[ACTION #4] MASSLESS COUNTERPOETICS

“I’m in no hurry, I’m not choking, I’m not destroyed, I’m not buried, I’m not surrounded, I’m not destroyed, I’m breathing.” [Christophe Tarkos] May-June 1886. La Vogue magazine publishes Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. The poem “Démocratie” [written after the suppression of the Paris Commune] details the stifling colonialism, the unreasonable demands of capitalist conditions [the ice-cold laws of traders], & the slaughter of the revolts that logically follow. June 1872. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels report on how the Pope, the French right [including the neoliberals] & the German police are all busy hunting down the “spectre of…

riots and/or poetics [10/2019]

2019-09-302019-09-30 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Albert Ayler · Anne Boyer · Antonin Artaud · César Vallejo · David Rattray · Denise Riley · Dionne Brand · Elvira Hernandez · Irmgard Emmelhainz · Jacob Rogozinski · Jean-Luc Godard · Jodie Dean · Joseph Jarman · Sean Bonney · Steve Dalachinsky · William Rowe · Zaina AlsousLeave a comment

TRILCE XXVII That flood frightens me, / good memory, strong sir, implacable / cruel sweetness. It frightens me. / This house does me complete good, complete / place for this not knowing where to be. // Let’s not go in. It frightens me, this favour / of returning by minutes, by blown up bridges. / I’m not going ahead, sweet sir, / brave memory, sad / singing skeleton. // What content, of this haunted house, / gives me deaths by mercury, and blocks / with lead my conduits / to sheer reality. // The flood that doesn’t know how…

César Vallejo | From “Art and Revolution”

2019-07-112020-10-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: André Breton · César Vallejo · Class Struggle · Communism · Cubism · Friedrich Nietzsche · Fyodor Gladkov · Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes · Jacques Rigaud · Karl Marx · Lautréamont · Marxism · Michel Leiris · Pierre Reverdy · Revolution · Roger Vitrac · Sergei Jessenin · Sergei Kolbasiev · Stéphane Mallarmé · Surrealism · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir Mayakovsky1 Comment

THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF THOUGHT Confusion is a phenomenon with a permanent, organic character in bourgeois society. Confusion grows ever thicker when it is addressed as already confusing problems by the very historical terms of its utterance. The latter occurs with the brand new and, at once, very old problem of the intellectual’s obligations with regard to revolution. As posed by historical materialists, this problem is already a tangle. When formulated or simply outlined by bourgeois intellectuals, it acquires the aspect of insoluble chaos. *** “The philosophers,” Marx says, “have only interpreted the world in various ways. The…

DIE PROZESSE — Ein faktographisches Poem

2019-06-112020-09-30 Categories: WorksTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Arthur Rimbaud · César Vallejo · George Jackson · Gilets Jaunes · Julien Coupat · Leo Trotsky · Nanni Balestrini · Paul Verlaine · Pawlenski (Pavlensky) · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Roque Dalton · Rosa Luxemburg · Sergei TretyakovLeave a comment

ENGLISH TRANSLATION (part 1) BY DAVID VICHNAR & TIM KÖNIG ALIENIST 5 “Mehr als 1000 Menschen wurden bereits willkürlich verurteilt und inhaftiert. Und jetzt soll das neue so genannte “Anti-Randalierer- Gesetz” uns auch noch darin hindern zu demonstrieren. Wir verurteilen jede Gewalt gegen Demonstranten durch die Polizei. Nichts wird uns aufhalten! Demonstrieren ist ein Grundrecht. Schluss mit der Straflosigkeit für die Ordnungskräfte! Amnestie für alle Opfer der Unterdrückung!” Aufruf der ersten Generalversammlung der Gilets Jaunes “Ich werde ein Arbeiter sein: Diese Idee hält mich zurück, wenn die wahnsinnige Wut mich hin zur Schlacht von Paris drängt, — wo doch so…

César Vallejo | Cuneiforms

2019-01-282019-01-28 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: César VallejoLeave a comment

No biographer or scholar can avoid the imprisonment that César Vallejo suffered between November 6, 1920, and February12, 1921, in Trujillo, an episode that stakes out an indubitable before and after in the life and work of the Santiaguino.
The first section of ‘Scales’, ‘Cuneiforms,’ and several poems of ‘Trilce’ were composed in his cell of Trujillo Central Jail. In effect, Vallejo wrote from and about the prison.

Alain Badiou | The Century & Poetry and Communism

2018-11-222020-10-31 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Alain Badiou · Bertolt Brecht · César Vallejo · Communism · Marxism · Nāzim Hikmet · RevolutionLeave a comment

Alain Badiou | The Century PDF Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to examine what…

Two Poets — Anna Mendelssohn & Miyó Vestrini

2018-08-152020-07-07 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Anne Boyer · César Vallejo · Charles Baudelaire · Marxism · Militant Poetics · Miyó Vestrini · Riots · Sean BonneyLeave a comment

Anna Mendelssohn Anna Mendelssohn, also known as Grace Lake, who has died aged 61 of a brain tumour, was principally a poet, and a poet like no other, but was also a painter, musician, actor and, earlier in her life, a political activist. She came from what she described as “a very strict working-class socialistic Jewish background” in Stockport, Cheshire. But what impelled her throughout her life was a 1960s spirit of radical revolt. At first it was political but, after a great turning point in her life, it was artistic. She was educated at Stockport high school and…

Miyó Vestrini | Poems

2017-12-232020-07-07 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anne Boyer · Cassandra Gillig · César Vallejo · Communism · Miyó Vestrini · Resistance · Revolution · RiotsLeave a comment

XII (from NEXT WINTER) for Luis Camilo I get up I do not get up They hate me I tie my tubes I hit a motorcyclist with malice aforethought I surrender to the Oedipus complex I wander I carefully study the differences between dysrhythmia – psychosis – schizophrenia – neurosis – depression – syndrome – panic and I’m pissed left alone in the house when everyone is asleep I buy a magazine that costs six dollars they steal my best friend’s purse they grab me I push him I murder him I remember the umbrella of Amsterdam and the…

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Tag: César Vallejo