i said endurance has its limits people are made of flesh and bone / i spoke about the stalinists and the method of executing the very best as traitors / who died screaming long live the party! / sifis said / the statement is only the beginning. then they will ask who are your friends. / then where do they live. katerina gogou i believe at heart that one must not be an accomplice to lies and compromise, the contemporary artist must scream out their revolt and make understood that we live in an unbearable, cruel, and…
Tag: Karen Brodine
Karen Brodine | Journal Entries: Always the Ideas Carry Themselves Forward
that you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself — surely you see that. Bertolt Brecht January, 78 my parents floated somewhere on the left. I visualized the left as a wide mysterious plain drifting beyond my left cheekbone. I know I was left-handed but what else did I inherit? hints and whispers of commie over the phone. my grandmother stubbornly mute in some kind of hearing. so when Mr. Bant, my 7th grade teacher, decided to spend a special week on the red menace, I was anxious. Mr. Bant had a birthmark that…
der traum von einer sache [subversive chronik]
Karen Brodine | Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking
Karen Brodine: Feminist Poet and Revolutionary KAREN BRODINE was barely 40 years old when she died of cancer on October 18, 1987. Her death was a shock, a misery, an abrupt and unwarranted end to an exceptionally dynamic and productive life. The horrible thing is that Karen’s death was unnecessary. Cancer killed her because the medical profession was too profit-motivated, too sexist, to catch it in time, when they could and should have. And she was mad as hell at the medical automatons who prescribed the massive doses of poison known as chemotherapy when an ounce of prevention could have saved…
Two Poets — Ida Börjel & Amiri Baraka
Ida Börjel is one of the most striking voices in contemporary poetry. Each of her much-praised and awarded collections forms a cohesively and rigoursly composed whole that is always rooted in extensive research and a strong thematic principle. Her collection “Miximum Ca’Canny; the Sabotage Manuals“ appears to be both a practical handbook and a philosophical study of the various ways the language of power and authority can be sabotaged, a recurring theme in Börjel’s poetry.
riots and/or poetics [10/2018]
“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson…