Rights of Participation (II)

If this is called inclusion
Count me out

Love absorbs an order of the cops

Patrolling their reward
In paradise purportedly

Where a billion affects have failed
There is a feeling

Of freshness for you in me

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Or being left behind

In the messaging of our waking dream
Affection absorbs a structure

Invisibly touched, patrolling its reward

If hell is friendship where a billion
“likes” have failed

What failed regard won’t make us lose?

Coerced purposively in a perceived
Paradise to the point that I could feel

Anything, this body, I could feel,
Me in you

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Lost in a messaging I am senseless to

The sun, like a blind-spot in reflexivity
If this is exclusion count me in

Call me your remnant patrolling
Its little reward

Redemption of the world called us
With the words struck through.

5 Questions with Not An Alternative (@ Art21)

Check out my latest feature at Art21 blog, on the Wllmsbrg-based art group Not An Alternative:

Capitalism is constructed to instrumentalize any form of engagement. How can we refuse this? Can we participate productively within a context where it’s either vote, engage, participate, or you’re apathetic. Can we vote no? We were inspired to create an organization that experimented with a form of engagement that was aimed at confronting the limits of liberal capitalism.
--Not An Alternative

Poetry Dinner (@ Four & Twenty Blackbirds)

It is a few weeks off, but the lovely people of Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Movement Research are putting together a dinner party/poetry reading for Sunday, June 5th.

Readers include Robert Kocik, Eva Yaa Asentawaa, Willa Carroll, and myself.

RSVP here

SPT's Reliquarium

This Saturday at Small Press Traffic you can bid on small bottles in which will be contained the remains of contemporary poets...

If the end of the world is coming…Celebrate it with Small Press Traffic
at
THE RELIQUARIUM
an apocalyptic fundraiser

Join us for the end of days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction) at this end of season bash featuring:

+reenactments from scenes of the end of the world
+the co-generation of a literary time capsule
+an auction of poetic reliquaries
+an end times dance party
+drinks and MORE!

May 21, 2011 at 7:30pm
California College of the Arts Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro at 15th
San Francisco, California

entrance a mere $10!

with reliquaries by:
Steve Benson
Charles Bernstein
Rachel Blau duPlessis
Julian Brolaski
Enrique Chagoya
Thom Donovan
Elaine Equi
Coco and Rob Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield
Kathleen Fraser
Bob Gluck
Judith Goldman
Tracy Grinnell
Nina Katchadorian
Kevin Killian
Joanne Kyger
Nathanial Mackey
Harryette Mullen
Eileen Myles
Sina Queyras
Ariana Reines
Larry Rinder
Camille Roy
Fiona Templeton
Edwin Torres
Amy Trachtenberg
Kaia Sand
Tyrone Williams
and MORE!

Can’t make it to the event? You can still bid on poet reliquaries online! Send in your absentee bids to smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING launch (at Printed Matter)

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING

Book Launch at Printed Matter

Saturday May 14, 5-7pm

195 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Editors:
Sreshta Rit Premnath & Matthew Metzger

Contributors:
Thom Donovan, Tamar Guimarães, Patricia Esquivias, Susan Jahoda, Eric Wenzel, Patrizio Di Massimo, Alicja Kwade, Adrian Williams, Mike Schuh, Lisa Zaher, Zachary Cahill, Arnold Kemp, Jean Marc Superville Sovak, Corinna Kirsch

Please join us this Saturday for the launch of Shifter Magazine's 17th issue, Re___ing at Printed Matter. We will also have back issues of Shifter on hand for purchase.

Re___ing, co-edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger exists both within Rethinking Marxism's new issue (Vol. 23 No. 2)* as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing.

While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities - to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already.

Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When I call you and there is no response I feel the threat of erasure. I therefore call with the strongest faith that you will respond and when you do we cement our relation. The abstract becomes concrete.

At what point does the attempt to exonerate representation from its intrusive counterpart, "the aura", become a concern around appearances rather than labor? As with Borges's Pierre Menard who rewrites Don Quixote word for word only to produce an anachronistic and inadequate adaptation, perhaps pure repetition is impossible. Therefore, although re attempts to proliferate multiples, the insistent ing, always in the present disturbs this veracity.

Here, contributors engage a variety of gestures tied to reproducing by deploying palimpsestic archives culled from historical documents, proposing morphological relations as historic fact and ultimately forcing procedures of mimicry, translation and interpretation to their limit. This limit or threshold in many instances is defined here through the body and its traces, actions, delusions and dreams which may often remain utterly irreproducible.

Re___ing is currently available for free download, online purchase as well as at Printed Matter, NYC and Motto, Berlin.