Is the poem activated by context?

Is the poem resisting containment by the textual grid?

Is the poem insurrectionary, activist, informed by a neo-Marxist economic and historical perspective?

Is the poem in conversation with verbal art traditions of native peoples of its continent?

Does the poem’s language frustrate, complicate, and reinvent common sense letter by syllable by painstaking word?

Does it exhibit an advanced ability to manipulate form and content to a well-chosen intentional effect?

Does it evoke an intense somatic response in the reader?

If the poem borrows, copies, plagiarizes, appropriates, etc., does it do so with what the Situationists called détournement (provisional artistic attempts to turn the capitalist spectacle against itself)?

Is the poem attentive to ways that punctuation polices the body?

Is the poem littered with a few glam-tags of theory or academic jargon, “personal” references to everyday experience (often involving name dropping), and expertise on commodity fields of various kinds—especially pop music, but dabs of high culture, too?

Does the poem demonstrate stylistic and formal sophistication?

Has the poem acclimated itself to intensifying struggles in crisis-produced terrains of breakdown and ever-increasing privatization?

Does the poem represent the human and animal creatures it describes as persons, as objects, as metonyms, or as vehicles for metaphor?

Does it blend the jargons of social economy and sexual taxonomy?

Does the poem revise patriarchal narrative tropes, patriarchal histories and patriarchal language structures?

Does it come from this place of inter/ruption, of eruption and irruption?

Does it use enjambment and composition by field to explore alternatives to the limit of the sentence?

Does it capture the young artist struggling to survive?

Does the poem overturn the longstanding presumption of difficulty and intransitivity in avant-garde writing, the product of outdated models of oppositionality and alienation?

Does it highlight the raced and gendered body?

Does it push beyond commitments to certain rigidly process-based notions of conceptualism?

Does it show evidence of understanding basic conventions of the genre of poetry by employing elements of craft, e.g., pacing, point of view, imagery, and characterization, at a basic level?

Is the reader changed by the ritual that is the reading of the poem, and therefore, to a minuscule degree, the world changed accordingly?

Does the poem show awareness of: collage techniques; paranomasia; “field composition”; oneiric logic; appropriative strategies; the problematics around lyric subjectivity; prosodic temporality as a flexible architecture or volume?

Is the poem accessible?

Is the poem a ritual work masquerading as a conceptual work? is it masquerading as something else while doing another kind of work (how african spiritual and cultural practices have survived the hostile societies of the afrospora, and how certain indigenous cultural practices survive the present day christianization and islamicization in africa)?

To what degree does the poem trouble notions of productivity and generativity as concepts associated with progress and industry?

To what degree is the poem marked out as having been generated by a dominant culture? a nondominant culture?

Is the poem generatively difficult?

Is the poem employing rhythm and soundplay to induce a somatic reverie in the reader?

Does the poem assert heterosexual norms?

Does its relationship with authorship signal an antipathy to notions of authorial control as means for false individualist consciousness or even fascism?

Does the poem touch you?

Does its relationship with authorship show awareness of the exploitative potential of appropriation?

Does the poem show awareness of itself as a commodity in a chain of supply and demand?

Does the poem address taboo subjects?

To what degree is the poem consciously participating in responsibility for climate change?

Does the poem show awareness of its lineage and influences?

Does the poem rake the angle of convergence between financial lingo, the latest Marxist terminology, and commodity culture?

Is the poem participating in human reproductive labor by refreshing minds so that they can look anew at the world and feel able to go on?