Sina Queyras

A Rambling Post on Common Readers, Classes and the Noise of Poetry

I haven’t read poetry in years, an old friend said recently. I was shocked. We came to poetry together, traded our first real attempts. Why, I wanted to know. What happened? I can no longer hear it, she said, all the arguing about poetry has killed it for me. It’s no longer alive in my mind.

02.09.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Craig Santos Perez

Community, Awaiting Moderation, & Why I Heart Truong Tran

in some ways, many of the posts from the current cohort of Harriet bloggers is about community: reading series, the commons, literary magazines, criticism, ethnic and gender organizations, humans and nature, academia. even Harriet itself is a kind of community blog.

as i mentioned in a previous comment field, there is always a dark side to community formation, always an exclusion, always the haunting of what a particular community will not embrace.

this dark side is rearing its ugly head again…

02.08.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (35)

Fred Moten

B 5

At circle time on Thursday, Lorenzo declared that when he makes smores for Julian (which I wasn’t aware that he’d ever done) he makes them with bricks, sticks and snow.

02.06.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Fred Moten

B 4

A lot of it is just trying to figure out how to say something. How to read. Not how to offer a reading, or even an interpretation, but a performance of a text, in the face of its unintelligibility, as if one were forced/privileged to access some other world where representation and unrepresentability were beside the point (so that the response to the terrors and chances of history were not about calculation, not bound to replicate, even in a blunted and ethically responsible way, the horrors of speculation), where new materialities of imagination were already on the other side of the logic of equivalence.

02.06.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Fred Moten

B 3

Dear Evie,

Remember when we read together in November, and afterwards you asked me about a particular poem of mine, and seemed to wonder why my reading of it didn’t acknowledge or account for the spacing of/in the poem as it is on the page? I figured that question was a statement and that you were right. Philip’s theater is this spatial disuption or fragmentation of the sentence and/or the word, where every fragmentation is also an augmentation, bespeaking multiplicity.

02.06.10 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Fred Moten

Backlog 2

The commitment to repair is how a refusal to represent terror redoubles the logic of representation. The refusal of our ongoing afterlife can only ever replicate a worn-out grammar. The event remains, in the depths. The event-remains are deep and we stand before them, to express them, as their expression.

02.06.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Fred Moten

Backlog

I didn’t stop logging, I just stopped posting. I think I got waterlogged from not being able not to try to get too deep. I got into some kind of double trouble from blowing bubbles, I guess. Anyway, here’s some more stuff, along the lines I promised, though I might want to make another promise now. The other thing is that this is driven by the chance to see some of Hong-An Truong’s film and installation work and from reading Gerald Barrax’s poetry and from a friend sending me the catalog from the Xenakis exhibit at the Drawing Center in New York. I just wanted to mention these not in order to provide the key to what I’ve been trying to write but just to commend them all to you because they are beautiful! As is Beth at the Jordan Lake School of the Arts, refuge for the new X-Men, where the superkids go to play. OK: back to my misbegotten ideas on poetics, in approximately 300 word installments.

02.06.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)