Category: landscape

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What’s the right flower for the ignored-

with-good-reason, the uninvited? A hydrangea,
head wide as a cabbage; or the bull thistle
wild along the roads; or a dandelion

Etiquette, Judson Mitcham

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The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that it would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans welcomed into the US under a Biden-era sponsorship process, according to a notice posted to the Federal Register and signed by the homeland security chief Kristi Noem.

The order cuts short a two-year “parole” program – known as CHNV – under Joe Biden that allowed 532,000 people who had arrived in the US since October 2022 with financial sponsors to obtain two-year work permits to live and work in the US. Noem’s notice said they will lose their legal status on 24 April.

The Guardian, 032125

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this soft, open witnessing of all that is well

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view

a planet contoured and landscaped by want

Samantha Harvey

earth works

thick brown mud

clinging pulling

a body down

hear wounded earth cry

bequeath to me

the hoe the hope

ancestral rights

to turn the ground over

to shovel and sift

until history

rewritten resurrected

returns to its rightful owners

a past to claim

yet another stone lifted to

throw against the enemy

making way for new endings

random seeds

spreading over the hillside

wild roses

come by fierce wind and hard rain

unleashed furies

here in this untouched wood

a dirge a lamentation

for earth to live again

earth that is all at once a grave

a resting place a bed of new beginnings

avalanche of splendor

4., bell hooks. Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

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I tasted—careless—then—
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World—Did you?

Emily Dickinson

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Style also indexes constraint: we make art ((or history)(KM)), but not in conditions of our choosing. Kornbluh

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This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

This is my territory, I know all of it—

Aubade: East, Rita Dove. Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

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When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the here and now more closely. These artists’ works are clear and detached, analytically precise and calm to present the state of affairs right now in all its complexity. In doing so, they undermine and refuse to comply with an omnipresent immediacy that manifests itself in the form of accelerated availability, speed, consumability, and instant legibility. Defying powerlessness and paralysis, the works address contemporary wars and their economic and political implications, dealing with climate change and socioeconomic power structures in various societies. Yet they invariably retain an awareness not only of our planetary present being permanently and repeatedly reconfigured from assorted constructions of the Real but also of the extent to which we are part of it all.

UNDERMINING THE IMMEDIACY curated by Susanne Pfeffer and Julia Eichler. MMK Frankfurt.

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Perhaps what we’re all looking for, …

though beautiful, was untenable in the long term.

the more beautiful the setting, the purer the horror.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the french by Lara Vergnaud