To have parents who sacrificed for upward mobility – and still you chose poetry? (And bookselling.) It’s chastening. In ‘Are You Ready Poem’, an imam asks about the family. Ender’s father says “hesagoodboy but no direction”. The imam goes in to bat for Ender: “poets write the world into being / are remembered forever / my father considers this / wonders if im a poet” (28). Can’t win, can you? Gain approval, respectability, and soon your folks start asking, How’s that poetry coming along? I dunno, Dad. How many worlds have you constructed lately?

Still. There’s beauty in the following lines, taken from ‘On The Peoples Beach’. They speak back to this moment some fifty pages later:

i feel like im ok at being grateful / at least nowadays 
largely because i never saw a future no glory no arc
so its all bonus now life
(72)

Meanwhile in ‘Are You Ready Poem’, Ender recalls a friend “trying to become a firefighter now so that he can become an artist”. The paths not taken. The what-might-have-been. Roads foreclosed, denied or turned from. They haunt you. Put into private school, Ender writes, “tried for government jobs / tried for grad programs / rejected / confused”. So instead: moving furniture, hospo, call centres, warehousing, manual labour, maintenance, school caretaker and, eventually, the bookstore.

Have children, though, and you’ll no longer need books. (Your children start trying to read you.)

The kids’ babble channels some of Ania Walwicz and Π. O. Musketeers is a veritable chorus of voices and language play. There’s heard speech, reported speech, retorted speech. Receiving a sun-like figure from a jeweller in ‘Lion Kink’, Ender recalls the words of French writer and philosopher George Bataille: “the sun gives without ever receiving” (132). If there’s a pun here, it’s bittersweet. Only Ender can make Bataille sound like a wellness instructor. Like Blue of Noon really is just a book about a nice sunset.

It’s funny, age and family. Watching your parents on the one hand, kids on the other, seeing something of each transmit in either direction:

theyre softening as they age / my parents 
one of the doves even 
walked into the house 
and mum said 
emily! what are you doing in here?
(‘Lion Kink’, 120)

Kids, ageing parents: real poets! Noisy and unruly and versed in dada without even trying. Cataloguing his kids’ portmanteaux, noise is no longer noise. Instead, it’s creative. Productive excess. It resists control, marketisation, capital.

The way Ender writes about noise reminds me of Michel Serres’ observation that “noise is the world itself”. Noise isn’t Marx’s surplus value; it’s Bataille’s sublime excess. What are you, some kind of monster? Let children hum, babble, sing and have some snot running down their face, for chrissakes!

Because being against capital means being for life. Family-as-praxis also means family-as-safety-net: “the dead labour of my family secures me / and my kids / my partner” (‘Get Your Overalls On’, 57). Because the life of the arts is a death rattle. Constant cuts and defunding. Every conceivable chaos happening at once. (A bit like having kids.)

Keen as Ender is to invoke Marx in these situations, though, I have to say I prefer Ender himself to old mate. Ender’s politics make room for friendship’s political valence. Marx got along with Engels like a house on fire – yet where is friendship in Marx’s account of political solidarity? Was it too private? Not violent or edgy enough? Not as big and bad as class conflict and labour relations? What was the big poo-poo head so afraid of?

Ender, on the other hand, meets organisational requirements:

✓ Mentions friends by name.
✓ Talks about the music they listen to together. (Scatman BEE BOP BAH BA DAH BOPE.) 

That’s just more my vibe. Friends and neighbours who dispel false consciousness, nostalgia, empty sentimentality; who know how and when to speak uncomfortable truths; who tell you things no one else will – keep them close.

Ender understands love is a social condition (but never reducible to social conditions). Reading about Cem Karaca singing of an uptown lover in ’75, you realise he’s a daddy (or sibling?) to Billy Joel, who did the same in ’83. Ender detects a note of militancy in Karaca’s closing refrain: “unut dedi romanları işçisin sen işçi kal giy dedi tulumları / forget the novels – you are a worker – stay a worker – get your overalls on” (‘Get Your Overalls On’, 54). Turkish rock and pop: not just about “naive love”. It’s about social forces. Rallying the troops.

But what happens when large parts of the most meaningful social conditions revolve around love? What gets you up in the morning?

Often what makes life worth living is love, however naive or silly or serious. Love of children. Loving the first time you saw your partner (loving the last time you looked at them, too). Loving one’s parents. Love for having become a parent oneself.

So if your daughter says, “dad lets go for a long adventure”, know this: that’s just theorising.

Practice is when you tell them: “we’re on one.”