Confluent inchoate figures marshal some fixity or rather a persistency within the formless.
New York Martinis. Tempting!
AG2024_1100536a marshals some fixity
Category: studio
AG2024_1100375a or rearranging words rearranges
i am trying to tell you something about how
rearranging words
rearranges the universe
generation of feeling, Marwa Helal
AG2024_1100377a
Gouache, colored pencil, acrylic, gesso, paper, and solvent transfer on paper.
15 x 11 inches
Moira Donegan in Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics; New York Review and Lithub.
“In this sentence—“that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school,’ could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights”—that “dint of numbers” is a scathing phrase. Justices on the Supreme Court are not as mean to one another as I sometimes, as a court observer, would hope they would be. When there is a pointed line like that, it’s something to pay attention to. She’s saying what we all know, which is that the law does not support this decision, the facts do not support this decision, the will of the people does not support this decision, and the spirit of our constitution does not support this decision. You are not doing it because you have real legitimacy to do it. I think that’s a tricky conundrum we find ourselves in as feminists and as Americans: we’re facing organs of political power that cannot be moved by threats to their legitimacy, that are content to be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the public so long as they have numbers.”
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Cecilia Vicuña, What Is Poetry to You? 1980 or 1990(?)(22:30). 23 minutes. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. via e-flux
AG2024111100331a or of flying and bilocating
How should we interpret these stories of flying and bilocating, of demons and chapped nipples? Of the body and its impossible desires? Eire’s approach is idiosyncratic. Across his scholarship he has aimed to “re-enchant” history, in the words of Ronald Rittgers. Eire understands modern secularism as its own kind of methodology, with its own interpretive shortcomings. Atheism, as much as faith, shapes the questions we ask of our sources and limits the possibilities of interpretation.
[…]Faith—and especially lived faith, not abstract theology—can make history, too. “Belief is the immortal soul of the imagination,” Eire writes at the close of They Flew, and the power of belief to make history “can be limitless.”
As Eire and others have argued, secularism involves its own, often unacknowledged assumptions about historical interpretation.
Wings of Desire, Erin Maglaque, NYRB
PXL_20240327_183506136 transposes and upends
No by Anne Boyer (2017)
“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away
[…]Of all the poems of no, Venezuelan poet Miguel James’s Against the Police, as translated by Guillermo Parra, refuses most elegantly
[…]It’s stealthy, portable, and unslouching. It presides over the logic of my art, and even when it is uttered erringly there is something admirable in its articulation. But even the greatest refusialists of the poets might be a somewhat ironic deployers of that refusal, for what is refused often amplifies what is not. The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no. The no of a poet is sometimes but rarely a no to a poem itself, but more usually a no to all dismal aggregations and landscapes outside of the poem. It’s a no to chemical banalities and wars, a no to employment and legalisms, a no to the wretched arrangements of history and the tattered and Bannon-laminated earth.
[…]Transpositions and upendings refuse and then reorder the world.
[…]There is a lot of meaning-space inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes—or more precisely, poetry’s no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah’s multiple variations. In this way, a poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.
Imagination, too, is old habit
Imagination, too, is old habit, assiduously maintained despite consequences.
And I accept the presence of dances invisible to me.
I racked up habitual sins. I desired, desire
Grand Tour: Poems, Elisa Gonzalez
AG2024IMG_20221127_161716_HDRa or always looked like agony to me
People talk of “good” or “peaceful” deaths as if they’ve seen one, but it’s always looked like agony to me, despite the morphine. “
The Dream Won’t Come True, Kathy Fagan
“The flatness I have in mind is also a form of rejoinder to a calamitous present. It, too, short-circuits the expectation that subjects will authenticate themselves through confession or breakdown, that they will call forth hidden but unfeigned intensities of feeling through their own meticulous artistry. Crucially, although a far cry from the honnêteté lofted by the crosscurrents of courtly and early commercial society, it retains what Pascal identified as an intimacy with judgement. Materializing in scenes and histories of violence, it ultimately sidesteps or leapfrogs an understanding of such contexts as traumatic, to land on the simple verdict that they are wrong. Without saying that this is a more radical approach to a political poetics, I would nonetheless suggest that it is a crucial and overlooked style of critique. In the us in particular, such flatness confronts a public culture that has long appealed to unexamined and unmanaged feeling to supercharge repressive programmes and paranoias.”
[…]” A recessive poetics doesn’t have to be radical: it might be timid, callous or boring. As Eisen-Martin’s work suggests, because flatness is embedded in a sense of the present as not only cruel but monotonous, it has definitively seceded from more exuberant or animated forms of expression; if it didn’t, it would not be flatness but melancholy. One might accuse it, then, as one might accuse these poets, of refusing or being unable to present a model of social life that is ecstatic, and through which human life might finally uncover the full range of its capacities for experience. But flatness is also, or might be, an ethical withdrawal from the impulse to dictate how any other person should encounter themselves. There is no cult of flatness, though there has long been a cult of lyric agitation; and since the latter is in no danger of dissolving, perhaps it might be good to have some alternatives to it.”
Notes on Tone, Anahid Nersessian, New Left Review 142