You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“First word, last word,
they sound both civilized and wild,
part human and part bowerbird,
the parts as yet unreconciled.
You keep awake as daylight fails
beside a crib or bed with rails—
first as parent, then as child—
and listen for a sign of death,
each breath in slow pursuit of breath.
Devin Johnston, a poem
I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.
Mahmoud Darwish, I Belong There
Home: A Short History of an Idea, a solo exhibition by Tim Buwalda.
“There’s a certain Slant of light,
…
That oppresses, …
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –”
Emily Dickinson, There’s a certain Slant of light
“I never knew I loved
The curves of
An apple until
…
Shameless indifference”
Ann Pedone, After Nazim Hikmet’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”
“A cortege of clouds’
shifting planes”
James Brasfield, Palladium
Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
(Elinor Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope)
“But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.”
Let’s Ride, Art history after Black studies by Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, Faye R. Gleisser. Copeland engaged Aranke (Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power) and Gleisser (Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987) about their respective books, in ArtForum.
Also, Hal Foster reassessed The Anti-Aesthetic (Bay Press, 1983); a book aimed at postmodernism.
“And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread”
-Roque Dalton, Como Tú, translated by Jack Hirschman.
A poem = A loaf of bread, via O, Miami and Zak the Baker, this October.
“a concept of everyday life that is specifically modern and that is primarily a category of capitalism, of capitalism’s proliferation of distinct, structured, specialized activities and its intensification, especially after World War II, of the social division of labor. “Everyday life,” properly speaking, first comes into being only at the moment, midway through the nineteenth century, when European cities begin to swell with the arrival of large numbers of newcomers, the moment—and this is crucial— when Marx conceptualized and systematized the “work day” of the wage laborer. When the lived experience of those new urban dwellers became organized, channeled, and codified into a set of repetitive and hence visible patterns, when markets became common between the provinces and the capital, when everything— work hours, money, miles, calories, minutes— became calculated and calculable, and when objects, people, and the relations between them changed under the onslaught of such quantification, then and only then and only there, in the large Western metropolises, did the world, in Lefebvre’s words, “turn to prose.”” (Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life)
“Limitations are style if you make them so.”
“Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”
(Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
