Immeasurable Equation

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

Ukrainian poet Anna Malihon’s English-language debut gathers daring, resilient, open-eyed poems written before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The difficult fates voiced by the protagonists of Malihon’s poems intertwine with her own experience, weaving an alarming but beautiful world where the young grow old and love is met with war. This world, at first shocking, holds the reader in suspension, compelling a desire to rethink and reread. With deft allegory and startling metaphor, Malihon crafts a poetry that seeks to influence the course of events, to reroute history.

Organized violence committed on ordinary speech’ is therapy for those who don’t believe in literature as value. Training Exercises is an unpacking of that dictum: seven short essays, letters, reports and anti-biographies written to overcome the feeling of resistance to the defacement of what strikes us as true. An anti-purge written out by lipstick or hammer, scrawled over the top of itself and run through a translation program that turns everything upside inside down, its pieces include: a polemic against catharsis; a letter to the poet Dom Hale on his book Seizures; and a series of on-the-spot reports on the UK Illegal Migration Bill, East London poetry readings, the politics of the war in Ukraine, and a conversation about the meaning of damage in contemporary literature. 

‘First you learn to write down your ideas, then you learn again how to write all of your lurid political and intellectual and intimate disappointments and all of your childhood hopes over the top of them’. Jack Spicer scrawled the name of his book in pink lipstick on the cover of the academic journal he had published in: Training Exercises scrawls itself on top of that.

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace —from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again—touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

Written after the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, when 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in the commercial and residential  port of Beirut after years of warning and mismanagement, Anatomy of a Refusal drifts between lineated and prose poetry, creating a transitional space of mourning. Comprised of three sections, “Mutually Assured Destruction” confronts displacement; “Blast” erases and rescribes bureaucratic documents written about the explosion, and “Deterrence” “return[s] to the place of injury.” 

Intertextually poetic, Sahar Khraibani writes in conversation with other writers and philosophers to question, “who owns my language?” and “What does it mean to be in / place?" And yet, between bureaucracy and philosophy, there are moments of intimacy, friendship coexisting in the shared space of the poem—between speaker and addressee, the body and the living world—where belonging carries the weight of grief.

—Blurb written by Clarise Reichley