#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.
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.
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.
cover image: Nicholas Galanin, “Shadow on the land, an excavation and bush burial,” earthworks, archaeological dig tools, barriers, 2020.
Announcing Tripwire 17 – with 245 pages of writing, art, reviews, interviews, & translations, plus 27 pages of “Revolutionary Poetry from Lusophone Africa,” selected & translated by Chris Daniels!
This issue is dedicated to the memories of Sean Bonney, Cassie Smith, & Diane di Prima
Contributors include:
Wendy Trevino, Tawahum Bige, Galina Rymbu, translated by Joan Brooks, Cait O’Kane, Jesse Darling, Anahita Jamali Rad, Colectivo Frank Ocean, Amitai Ben-Abba, Nkosi Nkululeko, Cean Gamalinda, Giancarlo Huapaya, translated by Ryan Greene, Hawad, translated by Jake Syersak, Nicholas Galanin, Archival: Revolutionary Poetry from Lusophone Africa, selected & translated by Chris Daniels: Amílcar Cabral * Deolinda Rodrigues * Noémia de Sousa * Alda do Espírito Santo * Marcelino dos Santos * Armando Emílio Guebuza * Nicolau Gomes Spencer, Helena Uambembe, Hugo Garcia Manríquez, translated by NAFTA, Mbizo Chirasha, Trish Salah, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Listen Chen, Hung Q. Tu, Catriona Strang, Buck Downs, Christodoulos Makris, ko ko thett, Catalina Cariaga. Essays & Reviews: Rossen Ventzislavov on Austyn Rich, Jeanine Onori Webb on Manuel Paul López, Alfredo Aguilar, & Lizz Huerta, Sarah Brouillette on Juliana Spahr, Virginia Konchan on Michael Nardone. 245 pages. $15.
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.
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?”
cover image: Kevin singing “Send in the Clowns” in The Shakers, courtesy of Dodie Bellamy
Announcing Tripwire 16 – the Performance/Writing issue – with over 325 pages of writing, scores, reviews interviews, & translations, plus a 80 page Kevin Killian Poets Theater tribute! Contributors include:
Excited to announce the 2nd annual Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, featuring three events with the Cartonera Collective, hosted by The Poetry Center at SFSU, Nov 7-8.
Cartonera Collective is a project of Cardboard House Press, devoted to the creation of spaces and media for cultural, artistic, and literary development. We publish writing, art, and contemporary thought from Latin America and Spain, and host bilingual events, community projects and workshops. Our work serves as a platform to exchange ideas and highlight meanings that stimulate diverse human connections and social actions. All of our publications are bilingual—English and Spanish. To date we have published authors from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain and Uruguay.
Presentation and readings: Thursday, November 7 – 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University
The Collective’s new Tripwire pamphlet, cardboard minutes // libro de cajas, will
be available (including limited-editing hand-bound copies), along with
the new Tripwire pamphlet from Anenta Aire, who inaugurated the Poetry
Center series last year. Hope to see you at some or all of the events!
Announcing the third installment of the Tripwire pamphlet series: Desperate Holdings (un) Real Estate: Dis-Investment Strategy, by Cassie Thornton and the Feminist Economics Department. Drawing on the collaborative work and story of the immersive real estate/spa installation at Dream Farm Commons in spring 2019, this pamphlet explores the FED’s ongoing investigation into property and land, with art-actions and performative rituals aimed at subverting the logics of colonial real estate and economic displacement. Find out more at the Desperate Holdings site.
Book release and talk: Tues Oct 22, 7pm EM Wolfman Books, Oakland. RSVP here.
Then on October 23, 25, and 28, from 11am to 2pm, come visit Desperate Holdings Real Estate & LandMind Spa at Oscar Grant Plaza for a land-facial! details here
