Posts Tagged ‘polis/oikos’
ECOPOETICS @ BERKELEY
The term ecopoetics has become increasingly important to scholars and poets alike. It is certainly a critical moment for the field and practice. Please join us in February for a three-day conference that will focus specifically on exploring ecopoetics, taking up such questions as: What is ecopoetics? What representational strategies and sociopolitical commitments might characterize [...]
SISYPHUS, OUTDONE.
Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal, by Nathanaël, was launched into the world at the Corpse Space on Milwaukee Avenue last Wednesday evening, in the presence of the author and Daniel Borzutsky (my discussants in open conversation), and a sizeable yet intimate crowd. This is one of a score of books recently issued by Nathanaël, [...]
INSIDE THE FOUNTAIN
Scoping it out at a press conference overlooking the whole city: the space we’ll perform in (Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble) before bidding goodbye to the site of Rome’s preGothic sustenance and our ravishment.
FLAG
In advance of “La Mama SpoletOpen” at the 54th Festival of Two Worlds, my poem to be carbonized: FLAG PIETRA PER PIETRA roso CHIODO PER CHIODO oso FILO PER FILO [...]
PIAZZA AS WUZ
Occupying the ruins now framing a deejay set ranging from Volare to hiphop all’italiano and the hospitality of Earthquake Jack: scene of palpably postwar pregentrification Palermo.
TOWN PRIDE
“Non ci passa una lira,” says the lady we meet surveying her high plaza with diamond facade from the waist up, and who justifies our afternoon chocolates by identifying us as her “children” to a daughter several minutes later. Not a cent passes through here yet everywhere—pizzerias, baseball caps, banks—is the immense unidentified Hellenistic goddess [...]
MEMORY
“I have turned from the castellaccio / so its…medieval shadow…/ does not leave uneven edges,” word by word infiltrating the idle mind even in beginning to walk toward the door of the dig house toward ascent of a town turning on a dream. Rubble of feudalism still operative as rubble and as resistance in the [...]
CURIOSITY
Unakin to the dogged determination of research leading in obedient step to professionalization, the navigation of cities and the production of poetry will always repay the errant seekings of curiosity off the Corso: look further, a second and a third time, for patterns, stances. Especially in Rome….
DESUETUDE
A fancied word so unfortunate in animation: in the woods punctuated by grazing fields for horses lined by modern sewers, the farthest reaches of the Aqua Paola (e Traiana), great outmoded infrastructural gift, at a tilt, leaking sporadic showers, and in expected picturesque disrepair: contemporary Ruskins our hunters from England hastening to capture the destruction [...]
HOUSING SOLUTION IN ROME
Among the only feasible options in the historical center: just outside the Borgo, or the area of the Vatican, adjacent to the hospital set up for pilgrims: bright & with a view for as long as they’ll allow it (law banning mobile homes on the Janiculum in momentum).
WRITING AS DRAWING
And drawing as writing in the work of William Kentridge: the potential, I surmise in listening to this brilliant lecture and conversation, to reintroduce provisionality to a stultifying historical record, just as it’s constantly introduced to the Johannesburg landscape of burnt felt (charcoal terrain that draws itself) and mounds of hollow-fallout in crusades for gold: [...]
WORLD CITY (HENDRIK ANDERSEN, ARDOR)
Henry James ardently to the friend (lover?) Hendrik Christian Andersen, coaxing his companion toward specific lived experiences and places, expressing doubt regarding “any use on all the made earth … for a ready-made city, made-while-one-waits, as they say, & which is the more preposterous & the more delirious, the more elaborate & the more ‘complete’ [...]
X LOCUS (ABLUVION)
“For those who submitted to disorientation, it was a success.” “Submit,” says Tom: “that’s the perfect word.” An old archaeologist friend, alongside whom I worked at my first and only dig, two decades ago, veering over the hole listening for voices. Hearing the unconscious, seeing the strata of history in the strata of bricks above [...]
OPEN STUDIOS @ THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME
Come see X Locus (Abluvion), a collaborative installation by Jennifer Scappettone (text/sound design), Paul Rudy (sound design), and Agency Architecture (environmental media), at the Open Studios event at the American Academy in Rome Wednesday, 25 May, 2011. Il consiglio di amministrazione dell’American Academy in Rome William B. Hart, Presidente del consiglio di amministrazione Adele Chatfield-Taylor, [...]
L’ACQUA NON SI VENDE/WATER IS PUBLIC
A sticker bedecking the she-wolf-head fountains around town. Once Massimo Cacciari started getting on the bandwagon, they began to call the tap water in Venice “the mayor’s water.” Don’t sell it: vote for public water on the referendum of 12-13 June. In Rome, where providing water to the public is a glorious tradition, a friend [...]
TRAGEDIA DELL’ASCOLTO/TRAGEDY OF LISTENING
“Now that’s quite a responsibility,” says Kathleen, deathly serious from the Piazza San Cosimato, as I tell her of the site of the sound piece in progress. All day spent in the dark tavern carving bypasses of voices from the literal underground. Carving from the blindness resulting from the hegemony of vision in this culture, [...]
CROSS-SPECIES COMMUNICATION, ITALIAN STYLE
Michele uses his excellent skills as translator, poet, and Italian (c.f. Bruno Munari’s dictionary of Italian gestures) to communicate with a cat atop the castle complex who is fond of quizzical self-exposure.
THE HOUSE EXPOSED E DOPO
How the writing of Marco Giovenale and other current Italian “poetry of research” can and has to be distinguished from Flarf, with which it identifies (to a certain extent): history. (fou / fenêtre) Glockenspiel – e nel freddo nel pieno è che il freddo è nel pieno della schiena: sulle scapole sulla spina per agosto [...]
NO GESTURE IS COMPARABLE TO THE LOVE I HAVE FOR YOU
Is the message on the aqueduct that has become bench, carpet, stadium seat for these Romans. Thinking it in retrospect & somewhat belatedly true.
POPPIES AND AQUEDUCTS
The Acqua Claudia, highest aqueduct of all, serving thus each quarter high and low of Rome, now backdrop straight out of Pasolini for the starring poppies & weekend runners of Cinecittà and Centocelle.
USCITA 43/EXIT 43
The introduction to our performance at Corto Circuito tonight, in Italian: Queste partiture “pop-up” fanno parte di un progetto in corso, intitolato Uscita 43, che è composto di elementi poetici, visivi, e sonori. Lo descrivo come un’archeologia di paesaggi tossici e afflitti, e un’operetta di cori “pop-up” (prendendo il termine usato per le finestre “pop-up” [...]
SKYLINE SQUAT
“New York City” and its scrapings of sky seen from the perspective of its underbelly, the swollen dump mounds shrouded in plastics.
EXIT 43 WITH DIFFORME ENSEMBLE: SATURDAY NIGHT
Performing pop-up choruses surrounding postpastoral landscapes from Exit 43/Uscita 43 with the Difforme Ensemble (Marco Ariano, Renato Ciunfrini, Roberto Fega) and with Ersela Kripa & Karen Yasinsky this Saturday night at the Centro Sociale Corto Circuito in Cinecittà: be there/ sii lì!
WALL-ROSE
Came home to a lecture on building in—as—time, concept so floral for would-be tragic Venice-of-water, and to walls—of taverns and cities—made conceptually permeable via their blooming, ground as cherries.