Notes

“tackle the topic of surveillance from every conceivable angle”—but conceptually diaphanous. Fault does not reside with the poems, in the end; the main obstacle to anthologizing the “Age of Surveillance” is the slippery nature of our fears, and their basis in even more elusive conceptions of privacy.

Others play to the state’s perpetual gaze, offering negation (slanted surfaces, studied emptiness) as defense. The most exciting of these (like CA Conrad) reject negation and locate instead an opportunity for a disruptive theater of the absurd. Still others (Harmony Holiday, Ben Fama among others) suggest velocity and/or volume as an antidote to an all-seeing eye. The only thing more paralyzing than limited information, they suggest, is all of the information. Too seldom, however, do the poems enact the inherent reciprocity of surveillance today, including the way in which technology allows citizens to watch (and regulate) the government (video of brutality, the push for police body-cams) or, for better or worse, our fellow citizens. There are exceptions. Nikki Giovanni’s “Surveillance,” for instance, balances social and governmental indifference to domestic violence against the primacy of the individual witness. At their best, the poems of Privacy Policy manage to embody the complexity of our notions of privacy, including the myriad ways we commodify it (and ourselves) for the sake of convenience or attention. Few poems do so as successfully as Cathy Park Hong’s “Inside Beyonce,” which dramatizes the porous borders of subjectivity, smartly reframing the lyric’s old-hat subject-object relationship in quasi-cyborgian terms.