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Poem: Notebook parentheses
(dismiss experiences far too easily,I want to become a commonplace of everything)
(only)
(just)
(what do you smash? When everything is backed-up, what do you smash?)
(I saw something nothing like you/ the symmetries of your face folded when I fucked you)
(& partly my own)
(historically and actually)
(but it was a pseudoscience)
(to remember it)
(this briefly happened in Little London)
(what have I to do with lamentation?)
(democracy)
(ie religion)
(ie unionised)
(ie embodied labour)
(what about the struggle? The Luddites, the Chartists, the imprisoned ones, what about them?)
(what isn’t)
(make me happy)
(mitto – hand)
(present & future)
(ie self-harm, as in prison)
(might be overdone)
(said long)
(said very fast like a shame word)
(against what? Writing, part-time work)
(who once married a stranger called Gloria)
(I was cheerfully stupid) -
During the 1607 uprising in Rockingham Forest more than fifty people defending common right were massacred. The commotion of forest commoners was a major step in the history of class struggle in England. New kinds of writing arose describing the class struggle, such as the seditious writing wrapped around a ball of wax (“living the poor doth want and living they shall have”) and thrown into a church choir, or such as Shakespeare’s treatment of the hard-hearted ruler faced with a starving populace in his Roman play Coriolanus (1608).
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically) -
Self Employed
Piling up the years
I awake in one place
And find the same face
Or counting the time
Since my parents died
Certain less is theft
Than was spent -
I am employed
Every morning
Whose ore I coin
Without knowing
How to join
Lid to coffer
Pillar to groin
Each day hinges
On the same offer.
Samuel Menashe -
Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012)
I have read only a few poems by Adrienne Rich; of course, when a poet dies, we seek their work. Many people will be sharing their favourites now and looking for more. Many more people in will now meet Adrienne Rich for the first time. Looking through old diaries from 2009 I’ve found notes I made from an essay of hers on Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
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Walking
The roaring alongside he takes for granted
And that every so often the world is bound to shake
branches are contention
not of the birds
wind intends
away from the birds
against
I am threatening
sun on trees
with words
I am a warning
for them not to close
I am a grasping
even when I utterly go
thinking about crises, cities, poetry, agitprop, architecture.
Stuff here is mainly interesting things I've seen and read, interspersed with poems and pictures by me and others.
