A page from Teju Cole’s “Erasures.”

When a writer or a translator strips a well-known work down to its essence, as Alice Oswald had done with The Iliad in Memorial, the narrative takes on almost new meaning. In her afterword to Memorial, Eavan Boland writes, “[The soldiers] have already been named by Homer in the Iliad. Now Alice Oswald names them again . . . But why, the reader might ask, do these young men need to die again?” Why indeed? Oswald’s intention was to strip away narrative altogether, to create a simple “oral cemetery,” but in claiming The Iliad for herself, she participated in the narrative of appropriation and revival. These many names had been recited and sung in Homer’s time, and Oswald reminds us that they will continue to be recited and sung in ours, and in future generations.

The most recent iteration of this naming is a conceptual poem called “Kill List” by Josef Kaplan. The title points to President Obama‘s no-longer-secret kill list, with each page identifying four poets. The banality of the groupings of the poets’ names is complemented by the banality of the bourgeois categories of him or her being “comfortable” or being “a rich poet.” The simple structure of these sentences is repeated again and again, because only one nugget of information is being—needs to be—transmitted.

Steve Benson is comfortable.
Caroline Bergvall is a rich poet.
Jasper Bernes is a rich poet.
Charles Bernstein is a rich poet.

The identities of these poets is illuminating in this context. Many are recognizable, and many are emerging. Yet the people behind the names are almost irrelevant here. Jasper Bernes is not rich, but when I think of the worlds and words he tackles and takes apart, I believe him to be very rich indeed. Here, he and the other poets hold up the structure of the context, and are not actual targets. A literal response by some poets listed here can be equally illuminating: “I am certainly not rich, therefore I don’t deserve to be on this particular list.” That a poet can respond to “Kill List” at all is a great thing — she is alive, will create (we hope) new work for her readers, and has been memorialized along with 231 poets in a very specifically violent time in our history.

A lateral angle into reading “Kill List” might be something like Joyelle McSweeney‘s defense of it, in which she compares it to Inger Christensen‘s Alphabet. The key to these two collections, McSweeney writes, is the verb repeated in each line: “is” in the former, and “exists” in the latter.

As each noun in Christensen’s poem comes into view, the poem remarks it “exists.” But I also felt this word “exists” could function as meaning the opposite — each of these things “exists” at the exact moment it leaves the planet. Alphabet is as much a cold war poem, “existing” in the split second between the dropping of a nuclear bomb and its impact, as Kill List is a drone war poem. Both invite us to think about how poetry “exists” under the aeriel penumbra of war. Both make us realize how puny “existence” is, how puny “is” is. The incommensurateness between the title’s reference to the supposed “inhumanity” of drone warfare (I think drone warfare is humanity itself) and the poem itself might be the point of this poem.

In the list of children killed by drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, the name, age, and gender for each child is separated by a vertical line. Teju Cole gathered thirty-five of these names and ages into “Erasures,” which presents a catalog of photographs of each name he’d written down on a sheet of lined paper and then erased. I’ve copied down the ages:

3
16
8
14
11
8
14
12
11
12
13
9
7
5
4
8
10
17
10
13
9
4
3
1
6
4
15
15
8
12
9
4
2
12
9

In itself these lists of children’s names and ages are stark reminders of what’s been lost, eradicated, and removed as a result of war in general, and of drone warfare in particular. If we repeat mention of these names and the method in which they died, as both Homer and Oswald had done in memorializing the Greek and Trojan soldiers, and if we can slip in the verb “was” or “existed” or their various cousins, such lists can situate the names of the dead (or soon-to-be-dead) in yet other contexts, such as that within political discourse as conceptual art or vice versa. At the same time, this repeated recognition and acknowledgment of all the names, with a simple verb tacked on, return life and humanity to those who’d owned them. This life would be brief, however, because the verbs must, by definition of war, of what a kill list represents, be in the past tense.