Con/Crescent reading with Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward

On July 9th at 7PM, I look forward to reading with Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward as part of Jamie Townsend's and Nicholas DeBoer's Con/Crescent Reading Series. The location is Fergie's Pub at 1214 Samsom Street in Philadelphia.

With + Stand 5

Thanks to Dan Thomas-Glass for his work editing the latest issue of With + Stand.

Contributors:

Lara Durback
Sam Lohmann
Erica Lewis
Brian Ang
Kristin Palm
Caroline Knapp
Barry Schwabsky
Meg Day
Bhanu Kapil
Thom Donovan
David Brazil
Evan Calder Williams
Monica Peck
Suzanne Stein
Jacqueline Frost
Seth Forrest
Lars Palm
Jennifer Karmin/David Emmanuel
Donna Stonecipher
Carol Szymanski
Cassandra Smith
Erin Wilson
Matt Longabucco
Josef Kaplan
Steven Karl
Whit Griffin
Tyler Dorholt
Jamey Jones
Fred Moten
Andrew Rippeon
Thomas Mowe
Lauren Levin
Barbara Claire Freeman
Derek Pollard
Stephen Collis
James Yeary
Caleb Puckett
Rodrigo Toscano
David Abel
Jen Hofer

Boston Poetry Marathon and BBQ

The Boston Poetry Marathon and BBQ schedule is up. Thanks to Jim Behrle and Michael Carr for their work putting this together for the second year in a row. Lots of great poetry to be heard!

An Archive

--after Carlos Motta

There is an archive in the sky
Not unlike the one on this earth
Except that it doesn’t forget

Here we are forgetful
An archive, your archive, is specific not general
Because it is made of flesh and blood

And because some people can’t speak
Very loudly an archive attempts to speak
In words and pictures it is a kind of multitude

A swarm it takes to the streets and
Like events is not foreclosed
The composite of a few specific questions,

Of research, it tries to keep a promise
When the dead can’t
The person/people who organize it

Obviously matter very much
The archive being an extension of them
In its organization if not in its content

It bears the mark of their concern
Their burning regard not for a world that exists
But for what will have been

To make an archive like writing a poem
May make a living body of history transmissible
Making us bear witness—especially through what

It’s excluded or lost—to the collective struggle
To remember, the threat of disappearance
This struggle represents.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Carlos Motta (@ Art21)

The latest 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice at Art21 blog features artist, activist, and radical archivist, Carlos Motta.

One of the biggest mistakes we often make is to believe in the monolithic category “ART IS,” which I believe is at the root of the debate (and skepticism) about the political efficacy of art. I don’t think art “IS” one thing in particular. It shouldn’t be thought in the singular, but rather embraced in the plural: Art(s), rather, are, whether objective and social, symbolic and didactic, pedagogical and entertaining, etc. I don’t mean to relativize or to dichotomize these categories, but to insist that a plural frame of mind produces a positive, inclusive, and liberatory rhetoric that resists the dominant and reductive forces of the art market and art history which have through the forces of authoritarianism, paternalism, and capitalism staked their claims over art.

Review of Heather Kravas's The Green Surround (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

here

Throughout the performance we witness the dancers both consenting to these regimes and resisting their situation in the performance itself. As we take our seats they face us, standing in a line across one side wall, as in one of Vanessa Beecroft’s tableaux vivants. They are wearing white smocks, kerchiefs, black bobby socks, and mirrored, panoptical sunglasses, which shield their eyes. The bright white lights that fill the black box theater only make it more difficult to tell where the dancers are looking. Counting occurs throughout the evening, starting with the nine women standing together, ticking off on their fingers while they repeat the words “boot lick.” The submission theme continues, and it is often unclear whether the viewers are dominating or being dominated, the boot lickers or the ones having their boots licked. “Boot lick boot lick boot lick” glides into “lick boot lick boot lick boot” echoing the ambiguity of subject and object.