Archivi categoria: kritik

gli artisti, non i poeti

Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea as Idea, 1967

Guardando le fotografie e i materiali di documentazione nel post di Pasquale Polidori che ho condiviso stamattina su FB (https://bit.ly/3uY97GR e https://t.ly/5P6R) mi rendo conto una volta di più di un’evidentissima evidenza.

Ossia che non c’è niente da fare: gli unici giovani (e meno giovani) in grado di mettersi immediatamente e senza elucubrazioni in sintonia con le scritture di ricerca, la sperimentazione linguistica in ambito concettuale e non solo, sono gli artisti.

Inutile aspettarsi qualcosa dai (o: dalla stragrande maggioranza dei) “giovani poeti”. (Dai vecchi meno che mai).

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reissues of mags @ jacket2 (freely downloadable pdfs)

freely downloadable pdf reissues of important lit mags like Combo, Aufgabe, Secession, Alcheringa, Roof, New Wilderness Letter, Reality Studios, Infolio, Zuk, Pages, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, O Books, Big Allis, Chain, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Calque are available here: https://jacket2.org/reissues/

 

“nanni balestrini – millepiani”, a cura di sergio bianchi (deriveapprodi, 2022)

Nanni Balestrini è stato poeta, scrittore e artista visivo di fama internazionale. Nella sua figura si riassume un’intera stagione di storia e di cultura, italiana ed europea, di compresenza e reciproca influenza tra avanguardie artistiche e avanguardie politiche: quel magico tempo degli «intellettuali militanti» che hanno agito dentro una temperie di lotte operaie e giovanili che hanno fatto epoca, e che hanno segnato il destino delle successive generazioni. Partecipe di Novissimi, e poi tra i fondatori del Gruppo 63, per oltre sessant’anni Balestrini ha progettato e organizzato un infaticabile lavoro culturale, utilizzando una molteplicità di piani: poesia, narrativa, cinema, audiovisivo, teatro, musica, collage, pittura, scultura, editoria, impegno politico. Balestrini, cioè, uomo-rete dei millepiani. È di questa sua ricchezza ideativa e pratica che diamo conto in questo volume che ne percorre scenari e articolazioni attraverso testimonianze e omaggi di decine di amici, collaboratori e compagni di avventure.

https://deriveapprodi.com/libro/nanni-balestrini-millepiani/

unwriting / jim leftwich. 2022

Unwriting
Jim Leftwich
Summer 2022
Nevada

Here it comes again, like an avalanche, oceanic, rolling across the desert, every imaginary uprooted route at once, enough to make you think it has a mind of its own, language cannot be trusted to mind its own business, sit down and shut up, work independently without disturbing others.

The word “unwriting” arrived most recently in my mind’s ear as a misreading of my first thing in the morning no glasses on handscrawled note about “the unwilling”.

What, then, is this unwriting? Is it a rewriting of a misreading? Is it an acknowledgement of misreading as rewriting? Is it the revelation of a parallel text, a parallel universe, another world is possible, the ancient branes of string theory, asemic messages encoded in those astonishing photographs from the James Webb telescope?

I think we know. Life is more than life. Language is more than language. Life is never life and life only. Life is beside itself with joy, beside itself with bewilderment, disbelief, semiosis, mitosis, osmosis, baskets of fish and loaves of bread, the news from far and near, some of which is true, the felt presence of experiential reality.

You can’t step in the same stream walking beside the lake, where the two creeks flow in from the mountains to the west, reading an old book of poems, remembering how it all got started in your tiny little life your tiny little world, what that small patch of the cosmos looked like 5 billion years ago, twice.

That is another reason, if not several, for wandering wide-eyed in the wonder, while the species is surely dying of its own devices, and there is no humanly semiotic future to care for our writings or unwritings, singing, between the two deserts, having driven ourselves softly or brutally insane, such that the human experiment seems to have failed entirely, if we can say so in some sort of poem, what hypothesis exactly was the experiment meant to test?

unorma: universal norms of absurdity / jim leftwich. 2022

UNORMA: Universal Norms of Absurdity
Jim Leftwich
Summer 2022
Nevada

Venn Diagrams glean presentiment where never the twains shall melt. Therein the Vesica Piscis, renumerable counterfactuals, munerates aeration of comeuppance, until the bittern fends.

First, it must be logical, the absurd must be predictable. To live out on the lawn / You must be honest.

Second: the absurd must be predictable; it must be a replica of itself. Do as I say to do, not as the duly unsaid, which is your duty. Unruly: an unmeasured quantity; the quality of being unmeasuring; a cup of what else, unfulfilled.

Third: the absurd is local. Lies about the absurd are global.

Fourth: go forth and multiple, multiply tables, The Plicate Cult of Mults, fables breathe froth before us — you are complicated; try to contain your selves!

The absurd is polysemic, is nothing if not. But you (You!) must remember: this is not Your Uncle’s Absurdity. You inherit what you invent.

Don’t make me tell you the whole treacherous tale again.

asemic writing as a kind of poetry / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing Is A Kind Of Poetry
Summer 2022 / Utah

If, at times (if not, in fact, all the time), it must seem as if I have no idea what asemic writing is, I can only defend myself through an appeal to my experience of the theory and the practice: asemic writing came into my life as a continuation and an extension of my practice as a poet.

I wrote textual poetry for a little over twenty years before I started making visual poems. After making visual poems for a few years, I started making what was originally called spirit writing (by John M. Bennett, in his capacity as the editor of Lost and Found Times, a magazine of experimental poetry and related matters).

That was in 1997. The following year, Tim Gaze published a small chapbook of my quasi-calligraphic scribblings entitled Spirit Writing. Maybe I didn’t know what I was doing at the time (the theory and history came later), but I had no reason to think of this new development in my work as anything other than poetry.

These days, and maybe for the past fifteen years or so, it seems that very few theorists or practitioners think of asemic writing as a kind of poetry.

Asemic writing, as a kind of poetry, is all but limitless in its potential. We should take the same sort of approach to it’s study. For example: I have been told that asemic writing is all about linguistics. I have no doubt that the study of linguistics, and the application of that study to an engagement with asemic writing, will add substantially to our understanding of the subject. But, as with all other varieties of poetry, linguistics is only one among very many approaches to the study of asemic writing.

I am never interested in having the last word on any of these matters. Maybe I am interested in having the next word — and then, in having had some of the recent words. The conversation around asemic writing is ongoing and, like all conversations around all varieties of poetry, it seems to have no necessary or inevitable end. I am interested in expanding the spectrum of acceptable discourse concerning the subject of asemic writing. I hope my writings on the subject will function as invitations to others to participate in this process.

doppia intervista su ‘lay0ut magazine’

https://www.layoutmagazine.it/snuff-box-poesia-impegno-interviste-carnaroli-giovenale/

intervista ad Alessandra Carnaroli e Marco Giovenale

*

grazie a Lay0ut, a Massimo Palma e a Sara Sermini.

“Gesto. Prendere la parola, dare voce, togliere la parola, restituire il silenzio. C’è un gesto, tra questi, che ti sembra rappresentare la tua scrittura poetica? Oppure nessuno di questi?” …

karen kurczinsky: “the cobra movement in postwar europe”

Sandro Ricaldone

KAREN KURCZINSKY
The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe.
Reanimating Art
Routledge, 2022

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948–1951). Although the name stood for the organizers’ home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States.

This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra’s experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media.