Jungle

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

The “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press, that federated visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement from 1971 to 1976.

The independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists' couple Martha Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children, they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside, where, joined by a group of friends including the artist and art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed 'a community of duplicators, printers, and artisans'.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition artists' books, it published the work of its own members, but also that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing to distribution, under the same—bucolic—roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of its generation.

Published by the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, this reference book surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the publications of its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, David Mayor and Chris Welch, and of the numerous visitors to its rural outpost from 1971 to 1976. A “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by BGP, it is complemented by critical essays and first-hand texts that explore the working methods (economy and autonomy of production, distribution of books via post) and document the international influence of this short-lived “community of duplicators, printers, and artisans”.

Essays by Karen Di Franco, Zanna Gilbert, Polly Gregson, Carmen Juliá, Alice Motard, Mila Waldeck ; original texts by Allen Fisher, Mike Leggett, Clive Phillpot, Cecilia Vicuña.

Editions by Claudio Bertoni, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, GJ de Rook, Felipe Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Yaël Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Ken Friedman, Mick Gibbs, Klaus Groh, Kristján Guðmundsson, Mary Harding, Woody Haut, Jan Hendrix, Jarosław Kozłowski, Myra Landau, Michael Leggett, Rafael López, Raúl Marroquin, Pepe Maya, David Mayor, Anthony McCall, Victor Musgrave, Opal L. Nations, Colin Naylor, Michael Nyman, Ryo & Hiroko Koike, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Sitting Dog & Co, Endre Tót, Yukio Tsuchiya, Ben Vautier, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Welch, Hideki Yoshida...

Each book is accompanied by five unprecedented bookmarks.

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other. In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Kelsey Street Press, 2018), SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
 
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.
 
Since its inception, This Container has hoped to contribute to a feminist lineage of textual production. What constitutes this lineage? This is a vast question. The beginning of an answer might start by saying something about genre. If , as Lauren Berlant writes, genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation”, a “formalization of aesthetic or emotional conventionalities”, then genre crafts expectation by pointing to what is recognizable in form.1 If feminism is about wanting the world to be otherwise, the multiplication of genres inducing the multiplication of (imagined) stories helps to recraft expectation toward a less oppressive, less boring, and more just world. Feminist work includes genre work. Poetry, diary, diagram, notes, recipe, critique, the sound file, the epistolary, the essay, the art project: they have all found their way in, sculpting a diverse set of readerly structures of affective expectation. They are to shift your worldly expectations.

More info at http://www.thiscontainer.com

Guest editor: Orla Barry, City Report Brussels: Maxime Fauconnier and Natural Contract Lab, Kasper König, Kendell Geers, Lucy McKenzie, Nástio Mosquito, Lisa Vlaemminck, Paloma Bosquê, Joar Nango, Sandrine Colard, Wu Tsang, Busan Biennale