riots and/or poetics [3/2020]

  Lisa Robertson | The Baudelaire Fractal I’d never had an idea for writing a novel before, though I’ve been curious about the form. I’m a poet who has always loved writing prose. Essay writing and the writing of verse have been overlapping and interchangeable activities, and the shape of the sentence has always been at the core of my writing practice. This Baudelaire idea was very funny to me, and it kept opening up more pathways of inquiry the more time I spent with it. It was a way to write a bildungsroman in the feminine; it opened questions of…

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte | Necessity of Revolt: The Power of Renunciation

  That’s agreed then. Tabula rasa: everything is true — there is nothing else. The great vertigo of Revolt has sent the phantasmagoria of appearances reeling and tumbling. Illusion shredded, the material world deforms, reforms, appears and disappears at the mercy of the rebel. A black gulf now swirls in place of what was the self, consciousness, the autonomy of the individual. His rolled-back eyes look between strained temples to where a vast, empty steppe stretches out, barred at the horizon by the floes of the old, bleached senses. He who has renounced everything outside himself just as he has…

Two Poets — Antonin Artaud & Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

The life and work of Antonin Artaud possess a raw power. Long after his death, Artaud’s body of work continues to ricochet strongly through contemporary culture. The facts of Artaud’s life are stark and austere. He was a writer whose work extended provocatively but disastrously into many unknown channels. His extreme challenge was […]