[Out-of-Print]
From the Foreword to Executive Orders, Volume III
After the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016, and following his 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 landscape. We began the project on Google Docs (where active writing continues), imagining that we would publish the work at various points in time in an effort to 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 January 2017 and February 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. The second volume was composed between January 2017 and March 2017 and contains all that was in the first volume, with additions and revisions. It resulted from the contributions of more than 50 authors and collaboration between the Organism for Poetic Research and a sister small press, the Operating System. The third volume was composed between January 2017 and February 2020 and is the work of over 100 contributors, some having participated in open writing sessions that took place in the lobby of the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. A list of signatories appears at the end of this text. Many contributors have opted to remain anonymous.
Executive Orders, vol. III, is published here, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a born-digital edition. It is freely available as a PDF download for reading and circulation.
We invite you to contribute to this document (to be published as a final fourth volume in 2021), and to sign on as a contributor on the contributors page, in one of a number of ways. You can contribute directly by adding your orders to the Google Doc via this link—bit.ly/executiveorders4u—and then adding your name to the end of the doc. Alternatively, your orders may be sent to the OPR email at organism [at] organismforpoeticresearch [dot] org and they will be added to the document by an editor. You can also tweet your orders to @OPRorg. And you may submit orders by snail mail to:
Organism for Poetic Research
C/O Alliya Dagman
244 Greene St.
New York, NY 10003
Thank you for your orders!
We will see that they take effect.