Multiple Arts: Making Poetry

Poetry is the indeterminate unity of a set of qualities that are not restricted to the kind of writing called “poetry”. The history of poetry is the history of poetry’s persistent refusal to allow itself to be identified with any given poetic mode or genre – not in order to invent one that would be …

Philippe Beck’s art of poetry: the poems of Opéradiques

Contemporary French poet Philippe Beck through his intriguing poetic project Opéradiques (2014; which has yet to be translated into English) demonstrates a new understanding of writing poetry through the deconstructive, reconstructive, boustrophedon process. Beck finds the foundation of his art of poetry in the “ruins” of existing written poems, stories, texts of all genres and …

War – Bob Marley

Until the philosophy which hold one race superiorAnd anotherInferiorIs finallyAnd permanentlyDiscreditedAnd abandoned –Everywhere is war –Me say war.That until there no longerFirst class and second class citizens of any nationUntil the colour of a man’s skinIs of no more significance than the colour of his eyes –Me say war.That until the basic human rightsAre equally …

Autopoetics of sound and signs: Toward poetry by other means

Autopoetics aims to create poetry which doesn’t rely on language and its known grammatical-syntactical structure. It is an attempt to overcome the limitations of currently known linguistic territories which are inadequate for artistic communication through simple and non-purely-verbal poetic forms (e.g. visual poetry, Signalism). Autopoetics doesn’t arise from the act of will and consciousness but …

A Worker Reads History

Japanese Posters Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian workers opposing the war between Manchuria and Mongolia; Design by Yanase Masamu 1927. Chinese and Japanese peasants working together, 1929; Design by Ōtsuki Genji. The Factory as Event Site by Alain Badiou Why Should The Worker Be a Reference in Our Vision Of Politics? The analytical and objective …

Poetic Justice

Nina Simone on the Role of the Artist Interviewer: You want your art to live on long after you? Nina Simone: Oh yes. Interviewer: And your music says this, and it speaks to Black people.  I want you to tell me what your gut feeling is about. Nina Simone: Well, look, off the top of …

Siren Song: The Death of Poetry and Commodified Singing

What has always fascinated me about Sirens, whether written of by Euripides, Homer, Ovid or Hesiod, is that no one writes about Siren’s Song. (Todorov, 2010)It is the hour of the discrete siren who refuses in advance to disseminate and cause to vanish truths that are still only in the state of ‘scales or chord …

Philosophy and Politics

Justice is the philosophical name of the inconsistency, for the state, of any equalitarian political orientation. And we can here join the declarative and axiomatic vocation of the poem. For it is Paul Celan who probably gives us the most exact image of what we must understand by ʻjusticeʼ: On inconsistencies Lean:flickin the abyss, in …

The Supreme Music: Music and Politics by Giorgio Agamben

An Excerpt If the access to the word is, in this sense, museically determined, we understand that for the Greeks, the nexus between music and politics was so evident that Plato and Aristotle treat musical questions only in the works they consecrate to politics. The relation of what they called μουσική (which included poetry, music …