Saturday, October 29, 2011

OccupyLanguage (@Facebook)

Writers stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

OccupyLanguage is a working group that encourages the staging of readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation.

What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation?

OccupyLanguage meetings are held Sunday evenings at 8pm at 60 Wall St., after the Poetry Assembly general meeting. Each week, a new project proposed by a member of the collective will be performed based on a set of guidelines.

We will reconvene weekly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and the kinds of interactions the readings open up in different public spaces. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? We want to invite a certain kind of cooperation in "reading," avoiding traditional styles of unidirectional address which lead to distracted listening and/or echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.

The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Dumps

--after Jennifer Scappettone

There are dumps
And then there are dumps
Violent like sunlight
Hides in methane
Like a heathen/eden of capital
Literally farting up a storm
Of paradise, a kind of last frontier
Of our thingness
Last men do it all night long
Until we all become subject

Methane, last bastion
Of property relations
Called pollution erstwhile
Profitability is our fatal
Enclosure threats of extinction
Literally fart carbon
Cash rules nothing moves
But the money
Out of the island Staten
Home of the Wu Tang Clan
And retired police of course
They closed the schools around
The dump for capital

For methane, the most absurd
Thing was these dumps were made
At all, now a profitable farting
Shitting us our common fiction
Of ecology & capital
Coexist these are the levels
We are dealing with
The unthinkability of waste
While endgames take place.

Shadow speaks with me

Shadow speaks with me
Is this the scarcity
We were dreaming of
The people we were
Inside the people
Light outside
In the trees no repeat
Performance is this singing
Like praise they rise
Up singing
Speaking not knowing
Where body ends pre-dawn
In the park somnolence
Gives us reason.