On New Braunfels Avenue, San Antonio.
Category: language
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Rita Dove reading her poems in the Montpelier Room, May 4, 1995
Dove, Rita, Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry And Literature Fund, and Archive Of Recorded Poetry And Literature. Rita Dove reading her poems in the Montpelier Room, May 4. 1995. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/95770167/>.
Contents :
From Mother love : Heroes ; Persephone, falling ; The narcissus flower ; Statistic : the witness ; Mother Love ; Breakfast of champions ; Persehpone in hell (section I) ; Wiederkehr ; The Bistro Styx ; Demeter mourning ; Exit ; Afield ; Lost brilliance ; Demeter, waiting ; Lamentations ; Used ; Missing ; Demeter’s prayer to Hades ; Her island — Evening primrose — Incarnation in Phoenix — The first book — Vacation.
A flower in a weedy field
make it a poppy. You pick it.
Because it begins to wiltyou run to the nearest house
to ask for a jar of water.
The woman on the porch startsscreaming: you’ve picked the last poppy
in her miserable garden, the one
that gives her the strength every morningto rise! It’s too late for apologies
though you go through the motions, offering
trinkets and a juicy spot in the written historyshe wouldn’t live to read, anyway
So you strike her, she hits
her head on a white boulder,and there’s nothing to be done
but break the stone into gravel
to prop up the flower in the stolen jaryou have to take along,
because you’re a fugitive now
and you can’t leave clues.Although the story’s starting to unravel,
the villagers stirring as your heart
pounds into your throat. O whydid you pick that idiot flower?
Because it was the last one
and you knewit was going to die.
Related : Louise Glück’s Persephone the Wanderer
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Between Islands and Peninsulas
Terremoto‘s blog–Amanda Linares presents Between Islands and Peninsulas at Bakehouse Art Complex.
Artist book Todo Sigue Igual (detail); photo by Pedro Wazzan, 2021 […] the viewer is taken on their own journey, mirroring the one Linares represents in Between Islands and Peninsulas, an immigrant’s story that transports you over time, space, and destinations.
Linares’ varied use of materials allows her to create works that are simultaneously delicate yet durable. She seeks to capture the contradictions of the human condition through materiality. In the artist books Todo Sigue Igual, Agua Salada, and Alternative Realities, she uses seemingly disparate mediums to convey the coexistence of the contradictory emotions and ideas. The artist books, constructed geographies of text and images, evoke the feelings of nostalgia, displacement, and disorientation Linares experienced during her own diaspora.
Laura Novoa -
TIS03
TIS03 is twelve books by twelve artists, sold both as a box set and as individual titles.
Tim Carpenter / A month of Sundays
Adler Guerrier / Sheltering in, so we can begin again
16cm x 24cm
softcover
48 pages
ISBN 978-1-943146-23-9Will Matsuda / The Potter Becomes The Pot
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The purple enrolled me or AG2021_LA_1110453a
a measure of [blackness] inter posed between and among inhabited landscapes and an emanant murmur.
The purple stain, […] ingrains floral embellishments, inhabits longed-for gardens.
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Radical revolution of values
AP Photo/Horace Cort via PR …the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
[…]
His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality.
Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the “affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic policies from foreign policies.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
January 15, 2018Fifty Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon Terry. Excerpt at The Paris Review. via Haymarket.
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AG2021_2020426
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
Martin Luther King
The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler.
JB: My effort in this book is to try to shift the debate on nonviolence from an exclusively moral framework to a social and political one that is informed by ethics. The question of what you would do as an individual in this situation returns me to the moral framework. Of course, sometimes we function precisely in that way and ask: what do I do?
My answer is twofold: On the one hand, I would say that there are enormously forceful and aggressive forms of nonviolence that can be used to oppose state violence and police violence. It can be used to sort or undermine the capacities of violent institutions or violent individuals. I am in favour of that. I do not understand nonviolence as passive. I do not understand it as peaceable. I do not believe it emerges from some internal place of equanimity. Nonviolence can be raging and in fact it might be defined as a way of cultivating or redirecting rage in such a way that it does not reproduce the violence it opposes.
Judith Butler via verso blogs
