… the day when the Italien poet Pier Paolo Pasolini was found murdered …

2022-11-012022-11-01 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina Gogou · Pier Paolo PasoliniLeave a comment

In one of her most fascinating poems, AUTOPSY REPORT 2.11.75, from the volume The Wooden Overcoat (1982), Katerina Gogou revisits the day when the Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (he was certainly more than an ally to her) was found murdered on the beach at Ostia. In the blind spot of a surveillance camera — a poet no one fears is no poet — Gogou traces with anatomical precision the horrific injuries that led to his agonizing death. “His face disfigured by the framework of the class he denied / a black and blue volunteer of the ragtag proletariat. /…

Lana Turner No.14

2022-04-07 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina Gogou · Lana Turner JournalLeave a comment

Lana Turner Journal number 14 is out (including my review of Katerina Gogou’s “Now Let’s See What You’re Gonna Do”) Available now: lanaturnerjournal.com

Katerina Gogou | AND THAT’S HOW I’LL GO AWAY

2021-06-022021-06-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina Gogou · Militant PoeticsLeave a comment

I walk. I walk. I walk. With the pockets on my wooden overcoat all stitched-up. I walk repeatedly. Repeatedly I walk. I carry nothing. I have nothing to hide I have nothing to stick my hands in I walk with my hands in the rain on a silken rope — an umbilical cord — that connects heaven and earth what’s above with what’s below. I go on with short-circuited searchlights with no safety net under me. I walk absurdly in inverted logic but righteous and decisive to put into practice all I have thought about to put into practice…

Katerina Gougou | A new translation of her book “Three Clicks Left”

2020-05-012020-05-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina GogouLeave a comment

Three Clicks Left: first appeared as Τρία κλικ αριστερά (Kastaniotis Editions, 1978); translated from the Greek by ΔT and JC. Here: Free May Day Book #9: Cherish x Abolish Wage-labor capital and imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism betrayed revolutions Hey, comrade, we miss you so much . . . Time is worm-ridden nuclear tests, popular fronts, brothels (the Portuguese regime has fallen too) hyperproductive Catholics and the mafia have become multinationals, they forbid love, comrade. Like dogs on soccer fields agents climb our stairs anytime they want they can yank down our pants and fuck us peace…

Sean Bonney | Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou

2020-02-242020-11-10 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Katerina Gogou · Sean BonneyLeave a comment

Dear Katerina, Yes I know, things are bad for us all these days. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve disappeared over the past few months. There’s an uneasy nausea settled into the basic awareness of, well, everything. Its not even the news or the weather. Even the raw evidence of our senses – sounds of machinery outside the window, smell of diesel and gas, the elevated railway, bird-song etc – has become sinister. The sunset is a warning. The ticking of the clock a threat. Everything has combined into a pitched malevolent force…

PORNO-TEO-KOLOSSAL ((nach Pasolini))

2019-11-292021-01-24 Categories: WorksTags: Dante Alighieri · Friedrich Hölderlin · Katerina Gogou · Peter Weiss · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Ulrike Meinhof · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Die Verweigerung ist schon immer eine essenzielle Geste gewesen. Denk nur an die Heiligen, die Eremiten, aber auch an die Intellektuellen. Die Wenigen, die die Geschichte gemacht haben, das waren diejenigen, die Nein gesagt haben, nicht die Höflinge oder die Diener der Kardinäle. Pier Paolo Pasolini I. 5:11 am Nachmittag: das Gefühl, dass der Geist, das Bewußtsein wie ein Sprengsatz explodieren / ich schwöre :: die einfachsten Bewegungen des Körpers nicht mehr zu kontrollieren sind und der Blick beginnt sich um sich selbst zu drehen — Einverständnis ist eine Falle. Zeit und Raum ineinander…

Katerina Gogou | Sui generis

2019-04-302019-04-30 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina GogouLeave a comment

Look how the streets disappear amid people… how the kiosks get cold from the wet newspapers the sky how it is punctured by the wires and the end of the sea by the weight of the ships how sad the forgotten umbrellas are at the last bus and the mistake of the one that got off one stop too early the clothes left in the laundry and your shame two years after you made money and found out how to ask for it how bit by bit slowly, methodically it twists us to determine our stance on life by…

Two Poets — Pier Paolo Pasolini & John Wieners

2018-09-072020-10-19 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Andrea Brady · Charles Olson · Communism · John Wieners · Katerina Gogou · Nat Raha · Pier Paolo Pasolini · RevolutionLeave a comment

“I harbor a visceral, deep, irreducible, hatred against the bourgeoisie, against its sufficiency, its vulgarity; a mythical hatred, or, if you prefer, religious.” Pier Paolo Pasolini
“Do not think of the future; there is none. / But the formula all great art is made of.“ J. Wieners

Two Poets — Katerina Gogou & Galina Rymbu

2018-07-102020-12-01 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Galina Rymbu · Katerina Gogou · RiotsLeave a comment

Katerina Gogou Katerina Gogou (1940-1993) was a Greek anarchist poetess who is a representative figure of the ‘80s radical political and cultural scene of Exarcheia. The impact of her poems, lately rediscovered and taken into consideration by the mainstream media, has always been influential in the radical movement. Katerina was born in Athens in 1940 and the first years of her life were marked by the famine and the Nazi occupation, the resistance and the civil war. The defeat of the communists was followed by a period of strict censorship, police terror and island camps for political prisoners. Gogou finished…

riots and/or poetics [6/2018]

2018-05-302018-07-12 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · Reading ListTags: Anne Boyer · Arthur Rimbaud · artiCHOKE · Bertolt Brecht · Communism · Francis Ponge · Galina Rymbu · Jackie Wang · Katerina Gogou · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Leslie Kaplan · Lisa Jeschke · Nat Raha · Nathalie Quintane · Revolution · Riots · Roque Dalton · Sean Bonney · Stephanie Young · Tripwire1 Comment

“[…] But here: distillation, composition, narrow-mindedness; and the oppressive summers: the heat isn’t without respite, but given that good weather is in everyone’s interests, and that everyone is a pig, I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly. […] The worst is that all of this will bother you as much as it will. It seems for the best that you read and walk as much as possible. Reason enough not to remain confined to offices and homes. Mindlessnesses must be given free reign, far from confinement. I am not about to be selling balm, but I imagine…

Katerina Gogou / AUTOPSY REPORT

2018-01-212020-12-09 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Communism · Katerina Gogou · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Revolution · RiotsLeave a comment

AUTOPSY REPORT 2.11.75 …the body lay face-down in a parallel connecting to the Vatican. One of his hands full of blood gestured in open palm as insult to CPI and the other clutching his genitals to the culture specialists. Blood clotting on his hair as leeches on the veiled homosexual syndromes of all men of earth throughout the realm. His face disfigured by the framework of the class he denied a black and blue volunteer of the ragtag proletariat. The fingers of the left hand broken by social realism thrown away to floodlit trash. The jaw broken by the…

Sean Bonney | Our Death

2017-12-032021-11-12 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Antonin Artaud · Arthur Rimbaud · Friedrich Hölderlin · Katerina Gogou · Miyó Vestrini · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Revolution · Riots · Sean Bonney2 Comments

Our Death / Abject 2 (after Baudelaire) Great love, that will crush the human world, I wish we could do something to help each other. But today we are separated by so many tedious enemies. They smile at us all day long and ask us about our fever. What is there to say? That “fever”, in the way they pronounce it, isn’t much more than a weird reflection of their smile, which in itself is a symbol of their sense of rightness within the so-called world. But that we feel that the five characters that make up the word…

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Tag: Katerina Gogou