2nd Ave Poetry vol. 3: the "occult" issue

2nd Ave Poetry's "occult" issue is live. Thanks to Emmy Catedral and Paolo Javier for their excellent work editing and designing the issue. Contributors include:


DODIE BELLAMY
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
CHARLES BORKHUIS
LAYNIE BROWNE
HECTOR CANONGE
EMMY CATEDRAL
ALAN CLINTON
ERNEST CONCEPCION
CA CONRAD
BRENDA COULTAS
YAGO CURA
TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA
THOM DONOVAN
DENISE DUHAMEL
R.M. ENGELHARDT
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
JONNY FARROW
THOMAS FINK
LYN GOERINGER
STEPHANIE GRAY
JOHN HARKEY
MITCH HIGHFILL
MATT JONES
VINCENT KATZ
KEVIN KILLIAN
DOROTHEA LASKY
MARK LAMOUREAUX
GERRIT LANSING
R. ZAMORA LINMARK
JILL MAGI
FILIP MARINOVICH
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN
JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
RUSTY MORRISON
CAITLIN PARKER
TIM PETERSON
SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH
LESLIE SCALAPINO
FRANK SHERLOCK
TONI SIMON
KELLY SPIVEY
PRISCILLA STADLER
JEREMY JF THOMPSON

Vancouver Poem

The mountains around the city
Sounds they make blue
On the retina in the ear
Resound a commons what will have been
The time of year not weather
Not the names of these
Places no longer there
The people we took never given back
To a useless and unused air

There are plenitudes in what we do not
Possess, in which sound dispossesses
Our future property took like the real
Announcing exactly where we are
In relation to who or what externalities
Banalities like belief

So hack spirit, come hack this
Spirit enclosure up, talk to the man
Like he won't come back from empire
Like power can't do anything about this

So hack spirit, hack me up
Take my name or don't take it
Multiplicity see if I care
Division matters because we are born
That strived-for-never-in-fact-
Existing-ever-imminent-commons
In our swagger in fact matters.

A Grave in Exchange for the Commons

Here goes a paragraph from the piece I presented for the Project on the Commons in Vancouver this past weekend. Thanks again to Stephen Collis for making the event happen, and to Taylor, Rob, Steve, Donato, Cecily, Aaron, and others for their incredible participation. We are hoping to have some new materials about the project up at the Nonsite Collective's website soon:

One of the great ironies of the European notion of commons in regards to a Black (America) Radical Aesthetic tradition, as the poet and theoretician Fred Moten points out, is the extent to which it cannot account for the African-American slave, whose subjectivity and subjection was of course defined by its status as a commodity and by a certain logic of value endemic to the North Atlantic Slave trade in conjunction with primitive accumulation. Moten draws out this irony of a collective desideratum for a commons where he cites the well-known passage from Capital in which Marx identifies the commodity as that which is silent, passive, and worldless. Against Marx’s formulation, which cannot account for slave subjectivity, Moten insists that the Black Radical Aesthetic tradition is defined by the fact that through the Blues and other Black aesthetic forms the commodity cum slave does indeed talk (back), if only through the ambivalence of its subjective origins and erstwhile commodity status, the body radically objectified through slavery and the body becoming subject in equally radical fashion through particular modes of performance born through and after the condition of slavery. What can the conditions of African-American slavery and the Black Radical Aesthetic tradition issuing from that tradition teach us about a commons and an activity of commoning? How does a commons emerge through the freedom drive of a slave subjectivity, subjectivity divided by its radical status as an object of private property (commodity) and of the fact of its human-animal species being?
from "A Grave in Exchange for the Commons: Commoning and the Resistance of the Object"