly relentless barrage of Trump’s dystopian executive orders with a series of their own orders. The project, titled “Executive Orders,” was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, “emergency” prose poem that would generate real-time responses to current events and the emerging American political landscape. The result was a poetic catalog of the people’s executive orders—orders that are at turns serious, absurd, satirical, philosophical, critical, utopian, and so on.
Executive Orders began as one community’s effort to cope with and respond to the tidal wave of reactionary policies enacted or proclaimed during the years of Trump’s first administration. As an index of historical happenings that charts events in rough chronological order (including the Muslim-country travel ban, Black Lives Matter protests, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the youth climate march, the January 6th riot at the US Capitol, and many other events), it stands as a documentary record of this historical period from the perspective of artists, writers, leftists, progressives, and other contributors, many of them anonymous. Executive Orders is also an experiment in crowdsourced collaborative making that tells a story about the ways we can—and can’t—come together to form a collective that could have a voice in political deliberations.
About the Editors
The Organism for Poetic Research is a platform for experimental poetics formed in 2011 by a group of poets, artists, and scholars centered in Lenapehoking/New York City. The OPR hosts events and readings, and produces multimedia publications, chapbooks, and an occasional journal, Pelt.
Andrew Michael Gorin is a writer, teacher, and emeritus co-director of the Organism for Poetic Research. He’s the author of Simple Location (above/ground, 2023) and Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017), and his poetry and critical work have appeared in Chicago Review, Criticism, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other venues.
Rachael Guynn Wilson is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in 16 Poems for Philip Guston by Clark Coolidge (Container Corps, 2022), apricota, The Baffler, Brooklyn Rail, The Distance Plan, Hyperallergic, Jacket2, Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna* Series), Ritual and Capital (Bard + Wendy’s Subway), and elsewhere. She is a co-founder of the Organism for Poetic Research, a member of Belladonna* Collaborative, and Managing Editor at Litmus Press.