#10 A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a “death”, two solitudes, façades, four loose dogs, a doppelgänger, a likeness, three airport floors, thirty-six weeks… by Lotte L.S., gathers four wide-ranging essays that together track a politics and a poetics through the cities of Marseille, Athens, Kyiv, and the town of Great Yarmouth, in order to ask: “When are your poetics, your politics, not implicated in another’s?” amidst the crises of our times. With a new afterword, these reflections on riots and collectivity and poetry and solitude seek to understand what is included or excluded in the lived and languaged record of individual and communal memory. $3 US/$8 International (shipping included). Free PDF.

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Remote access event, free and open to the public

Saturday, March 13 – 12:00 pm PST

REGISTER TO ATTEND
—or—
Watch this program at YouTube

With emcee, alex cruse

This remote-access event starts promptly at 12:00 pm Pacific Time, and is free and open to the public. Real-Time Captioning link will be provided at the event. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu

Please note early start-time, to accommodate our guest and audience in the UK, and elsewhere.

For our third program in the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, we are delighted to welcome two of the more outstanding young Black writers and intellectuals at work in the US and UK. Momtaza Mehri, in London, and Zoé Samudzi, here in the Bay Area, will each read from their work, engage in conversation with one another and with emcee alex cruse, and respond to questions from the audience. We welcome this rare opportunity to bring these two Afro-diasporan writers and thinkers together across continents.

• “…A poet is drenched in a singularity, sodden with its viscous specificity. A poem speaks for itself exactly when it declares it speaks for others. The Black poet is an isotope of both hope & despair. The Black poet is both a reluctant & enthusiastic interlocutor of what is known as the Black condition, which conditions & structures the World that invented it. The Black poem asks you where it hurts & demands no particular answer. The Black poet knows this is a question one can spend a life trying to answer….”
  —Momtaza Mehri, “Harlem Is Hijaz Is Havana Is Harar, Or: The Whole Point of the Black Arts Movement Is That They Were Moving”
• “We [Afro-]diasporans joke often about the genre of poetry and prose born out of a longing for a motherland animated only by hungry verses. There’s a cowardice to this: nostalgic memory, a narrativized nostalgia for memories and experiences and beauty that never belonged to you, is easy. But situating oneself in the wake and afterlife of those traumas and beautiful/beautified struggles is far harder still.”
  —Zoé Samudzi on Momtaza Mehri, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Summer 2020

Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher. Her work has been widely anthologised and has appeared in Granta, Artforum, The Guardian, BOMB, and Real Life Mag. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published in 2019 by Goldsmiths Press. More here.

• “As Black as Resistance [by Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson] is an urgently needed book…a call to action through an embrace of the anarchy of blackness as a recognition and a refusal of the deathly logics of liberalism and consumption. In the face of the ever expanding carceral state, levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and resurgent fascism, this book offers a map to imagining the liberated futures that we can and mus and do make.”
  —Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Zoé Samudzi is a writer, photographer, and a doctoral candidate in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Warscapes, Truthout, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue, BGD, Bitch Media, Open Space, and Verso, among others. With William C. Anderson, Samudzi is coauthor of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (foreword by Mariame Kaba, AK Press, 2018). More here.

Featured:

Tripwire: a journal of poetics

Tripwire Pamphlet Series

Momtaza Mehri, Granta Podcast, Ep. 94, October 7, 2020

Momtaza Mehri, “Poets Should Ride the Bus: On Diane di Prima (1934–2020),” at Verso Books, November 3, 2020

Momtaza Mehri at Open Space, 2018

“Blackness As a State of Matter: A Conversation with Zoé Samudzi,” by Will Furtado, at Contemporary And, C&’s Top Articles of 2019

Zoé Samudzi at Open Space, 2018–2019

Video:

View earlier events in the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

Event contact: The Poetry Center

Event email: poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor: The Poetry Center, Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

Register to Attend: 

https://sfsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3fVkVa5mS2iU5P5jmed6TQ

todas las cajas están vacías / all the boxes are empty, by Sara Uribe, translated by JD Pluecker.

Este manifiesto apuesta por una escritura acuerpada, por escribir en, desde y con el cuerpo: con los cuerpos presentes y los ausentes. Se trata de texto y subtexto que construye, deconstruye y resiste en torno a la poesía como devenir, reescritura y reciclaje: reverberaciones, resonancias, loops, archivos desestabilizadores y un desdecir de fronteras lingüísticas. Se trata de una política escritural que se propone robar tiempo y lenguaje de las fauces del capital y las constricciones de la cultura orquestada por el estado. Es un llamado a re-producir el presente, colectivamente, todos los días.

This manifesto insists on an embodied writing, writing in, from, and with the body: with the bodies, whether present or absent. This is a text and subtext that construct, deconstruct, and resist through an idea of poetry as becoming, re-writing, and recycling: reverberations, echoes, loops, archives that unsettle, and an unspeaking of linguistic boundaries. This is a politic of writing that proposes to steal time and language from the jaws of capital and the constrictions of state-orchestrated culture. A call to re-produce the present, collectively, each and every day. $3 US/$8 International (shipping included). Free PDF.

Click HERE to order or download the PDFs!

The Processes, a factographic proem, by Peter Bouscheljong, translated by David Vichnar, Louis Armand & Tim König.

Announcing Tripwire Pamphlet #8: The Processes, a factographical proem, by Peter Bouscheljong, translated by David Vichnar, Louis Armand & Tim König. A dialectical poetics of radical history that asks what kind of resistance and poetry is possible under conditions of capitalist repression, if we do not simply want to return to everyday life? Synthesizing documentary poetics (the lives of George Jackson, Luxemburg, Verlaine, Pasolini, Anna Mendelssohn, Dalton, Vallejo, and others) with the capitalist alchemy of surveillance and repression, the long “proem” tracks the processes with which those in power react to the social struggles of political movements and the works of revolutionary poets, who strike back into a corner and contribute to our understanding of social upheavals, illuminated by the solar flares of Marx & Rimbaud. $3/$5 int’l. Free PDF. 

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Making Ruins, by Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber

Published in conjunction with their exhibition at Republic Gallery, and their ongoing investigative work into architecture, public space, and collective memory, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber explore the legacy of architectural designs and debates in Skopje, Macedonia, where attempts to erase traces of the city’s sociaist history has resulted in uncanny conjunctures of nationalist ideologies, urban history, and attempts to stage such ruptures in the built environment. Making Ruins points to the corpses of architecture hidden away under foamy camouflage. Artistic intervention is meant to rework the still visible architectural remains into ruins, acting to interrupt the linearity of false historization, preserving memories of a particular moment of past international solidarity and claiming an alternative future. FREE COLOR PDF.

The Tricking Hour, by Irene Silt

Gathering columns written over the last two years by New Orleans-based sex worker Irene Silt for a local alt monthly, The Tricking Hour explores work, sex, criminalization, resistance, joy, solidarity and queer love in the alternative political economies of sex work. A fervently anti-capitalist missive through the intersectional lens of anti-work feminist praxis, where struggles for autonomy and survival are deeply embedded in gendered bodies clandestinely organizing new modes of political identity and rebellion. As Silt asks, “How do we use our bodies, each other, animals, objects in the world, without making claims of possession over them? How do we take our refusal so seriously that we do not return to business as usual—ever?”

Click HERE to order or download the PDFs!