round-up: 2/11
poems to read, books to check out, & reflections on art
Happy Friday, all!
Just a little round-up for you today—enjoy!
Housekeeping:
My lil fiction collection, Burials, is now available for preorder at Bull City Press.
And, yes, this link will be in the newsletter until the book comes out in March.
It’s worth noting, too, that it only costs $3.99!
I shared a bunch of poems I’ve loved lately on Twitter. Click here to read them:
With so many of my own publications coming out all at once, I’ve been talking about myself waaay more than I’m comfortable with. So I wanted to hype other people up & build community in a small way by sharing really amazing work by other writers. For me, that’s part of being a good literary citizen. If you’re interested, I challenge you to start a similar thread on your own Twitter account!
Resources:
What I read this week:
Minnie Bruce Pratt on Magnified, Making A Home We Can All Be Safe In
Betraying Authority: Fragments on Queer Art & Poetry, Noah LeBien
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: For a Love of Softness, Be Oakley
What I want to read:
A Radical Examination of Homoeroticism in Communist Propaganda Posters
Let’s Cut the Bullshit—Here’s What it Really Means to Diversify Your Workplace
Quotations:
The real value of our work as artivists, or as artists using our creative practices to seek justice and create social equity, is collaboration.
-x
I thought about this a little bit before we got ready to talk, the way that grief and love, romance and politics, caretaking and adventure were all intertwined in our life for almost our whole life together. You know, Leslie’s last words were “remember me as a communist revolutionary.” Those words actually opened a window into why our time together during her illness was what you just said, it was romance, it was work, it was adventure, it was grief. We were always placing the process of illness and even dying in a political context.
The loss of the most loved person, is not, first of all, a blow to words or to language. It’s a blow to the body.
Capitalism seizes our labor and estranges us from our work at the same time that it simultaneously alienates us from nature and keeps us from experiencing ourselves as simply one species intertwined with the world and other species.
So, my work, as I understand it, as a poet, is at least in part to try to make poems that reestablish the link between the sensuous external world and our daily human life, which is battered under capitalism.
As artists, we are forced to participate in a community of competing individuals rather than a community of equal individuals.
-Noah LeBien
Queer artists only learn how to use their experiences; we’re never taught how to talk about our experiences in their own terms. We’re only taught the language of capitalism, how to use the queer mythos to a macho-individualist end. We’re not writing our own stories, we’re molding our experiences to the forms of storytelling that have been forced on us.
-Noah LeBien
Do we let our lives become fetishized in order to live? Do we let our suffering become another consumable content-product?
-Noah LeBien
I think of queerness as multiple, as an anarchistic approach to sexual/gender identity.
-Noah LeBien
The urgency with which I created things as a child shows me now that I was clinging to creativity with the hope that it would show me a way out. And it did.
Sometimes, people ask us what we want to do in the future and we say the answer we think we should say. We downplay our deepest desires, thinking we are protecting them.
[…]
It took me some time to realize that I have been doing this to myself. Creating art and writing is a driving force of my life. I dream of spending my life doing those things, whether or not that means paying my bills with it. But people ask me, “What do you want to do in the future? What about when you graduate?” I immediately say a practical answer. I try to sound smart. I don’t say I want to create because it is not a “realistic” answer. Or, in the past I said it, and I don’t wish to get into the more vulnerable territory of truth with a stranger who I doubt will take me seriously. So I crumple up my real desires and tuck them into my back pocket, replacing them with a more practical answer. By doing so, whether out of protection or not, I reinforce the idea that my dreams are unattainable.
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!
-Audre Lorde
Tweets:
Have a great weekend,
-Despy Boutris