After the polis
Before the police
The problem is that
This is a feeling,
That feeling undergirds
Any organization
Or collective action
My friend Robbie
Tells me
Chris Kraus says
That all utopian
Social movements
Matter because
Their wager is
For time and time
Can't fail
I really
Believe that
But bodies can
Be hurt, bodies can
Easily disappear
All it takes is
Some pepper spray
Or a fist misapplied
What the opposite
Of Habeas Corpus
Is dissolves with
Your hair on my face,
Your legs around
Me without demands
Agreed upon in
Advance
The problem is to
Make us an us
Without making us
An us, to keep
These pronouns
At arm's length,
Touching proper names
Like the singular becomes
Multiple
No people was ever
Separable, no dialogue
From what it intends,
The abuse of the abused
Must end, the undead
Move through these
Lines thinking the
Necropolis, thinking
The polis after it was
Not one of them
In their proper place,
Like I or you wasn't
The remnant,
Sublime kernel of
Wanting to be a citizen
Here is a list of all the things
I did while revolution was fomenting
Or while we watched something
Happen in the distance
Of Facebook
Now's your chance.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
PoetryReading@OccupyWallStreet
via Travis Holloway, come one come all and read a poem:
"On Friday night at 9 p.m., we'll hold the first general Poetry Reading at Occupy Wall Street. We're asking poets to come down and read a poem as a prelude to the march on Saturday. In accordance with the movement that is now called Occupy Wall Street, the reading will take the form of a direct democratic assembly. As we discussed tonight at the Culture and Arts Committee meeting, we wish to have no headliners or special privileges but rather presume the equality of each poet's voice and try to listen to one another. We ask that each poet try to keep their poems under 3 minutes at the least. And we hope that poets will select poems that they feel are relevant to the hopes and demands of the people here. See you Friday night. We're looking forward to it. *Please note that PA systems and alcohol are banned from the park, but megaphones will be available. In other words, this is no ordinary poetry reading."
"On Friday night at 9 p.m., we'll hold the first general Poetry Reading at Occupy Wall Street. We're asking poets to come down and read a poem as a prelude to the march on Saturday. In accordance with the movement that is now called Occupy Wall Street, the reading will take the form of a direct democratic assembly. As we discussed tonight at the Culture and Arts Committee meeting, we wish to have no headliners or special privileges but rather presume the equality of each poet's voice and try to listen to one another. We ask that each poet try to keep their poems under 3 minutes at the least. And we hope that poets will select poems that they feel are relevant to the hopes and demands of the people here. See you Friday night. We're looking forward to it. *Please note that PA systems and alcohol are banned from the park, but megaphones will be available. In other words, this is no ordinary poetry reading."
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene
Schizophrene, by Bhanu Kapil and published by Nightboat, just hit the streets. Below is a little blurb I did for the back cover. Bhanu is amazing if you didn't already know it. Check-out all her books, and especially this one!
Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene cleaves the human-animal, organic-inorganic, virtual-actual, immigrant-native where “‘Reverse migration....’ is psychotic” and "‘Nobody is [emigrant].’" Wrested from states of abandonment and undeath, language flickers somewhere just beyond the sensory. This is autobiography (life writing) in enthusiastic, map-defying movement, “…a flux where the body always is.” In Schizophrene, and all of Kapil's writing for that matter, sumptuousness moves through a restless presence of mind.
Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene cleaves the human-animal, organic-inorganic, virtual-actual, immigrant-native where “‘Reverse migration....’ is psychotic” and "‘Nobody is [emigrant].’" Wrested from states of abandonment and undeath, language flickers somewhere just beyond the sensory. This is autobiography (life writing) in enthusiastic, map-defying movement, “…a flux where the body always is.” In Schizophrene, and all of Kapil's writing for that matter, sumptuousness moves through a restless presence of mind.
Monday, September 19, 2011
The Hole: a Meta-Discourse (in P-Queue vol. 8)
A version of the talk I gave in Bflo last February about The Hole is in the new P-Queue, which also features work by David Buuck, CA Conrad, Brad Flis, Lewis E. Freedman, Lawrence Giffin, Josef Kaplan, Ish Klein, Jena Osman, Chris Sylvester, Andrew Topel, Divya Victor, Anna Vitale, and David Wolach. Thanks to Joey Yearous-Algozin and Holly Melgard for their excellent work as the journal's new editors.
Monday, September 12, 2011
False Flags
What is loss what we didn’t
Even know yet was in
Those others also a part
Of ourselves unknowable
I am withdrawing
Every image of the event
Now, what is left being
The remnant, hard kernel
Of how they’ve maintained
Consent, the citizen being
A fiction and the people being
A fiction, nations don’t exist
Really just this proximity,
To disaster borders determine
Who gets to feel this sense
Of tragedy, whose death matters
What comes back comes
The fuck back clutching
At a lack every image
Still tries to fill, a hole where
The truth got clipped
In the attempt to list
The names of the dead
What else is lost, displaced
By an intention to make visible,
Unaccountable though it may
Always return to the place it was
The motion of this
Withdrawal without caption,
Or negative space or silence
Surrounding it being
What is left, calls me back
From a sense of process to you
History in those arms the
Opposite of immunized would be
Secret name of God or
A negation we’ve always dreamed
Casualties of false flags
Full of grace and excepted
From witness, through peace
Do we dominate, through
The millions we’ve captioned.
Even know yet was in
Those others also a part
Of ourselves unknowable
I am withdrawing
Every image of the event
Now, what is left being
The remnant, hard kernel
Of how they’ve maintained
Consent, the citizen being
A fiction and the people being
A fiction, nations don’t exist
Really just this proximity,
To disaster borders determine
Who gets to feel this sense
Of tragedy, whose death matters
What comes back comes
The fuck back clutching
At a lack every image
Still tries to fill, a hole where
The truth got clipped
In the attempt to list
The names of the dead
What else is lost, displaced
By an intention to make visible,
Unaccountable though it may
Always return to the place it was
The motion of this
Withdrawal without caption,
Or negative space or silence
Surrounding it being
What is left, calls me back
From a sense of process to you
History in those arms the
Opposite of immunized would be
Secret name of God or
A negation we’ve always dreamed
Casualties of false flags
Full of grace and excepted
From witness, through peace
Do we dominate, through
The millions we’ve captioned.
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's "Sensitive Correspondence" (at Others Letters)
The latest post at Others Letters features Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's "Sensitive Correspodnece" a selection of correspondence and essay regarding their book collaboration, Snow Sensitive Skin.
"Sensitive Correspondence" offers insight into the process of the two collaborators as they reflect, via email, upon the particulars of their collaboration, with special attention to the role of time and duration in their writing, engagement with source materials, and to what Rob calls "patiency," a condition in which one becomes susceptive to the thought and affect of others, a mutual subject of prosody emerging through the work.
"Sensitive Correspondence" offers insight into the process of the two collaborators as they reflect, via email, upon the particulars of their collaboration, with special attention to the role of time and duration in their writing, engagement with source materials, and to what Rob calls "patiency," a condition in which one becomes susceptive to the thought and affect of others, a mutual subject of prosody emerging through the work.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Storeys End
My friend/collaborator Sreshta Rit Premnath's solo show opens in Berlin this week, Storeys End, featuring a little essay I wrote for the catalogue. Here in an excerpt:
The exhibition Storeys End seems a culmination of Premnath's engagement with the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who undoubtedly acts as a kind of muse for the artist. Like Wittgenstein, Premnath relishes philosophical, linguistic, and cultural aporia. In Storeys End, named after the address where Wittgenstein composed his posthumous text, On Certainty, and died shortly thereafter, the viewer is presented with a detective plot redolent with post-modernist obsessions.
Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art offer Premnath an art historical language game, like so many of his generation who have returned to the "scene of the crime" of their parent and grandparent generations. But this game cum crime story also takes place between multiple media, which include photography, sculpture (the partial reconstruction of a kite designed by Wittgenstein in 1909), and painting.
Premnath's installation pushes against the limits of a particular universe of meaning, the work of art measuring the limits of a world-the personal and collective capability to understand in situ through a set of linguistic and visual propositions. By entering into the work, the viewer encounters the artifacts of the artist's research practice, which move seamlessly between philosophical speculation and humor. In the narrative tension of these objects, stories actually begin rather than end. Objects mark the mobile traces of our compulsion to make meaning faced with negation, absence, aporia, and gaps within signifying processes.
The exhibition Storeys End seems a culmination of Premnath's engagement with the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who undoubtedly acts as a kind of muse for the artist. Like Wittgenstein, Premnath relishes philosophical, linguistic, and cultural aporia. In Storeys End, named after the address where Wittgenstein composed his posthumous text, On Certainty, and died shortly thereafter, the viewer is presented with a detective plot redolent with post-modernist obsessions.
Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art offer Premnath an art historical language game, like so many of his generation who have returned to the "scene of the crime" of their parent and grandparent generations. But this game cum crime story also takes place between multiple media, which include photography, sculpture (the partial reconstruction of a kite designed by Wittgenstein in 1909), and painting.
Premnath's installation pushes against the limits of a particular universe of meaning, the work of art measuring the limits of a world-the personal and collective capability to understand in situ through a set of linguistic and visual propositions. By entering into the work, the viewer encounters the artifacts of the artist's research practice, which move seamlessly between philosophical speculation and humor. In the narrative tension of these objects, stories actually begin rather than end. Objects mark the mobile traces of our compulsion to make meaning faced with negation, absence, aporia, and gaps within signifying processes.
Friday, September 02, 2011
"The New Us" in BOMB 117
The latest BOMB features a ton of poets on artists, poets' writing, and poets in dialogue with art, including work by Erica Hunt, Corina Copp, Danny Snelson, Mónica de la Torre, Matvei Yankelevich, and Alan Gilbert. It also includes a suite of poems I wrote last fall, "The New Us."
The new us starts from a dish
Not socialism, continues to grow
Sans system, an attention
To this consumption system, a local
Kissing of totality what will be value
And what's the use, in poking
Our heads out, food sovereignties
Produce this singularity
The new us, the new good life
Well being as muse and health
As wealth all we are saying's
The all new thing, new expression
Being shares this sense, of turning
Around a land, or land fills
Me up with emergence, political
Like a dish, we cannot help,
Gathering around, or con/tem/plating.
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