Joshua Clover in 2014. Photograph by Joe Mabel. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien dedicated his poem “Ray of Light,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, to Joshua Clover, the poet, scholar, and writer who passed away last year at the age of sixty-two. Clover’s life and work resisted easy categorization—the Marxist and “physicist of syllables,” as Jorie Graham once called him, wrote for both the academic and mainstream press, inflecting his poetry and prose with political critique and social theory, popular music and blockbuster films. “Again you sing how / Music and poetry lie / Between joke and gift, idea and gun,” O’Brien writes. “Hoping to be both / While destined to be neither.”

O’Brien is married the writer and Parapraxis founder Hannah Zeavin, who, in an essay for the Daily last year, recalled a conversation she had with Clover shortly before his death: “My friend Joshua Clover recently said to me, ‘We all know that the poems get worse after analysis, Hannah.’ ” Fortunately, the remit of our series Making of a Poem is more anecdotal than analytical, asking poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages, and give us a glimpse of the writer and their process—which, in O’Brien’s case, has much to do with his late friend.

You dedicated this poem to Joshua Clover. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with him, and his relationship with this poem?

Joshua was a friend, a friend in the art, and a comrade for more than thirty years, which included a substantial rift in the middle that made the eventual friendship’s resumption even more crucial. I expected decades more with him. At seven in the morning on April 27, 2025, I got a call from his partner saying he had died overnight. He’d been battling a very serious and bafflingly unexplained illness and was in the hospital, but nobody thought he was on the point of death. After all the work of telling others that morning about this devastating new fact, I sat there stunned, and this poem came out of me just about exactly as it now stands. I didn’t intend to write a poem, and if you’d asked me if I wanted to, I would have said no. But it came out of basic elegiac instinct to present him in his departure.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The poem starts with the word “Left,” which is doing a lot of work, indicating Joshua’s actual passing away, but also what he left the world, including his practical dream of another, better one. Because “Left” is also the adjective for a radical politic like Joshua’s, one that refused the present state of things and testified to that in writing, in classrooms, and in the streets. 

The polysemy in that first word is my way of trying to capture all the things he was and did, and to have a reader tarry with all its senses—a stance, a bequeathing, a body that can no longer remain in the world. It is also my secret communication with him, which he can never receive, and an attempt to make “Left” stay—it is the first word, not the last.

What were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this? And were those things at all inflected by Clover, who, in addition to his poetry and political writing, wrote often and seriously about music and popular culture? 

Joshua could blast any musical genre while pursuing any kind of writing. Over decades, I watched him refine his account of music and popular culture into an exquisite, painful materialist account of why those forms do what they do, and what they don’t. See, for example, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About and Roadrunner: A Song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers or How I Quit Spin (in about 200 Tweets), where I happen to feature as the friend who was with him on 9/11. 

Unlike Joshua, I can’t let those kinds of corporate cultural products in when trying to compose. I have to have “Left the world” a little to return to it with a poem. But the poem does refer to his first book of poems, Madonna Anno Domini, and to the book about Richman’s song, as well as to the book he was still writing at his death, which we will never receive.

Where did you write this poem? Can you share photos of your workspace, or workspaces?

I wrote it on my bed, which is too often my workspace, maybe for the reason I gave above about needing to be away from the world of work in as many ways as I can, as fully as I can.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

Easily feels like the wrong adverb, but it came immediately. Reading it afterward, I’m particularly interested in the line that keeps rearranging its syntax—

Here is what he taught me:

becomes

Here taught me what he is:

then finally

He taught me what here is:

—as though I’m fighting the determination of syntactic fate when I can’t fight the fact of his end or the “here” I have to face without him. I also think he would have liked “Goods are bad elegies” for its conversion of elegy into an expression of the dead labor in the commodity and for the false opposition between “goods” and “bad.” 

In addition to all the other forms of his brilliance, he is the cleverest person I have ever known, able to raise that possibly pejorative and cringey mode until it feels like communion and a small necessary pleasure inside a burning world. I felt in that line like I was talking to him, bantering with him even in his goneness.

What was the challenge of this particular poem? 

In a way, the same as with any poem—how to end. But that question of closure—I now hear “Clover” in that word—carries a special kind of weight and difficulty in elegy, where you are ceasing to speak to or of the beloved and suddenly are facing the terminal again in the very artifact that was supposed to reopen or sustain that person’s life. The poem’s last line is “Our enemy has no shape,” and it links us in its first person plural, celebrates how important his thought and art were to describing the shapelessness of capital, and indicates the difficulty of the work still to come. That’s as close as I could come to stopping without ending.

I guess I should add this wasn’t technically the end of the poem, since I titled it afterwards, returning to its pre-beginning as though on a ring road, like the one Joshua identifies in Jonathan Richman’s song. The title can obviously be metaphorized in many ways, but its loudest sentimentality to me is its serving as the name of a song by Madonna, for whom Joshua had a nearly lifelong love.

Strangely, he and my wife, Hannah Zeavin, had been talking about this song a lot in the weeks before his death. Joshua told her that the most beautiful piece of music criticism in history, which now I can’t find, was a single sentence review of that album—“She got knocked down, but she got up again.” To make a poem for this poet and anticapitalist and cultural critic whose title comes from the Queen of Pop was another form of honoring his manyness—and the high, low, and middle of the “here” we shared with commerce and with him.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of five poetry collections and a professor of English at UC Berkeley.