Critiphoria 2

The new Critiphoria has a lot of great content, including a feature on Radical Poetics & Secular Jewish Culture. However I am particularly looking forward to spending time with these critical offerings:

Steve Benson: Introduction, Performance Text (“to write”), and Live Notes (“m&Msum”)

Abigail Child: FORM AND CONTENT: The Continuing Use Value of Dialogue

Bhanu Kapil: LIBERIA, INDIA, COLOMBIA, SERBIA: ia: [An aesthetics of non-violence. Notes for the book to come.]

Robert Kocik: THE PROSODY BUILDING

James Sherry: Appendix A: How Language Writing Got Its Period

Rodrigo Toscano & Natalie Knight: from “Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception”

Stephanie Young: on Live Film Narration

Utopian/Distopian

for Charles & Rit

Like names falling through
Old levels sounds like
In the open of the public
Eye we are vulnerable
Scrutinized not just for the poems
Sounds they make on the inside

How they still how they don't
Make us whole but the whole
World flickers the time
They take to get outside
And sense not just this sense
Of the mind's survival.


Wants to put
The me back in you

Scratch that
The eyes out
From a fault line
In the ear

I its epicenter
Equivocal of a
Thousand shades

Clear now in your
Tears an idea
Of we

A tenuous this
The future breaks
Upon, opening.


Wants to put
The you back in me

If no other things
The sense of things
Being together

Whole only in
Their potentia

Which is not
False equivalence

Semblance just
A taste of paradise
In this life

Though there is
No other of which
We may speak.


Context relies on ash
When what we will be is blank
As facts without the moon
The surface of the moon
To which they are attached
Words only make more knots
A cage to which the bird
Must refer in some future tense
So that we can make sense
So that the abstract can seem real.


Libraries there are
That are made in the mind
And which we never read the entirety of
And which yet affect us
As though we had read
Everything they contain

That is how it felt
To be with you today
Shaped by words which never
Alone will be mine.

Art Strike Anyone? (@ Harriet)

here

"Examining the documentation of Hsieh’s one-year performances make me think about all that the artist must have experienced while not making art objects, that is, while withdrawing from an economy involved with visual art. And this seems the point of the work: to imagine the vanishing of art itself for lived social practices as a limit of aesthetic autonomy. What, for example, could have kept the artist’s mind and body active while refusing to go outside the confines of a cell for a year (an experience obviously lived daily by actual detainees)? What social difficulties and practical dilemmas did the artist encounter while remaining outdoors in the streets of New York City (the state of necessity, obviously, of all homeless, itinerant, and displaced people living in the city). What daily struggles does one face with another individual whose most private needs can not be extricated from one’s own (a fact we all face cohabitating with others, only not usually on such extreme terms)? Finally, what can we consider the work of art when what comprises the work itself is the avoidance of working—to not give one’s labor power to art as it is expressed by a set of cultural practices and activities?"