You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
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
“The draft proposal also included an “orange” list of 10 countries for which travel would be restricted but not cut off. In those cases, affluent business travelers might be allowed to enter, but not people traveling on immigrant or tourist visas.
Citizens on that list would also be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews in order to receive a visa. It included Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.” nytimes.
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing
Orbital, 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
Style also indexes constraint: we make art ((or history)(KM)), but not in conditions of our choosing. Kornbluh
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.
Imagination, too, is old habit, assiduously maintained despite consequences.
Grand Tour: Poems, Elisa Gonzalez
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.
