Intellectual Property as a Result
recently I signed a contract / which stipulates anything / I conceive of as a result / of the job belongs to the job
Intellectual Property as a Result
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Editors note: T. Liem’s “Intellectual Property As A Result” is a poetic investigation of the workday and its discontents. Liem suggests we are on the clock even when we are off the clock; even a poem written in the late hours of a day might not fully belong to us. Is there a trick to writing against capitalist time or do we “spit / out word upon word / upon word like a pump / in a mall fountain?” Liem doesn’t hand down any final verdicts, but she does strike a note of wonder, however minor, about the “awfully joyous nights” when all we have are our bodies and all we can do is make love with them. The thin walls of our apartments, like “a ceiling / that is also a floor,” index, for better and worse, our interconnectedness in a struggle against exploitation that maybe love and art can be antidotes for. Like Liem, we’ve all “said many words / and meant them.” We have to keep saying them.
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, poetry editor
T. Liem is the author of OBITS. (Coach House 2018), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as well as the the A.M. Klein Prize. Her writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal, Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.
More in this series
and though the odds say improbable
they ain’t superhuman. ain’t always able / to save the children the men the country or even your silk presses / but whatever they touch. somebody’s good god blesses.
I’m not like you
and don’t you ever forget / it takes practice to access what you demolished / when you see us / you feel something for the first time
