Category: studio

PXL_20240327_183506136 transposes and upends

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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

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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

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Studio view (122123) including Untitled (Field Guide; “what’s not found at once, but lies within something of another nature”) i and iii.

AG2024IMG_20221127_161716_HDRa or always looked like agony to me

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Untitled, 2022

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

AG2024_1088819a or too dumbfounded to move

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“perhaps the muse was always a critic, always a builder of stacks of things “interesting to look at”

“always a mind in relation to another.”

“Inside every critic is a coach or, to use Isabelle Graw’s image, “a sort of amplifier.””

“deferential, wry, combative. Humorous. Detached. At sea.”

Art’s stupidity, Mayer suggests, is the reason for its persistence in her memory: it is too dumbfounded to move.

But what first punched art in the face? Probably life. Or, as Mayer says, “fucked up time.””

“They are, at their best, avenues of grace within fucked-up time, languages of perpetual inquiry and curiosity, poses of submission and dominance and everything in between, a practice of turn-taking in a world that runs on theft and greed.”

Anahid Nersessian. Originally published in Mousse 86.

AG2023_1078359a or a figure, a field guide

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a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. The equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, linking “picturesque” but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson

Beauty calls forth meaning, order, calm

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Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”

O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.

Tippett: That’s fascinating.

O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.

On Being with Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue : The Inner Landscape of Beauty

Original Air Date : February 28, 2008

“Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm” (RS)

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Studio in Miami Design District, 2011.