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Theaster Gates guest-edits Poem of the Day (Fall 2024); … [Gates] (he/him) is an artist whose practice finds roots in conceptual formalism, sculpture, space theory, land art, and performance. Trained in urban planning and within the tradition of
Japanese ceramics, Gates’s artistic philosophy is guided by the concepts of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Animism, most notably honoring the “spirit within things.” Foundational to Gates’s practice is his custodianship and critical redeployment of culturally significant Black objects, archives, and spaces.


Dikembe Mutombo, the Hall of Fame, finger-wagging center who spent much of his post-basketball career as an ambassador for the sport, has died of brain cancer at the age of 58, the NBA announced Monday. (ESPN)

Do language, the measure

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

Speaking the Unspeakable, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Fady Joudah’s […] in New York Review.

Still, even as it insists upon the poem’s acoustic dimension, that “[…]” hints at what exceeds or baffles speech and therefore, as Abrams might say, reckons with what cannot be reembodied or returned to life. Joudah belongs to a poetic tradition for which the unpronounceable mark—the ellipsis, the bracket, a large space on the page—has an intimate relationship to historical violence. It’s a tradition that includes Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), a Holocaust survivor whose prolific ellipses, em dashes, and colons suggest the incommunicability of severe collective trauma, and M. NourbeSe Philip, whose 2008 masterpiece Zong! repurposes the text of an eighteenth-century legal case involving the murder of over 130 captive Africans, creating a fragmented work whose large white spaces signify the gaps and silences in the official record.

These typographic gestures draw attention to what poetry can and cannot do, and to its always abortive attempts to make sense of what is beyond moral comprehension.

There is the threat of subordinating ethical concerns to artistic ones, or else of turning the work of art into a newsreel, in which case we might ask: Why shouldn’t we just watch the newsreel? Besides, what would it mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide?


The poems in […], while occasioned by death, are poems that insist upon life.


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feel, the light

Cada sonido es una forma del tiempo

Glenda León
La Lluvia
The Rain

2015
Monotipo, crayón y foto-grabado sobre papel Bunkoshi 60 g
Monothype, crayon and photo gravure on Bunkoshi paper 60 g


Every sound is a shape of time: selections from PAMM’s Collection is organized by PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans with PAMM Curatorial Assistant Fabiana A. Sotillo.
Participating artists include Abraham Cruzvillegas, Alfredo Jaar, Ellsworth Kelly, Glenda León, Helen
Frankenthaler, Jennie C. Jones, Jules Olitski, Julie Mehretu, Lawrence Weiner, Luis Camnitzer,
Lydia Okumura, Mark Bradford, Morris Louis, Nicole Cherubini, Richard Serra, Richard Dupont,
and Robert Morris.


Bienvenu Steinberg & C, May 26 – July 15, 2022.

I’m a traveler to all parts, And a newcomer to none

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Yo vengo de todas partes, y hacia todas partes voy, Amanda Linares, Piero Atchugarry, September 21 – November 2, 2024. Curated by Laura Novoa.

Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.

Yo vengo de todas partes,
Y hacia todas partes voy:
Arte soy entre las artes,
En los montes, monte soy.

Yo sé los nombres extraños
De las yerbas y las flores,
Y de mortales engaños,
Y de sublimes dolores.

Yo he visto en la noche oscura
Llover sobre mi cabeza
Los rayos de lumbre pura
De la divina belleza.

[…]

A sincere man am I
From the land where palm trees grow,
And I want before I die
My soul’s verses to bestow.

I’m a traveller to all parts,
And a newcomer to none:
I am art among the arts,
With the mountains I am one.

I know how to name and class
All the strange flowers that grow;
I know every blade of grass,
Fatal lie and sublime woe.

I have seen through dead of night
Upon my head softly fall,
Rays formed of the purest light
From beauty celestial.

[…]

Yo soy un hombre sincero, Jose Marti, translated by Manuel A. Tellechea

Also, at Piero Atchugarry, Women at Large, Nathalie Alfonso, Maria Theresa Barbist, Carolina Cueva, Carol Jazzar, Charo Oquet, Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, Chire Reagans, Carol Todaro, Denise Treizman. Curated by Dainy Tapia.

At Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, The55Project presents Tex(T), by André Azevedo, curated by Jennifer Inacio.

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it would be that
but only if I knew how

    again

[…]

that one

      where something oddly music

            will pass through your

          night

                  and it will be me

             sweet me

AN

Also, (The Goddess Who Created This Passing World) via AN

[…] was I

Meant by her to recognize a painting

As beautiful or a movie stunning

And to adore the finitude of words

And understand as surfaces my dreams

Know the eye the organ of affection

And depths

– Alice Notley

And says it supremely well

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She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well.

Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf.

It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

A certain kind of Eden, Kay Ryan

Cover virtually everything

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Adam Shatz, in LRB, the pager attack and Israel’s forever war.

Since 7 October, the Biden administration has given Israel virtually everything it has asked for, from F-15 fighter aircraft and white phosphorous bombs to diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have underwritten the destruction of Gaza

[…]

Let’s imagine a militant organisation, such as Hizbullah, had carried out a similar attack in Israel, detonating explosives in the phones of soldiers and reservists, and murdering Israeli children. The Americans would not have waited to ‘gather the facts’ before denouncing the attack. The response of much of the Western press has been striking, too, full of fascination for Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger ingenuity. What you won’t see in these accounts is the word ‘terrorism’, which is as taboo as the word ‘genocide’ when the perpetrator is Israel.

[…]

Israel hasn’t taken official responsibility for the attacks, but it is gloating. The short-term success can hardly be denied. The pager attacks have put Hizbullah and Iran on the defensive. They have distracted attention from the horrors Israel continues to visit on Gaza and the West Bank, from the obscenity of Sde Teiman, a torture and rape centre in the Negev where dozens of prisoners from Gaza have been murdered, and from the hostage ordeal, the biggest threat to Netanyahu’s premiership.


Terrorizing Haitians will not help you. (NPR) We have been threaten, subjugated to violence, lied to and about, mistreated, poorly served, mocked, derided, and yet, we are. We know love, community, and freedom.