Poetry

For '​A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff'​ Valentina Desideri transformed Kunstverein’s space into a Studio – a place that generates knowledge through different modes of being together. Throughout the exhibition, Desideri invited participants as well as visitors to gather for readings and in study.

The Studio – and its bar – were open for readings during Kunstverein’s regular opening hours and punctuated by weekly contributions to the study by the invited guests and artists. 'Handreading Studies​' picks up where the project left off, bringing together a variety of materials and publications that were generated in or reverberated from the Studio.

‘In De vulgare eloquentia, Dante developed a poetics of the vernacular – the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street, distributed unilaterally rather than intentionally acquired via a disciplined pedagogy of grammar, and transformed in open bodily exchange, irrespective of social position, gender or rank. “The vernacular,” Dante says, “[is] the language which children gather from those around them when they first begin to articulate words; or more briefly, that which we learn without any rules at all by imitating our nurses.” A vernacular is not structured according to a valuing hierarchy or an administration of history; it is improvised in tandem with the rhythmic needs and movements of a present-tense yet tradition-informed body among other bodies, each specific. There is no general vernacular; it is intrinsically grammarless. Vernacular speech can only ever begin and can never achieve closure. Refusing spatial propriety, it crisscrosses institutions. In Dante’s definition, it is what’s spoken by women and children, thus it is the first, and natural language: “The whole world uses it through its diverse pronunciations and forms”.’ – from Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship. 

Lisa Robertson’s reflection of political subject formation, through poetry and vernacular forms, acts as a critical anchor for the ideas and experiments published in this new series, Dialecty. 

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

A fourteen-track vinyl LP featuring poems of American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Nathaniel Mackey (b. 1947) as produced by visual artist Shannon Ebner. Juxtaposing historic and recent material from 1991 until 2018, the work brought together here examines the two writer’s lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in narratives of dispossession both real and imagined. Liner notes contain excerpts of original interviews as well as reproductions of the poets’ published materials.

According to Ebner, “STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE is the full-length version of what I started in 2016 when I began seeking exchanges with these two poets. I was drawn to their works for their experiments with poetic form – for their politics of poetic form, to be exact – for their poems’ stray figures and stray errant marks.”

Profiles of all the women named Helen in Troy, NY, with poems and images, mixing the classical with the ordinary and delightful intelligence with irreverence. 

'everybody died there’s nothing more to say my hair’s braided like a family i took off, it was fun, i loved it if you did something wrong, they punished you one helen is enough, trust me'

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?

These and other questions are answered in the new long poem from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell.

The first part of a larger novel in several episodes: a text about the perception of time and how some places mark people's minds.

Inspired by the Petrified Forest in Arizona and its ability to change over time from an organic to a mineral state, the story was concieved by the musician and artist Félicia Atkisnon over the past five years, while its on-going writing has been the starting point of many of Atkinson's music lyrics and recent records and exhibitions.

A part of the book takes place in the middle of the desert in an indistinct future. Two men are having a discussion by a fire in a modernist house. The music they are listening to is not emitted by a device but by themselves, it's a new kind of technology. They look at the embers of the fire and it reminds them of a painting by Jeronemus Bosch. They suddenly wonder if those embers could be a republic of some kind.
A Forest Petrifies is a novel about the perception of time and how some places mark people's minds.

Félicia Atkinson (born 1981 in Paris, lives and works in Brussels) is graduated with Honors from l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and studied also anthropology and contemporary dance. She is a sound and visual artist, an experimental musician and the co-publisher of the independent imprint Shelter Press. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures and musical compositions are mostly abstract. Her work takes its sources from the American tradition of painting (Morris Louis, Cy Twombly, Richard Tuttle) and from avant-gardes figures who worked on chance and randomness (Fluxus, John Cage, La Monte Young...) as much as feminist figures in music and art.

The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman s heart and mind in language for everybody language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to.

Blue has run is an intervened facsimile of A Catalog of Textiles and Folkart of Chiapas by the anthropologist Walter F. Morris, published in 1979. The original publication was printed in 100 copies, most of which have been lost or dispersed through various specialized libraries.

This catalog listed the items belonging to three collections of fabrics and weaving patterns in South Mexico which Walter F. Morris, called Chip, helped to constitute during mid seventies: the Pellizzi, the Pomar and the Morris Collection. Its DIY quality gives the images an almost abstract twist. This and the painstakingly precise descriptions of the items take the content of the catalog towards territories closer to poetry, drifting it away from its original purpose.

Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things (such as human bodies, as emphasised in a commentary exploring the destituent potential of Hejinian’s faltering poetic corpus, in “A Draft of Resistance” by Andrea di Serego Alighieri), in an envelope.

1. Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things (such as human bodies, as emphasised in

2. A commentary exploring the destituent potential of Hejinian’s faltering poetic corpus, in “A Draft of Resistance” by Andrea di Serego Alighieri), in

3. An envelope.

For Wallace Stevens, “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson’s intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. “Dickinson’s life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text….”

On Pillow Talk, or, How I dance Solo While Logos Watches from Our Bed, Smoking a Cigarette

Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines' first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.

Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) is based on the typescripts Early and Clairvoyant Journals and includes the entries dated February 23 to June 10.

This new edition of Clairvoyant Journal features an “Afterword” by Patrick Durgin, dealing with Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style” writing. With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.

Fade the Lure is a collection of poems and photographs created between 2014 and 2017, during Dena Yago’s experience working and living alongside emotional support dogs in Los Angeles. In Yago’s words, poetry is sometimes “a form of communication created out of the desire to avoid, and an inability to engage in other forms of direct communication” with animals or humans. Fade the Lure explores the possibility for the poem to account for relationships that materialize and live beyond words, while being embedded in a consumerist society’s confined structures.

Dena Yago (born 1988, lives & works in NYC) is an artist, a writer and a poet. She was one of the founding members of K-HOLE, a trend forecasting group active from 2010 to 2016. Recent publications include Ambergris (Bodega) and Esprit Reprise (Pork Salad Press). Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.

Vale Ave, Latin for "Farewell, Hail", is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical, "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men.

This new edition will feature essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis, who adapted the book to music with TM Davy in 2017 for a performance at the New Museum, and activist filmmaker Tourmaline.

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.

"I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here.

As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess.

OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks."—Eileen Myles

The Poeticians is a publication of the performance of the collection of clothes and poetry called Writing Wounds To Heal by Swedish choreographer Pontus Pettersson. Made in velvet silk with the poetry burned out in the fabric exposing the texts, the poetry exposes both itself and the skin of the performer. Throughout the durational piece the performers are doing Pontus Petterssons cat practice and is one of the main ingredients of the project as well as the clothes/poems. The Poeticans is also a choreo-curational event that hosts different choreographic proposals inside of it. It is seen as module or installation where pieces, objects, performers can be inserted rather than a performance that executes and performs the same over and over. It was created as an extension of Pontus interest in poetry and choreography where hospitality and proximity is seen as key concepts in the development and execution of the event.

The Wind Escorts The Sky (Weld 2017) is the second part of Pontus Pettersson’s project Poetic Procedures. The project and performance looks into the relation between dance and poetry and how these practices can unfold in the situation of a dance class and with the case of The wind Escorts The Sky; a stage performance. This is the publication that came out of that practice.

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays - many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries - on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past, its ideas, its personages, its syntax, to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language, whiplike, casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage.

Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

I I C / The Contract / Ellipsis / Delbaram / Booos / U OK?

A series of choreopoems by Eric Peter. Published at the occasion of 'Assemblages of Intimacy' a group exhibition in a Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam in 2018.