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Category: language

  • Witness

    AG2020_1980273a 1

    I weighed […],
    actions,
    […],
    on the scales I was given,
    calibrated
    in units of fear and amazement.

    […] everyday
    something has tried to kill me
    and has failed.

  • Poetry, Permeability, and Healing

    Essay by Jane Hirshfield from 2018 via poets.org.

    At the etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” To heal, then, is to take what has been broken, separated, frag­mented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness.

    […]

    Many things beyond physical illness and physical fracture need healing. Some are personal, some are collective, and these two realms are not disconnected. We don’t live in compartments; we live in our lives.

    […]

    kintsugi, done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s his­tory, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial.

    […]

    Poems are words that live in the fractures, […] they make new by rejoining parts into a visibly changed whole.

    […]

    a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence.

    [..]

    [Poems] loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality. The particularity and unexpectedness of poetry’s language shake us from sleepiness, complacency, habitual mind. Empathy breaks us from the hypnosis of ego’s grip on its own sense of purpose.

    […]

    The rational mind, untempered by poetry, divides; […] fierce rational power, in isolation, is inhuman. Art dwells at the crossroads between what in us is body, what in us is emotion, what in us is history, and what in us is mind. To step into wholeness of seeing and feeling, under any conditions, is in itself restorative.

    Jane Hirshfield

  • AG2020_1960514aa

    AG2020_1960514aa

    A Shining Wonder. Daylong, Clear, and Sunlit. Sun Pours [All] Daylong.

    Related : Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s A River of Grass.

  • AG2020_1880507a2.jpg

    AG2020_1880507a2.jpg

    Mourning gives loss a creative form, restoring life to a shattered world.

    Mourning could animate a new birth, but this doesn’t guarantee a future without vulnerability. Mourning might be a leap in the dark, but it is not a leap into darkness.

    Alexander Hirsch, Psyche.
    Cos-Ber-ZamNé Noya4:10

  • Kara Walker – ‘I’m an Unreliable Narrator’

    via Art Resources Transfer, a nonprofit organization committed to documenting and disseminating artists’ voices and work to the broadest possible public.

  • The Slowdown, 409

    How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, by Hanif Abdurraqib.

    … that is the wrong question

    Traci K. Smith

  • Defund Toolkit

    Concrete steps toward divestment from policing and investment in community safety via Interrupting Criminalization

    Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action is an initiative at the BCRW Social Justice Institute led by researchers Andrea J. Ritchie, Mariame Kaba, and Woods Ervin. The project aims to interrupt and end the the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for criminalized acts related to public order, poverty, child welfare, drug use, survival and self-defense, including criminalization and incarceration of survivors of violence.

    #DefundPolice is a demand to cut funding and resources from police departments and other law enforcement and invest in things that actually make our communities safer: quality, affordable, and accessible housing, universal quality health care, including community-based mental health services, income support to stay safe during the pandemic, safe living wage employment, education, and youth programming. It is rooted in a larger Invest/Divest framework articulated in the Movement for Black Lives’ Vision for Black Lives. 

    Related : Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Plan.

    We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.

    We Want Full Employment For Our People.

    We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.

    We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.

    We Want Education For Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.

    …

    We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.

    We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.

    …

    We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.

  • Anne Boyer

    With unflinching self-scrutiny, Anne Boyer exposes uncomfortable truths about our culture’s mistreatment of the individual in duress and the ways in which we are complicit in that neglect.

    Anne Boyer is an American essayist and poet. Her boundary-blurring body of work includes two books of nonfiction, a poetry collection, and several chapbooks. Most recently, her book The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and art (2019) earned accolades for its formal inventiveness and searing prose. The story of Boyer’s experience with a highly aggressive form of triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying is not a traditional memoir but something altogether different and new; a fierce and funny experiment in cultural criticism and personal history, malediction and requiem.

    Windham Campbell Prizes

    What cancer takes away, New Yorker, April 15, 2019 Issue.

    A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Ugly Duckling Presse.

    Mirabilary, newletter/blog.

    Ten questions. In the New Inquiry.