“Swarming, in other words, maximizes the advantages of formlessness over form…Because such action is self-organizing and self-producing…it is liable to occur spontaneously at all levels of social organization…Not only does Swarm threaten Empire’s monuments and armies…At the level of language, swarming is a sign of poetic activity.”

–Andrew Joron, “Terror Conduction,” The Cry at Zero

Over at Big Lucks, there is a Mike Young poem flapping open with some blankspaces that need filling. The poem is from a chapbook SOON TO COME called Who Can Make It. Maybe it’s a title about survival. Maybe it’s a title about creation. Either way, Big Lucks and Mike Young want you to go visit those blankspaces in Mike Young’s poem with your stormwords, with your birdclouds. Go to the website and fill in the blankspaces and maybe you get a glow shout in the acknowledgments / a chance to be in the newest issue of Big Lucks. Yeah? I think it seems like the kill rhythm. I think it seems like the way to get some colored fumes around here. Winners will be announced on the Big Lucks FB page in January. 

Many of these footprints were in large numbers close together and, just by looking quietly at them, men, who themselves originally lived in small hordes, were made aware of the contrast between their own number and the enormous numbers of some animal herds. They were always hungry and on the watch for game; and the more there was of it the better for them. But they also wanted to be more than themselves. Man’s feeling for his own increase was always strong and is certainly not to be understood only as his urge for self-propagation. Men wanted to be more, then and there; the large numbers of the herd which they hunted blended, in their feeling with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which I shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

-Elias Canetti, “Rhythm,” Crowds and Power