Category: language

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you
who’ve read Dante in folio
you let yourself drift
through those little drawings
so-called illuminated miniatures
and you swallowed it all
all
from ay
to bi

but it’s a lie

that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish
made on purpose to make you waste time
calculating in which circle
the bones of your soul
will end up

and you know something?
this famous inferno
has an admirable simplicity
it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning

you get there and they tell you

you’re free
go ahead and do as you like

The [preceding] poems come from Rebekah Smith’s […] translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa.

god help us or god don’t help us
or god half help us
or he makes us believe that he’ll help us
and later sends word that he’s busy
or he helps us obliquely
with a pious “help yourself”
or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it
if we don’t go to sleep immediately
or …

Kikirikyrie, Susana Thénon, translated from Spanish by Rebekah Smith (UDP)

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Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, Elizabeth Alexander

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Into the Sublime, Tank Magazine, Issue 95. Anahid Nersessian interviewed by Nell Whittaker.

“Will we choose to believe in an art that launders pain and calls that an ethics? Or will we opt for something else, not knowing necessarily what it might be but certain it will involve the loss of something precious – an elegant idea, a charming concert, a way of being effortlessly in the world?”

“[Poetry] … it does surround and enraptures us.”

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Zadie Smith on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Instead, it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death.

[…]

Well, helpfully, my mother has written a novel, a quite autobiographical novel called “The Day I Fell Off My Island.” She was born in very tough circumstances. She grew up extremely poor. Her mother left to work with the Windrush generation as an orderly in a hospital. And she left my mother in Jamaica. So she was alone for a long time.”

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Anahid Nersessian’s When does a divorce begins? (The Yale Review)

18

Divorce is a writer’s business. You can paint a wedding but not a divorce.

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As early as 1934 he argued that communism had failed to exploit the ‘political importance of collective emotions’ as adroitly as fascism had: ‘The great discovery and the essential originality of fascism is its utilisation of the irrational as [an] autonomous … factor in the political domain.’ Fascism was an ‘emotional and ideational revolution’ that exploited the ‘psychological misery’ of the proletariat as much as its ‘economic poverty’. Surrealism spoke to this ‘misery of desire’ too, but in a way that opposed the fascist manipulation of ‘masochism and sublimation’. Such attention to collective emotions suggests that Yoyotte had read Freud, in particular Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921).

[…]

Bataille was also involved in the mid-1930s, with his bitter rival Breton no less, in an explicitly anti-fascist group called Contre-Attaque, which in one of its communiqués inveighed against the ‘heterogeneous’ trinity of French fascism: père, patrie, patron.

[…]

these old anti-fascists had failed to see that, in the society of spectacle, fascism operates primarily through the colonisation of everyday life.

Hal Foster, Tightrope of Hope, LRB

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Le Journal d’un Prisonnier … is, at best, a mediocris opus. (newyorker)