from Introduction to A Stein Reader

Ed. Ulla Dydo

No time, no space, no center, standard, or authority. Stein wrote in a world changed by Einstein and even more by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. She knew she was one of them, constructing for words what they had constructed for quantum mechanics. On 25 May 1928 Dorothy Dudley Harvey wrote to stein from New York...Harvey described Stein with a quotation from Russell ["Physics and Metaphysics"] as a visionary in the world of the new physics.

"Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind...have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain."
In connection with grammar I thought at once of you, and wondered, knowing little about them, if you have not been one of the metaphysicians as an artist, with whom the physicists have just caught up.

from "Things to Do Today"

by Joe Wenderoth


1. thaw the wounded

7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard

10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the

19. determine the cause of the cause

22. set the famous criminals free

26. make the beautiful go to work

37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices

42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment

53. clarify a morning posture

59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work

70. control the urge to farm

75. rehabilitate the truth tellers

77. practice saying something

79. try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces

80. discontinue the breadth of the applicable horizon

87. mimic the open area

90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields

92. make the faithful look at us

93. weep new syllables

"54. sing of eyes freezing, thighs giving birth, what have you"
--Joe Wenderoth, "Things to Do Today"

have not into cold
a flash of cutting crisp
in the dead
of terror
shivers what freezing
birth white frost
giving new
slide screech shatter
finger
nails
lengthen scratch a
formidable horizon falls
into disrepair regard
silences in flesh
composed sweet
notes ring
fast

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine


Define loneliness?

Yes.

It’s what we can’t do for each other.

What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other? (62)

relates

“Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure
and the body figur’d; motion and the body mov’d.”

--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature


your marble sphere my box
dimensional
the words laid one on top
across
broken letters
an articulation of history through space
on the page
who was defeated
whose artifacts
weapons

kiss me present tense against shining marble
does not move
its form holding together
molecules
straddling
how much means
across letters objects
viewed from every direction
will not simply show and tell

stories without verbs

punctuation wasted

linoleum can you bend

all the way

against yesterday

scheduled mishaps unruly

confined progress still

each hair meticulously

nails hammered into steel

without structure

in accordance with

dreams, textured

in the gaps tangle

wine, peppermint, cardboard

details

sustain sun in through the window unexpected listening masks a visual sensation narrates the lines set against her, can you tell me how and in what manner? not angry but potential, under the surface, bare tree branches of the inconceivable. hope has feathers you know, little else. concrete array of vocabulary intoned against, detour instead, storms lingering. grey orange mix with silent refrain—repeat and hold back—the coloring texture noisy scattered maneuvering. the body impulse, intoxication, monologues of manic silence.

from "Poetry is Not a Luxury"

by Audre Lorde

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

one notices the slivers of pale flesh in the ash. she is come undone. flakes scatter a breeze it will be impossible to close our eyes without the smell, of ash, of flesh. heat amplified against flame and a forgotten history, never recorded by victors or anyone else. we tie our ends with neon ribbon, pretend there is a common story that would make us feel better, that we could remember fondly, that we could displace into lines of feeling. Pale, gruesome, emotion. she led us to believe there was another way. instead, coming to this.

from "Proportion Surviving"

by Renee Gladman

For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed.

from "Translation"

by Renee Gladman


I love this town. It's still vibrant though I have not seen anyone in years. I am not in jail--they have just gone. I cannot remember where I was when I came back to find them gone--maybe at the river or drying my hair in the hot part of the forest. All I know is the sudden ghostliness of it. Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore. I mean, you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you. Life was that dynamic. We could not love ourselves more. Well, imagine coming home to a one-hundred-mile expanse of beauty that you always have thought of as yourself, and finding on that day that it exists without you. Furthermore, contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.

"You may have noticed, however, that there is frequently an irritating, if not depressing, discrepancy between our ideas and good intentions and how we act when we are confronted with the nitty-gritty details of real life situations." --Pema Chodron

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine

Or I remember that the last two sentences I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee before falling asleep the previous night were: "I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in. Obedient to them."

Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness. The Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture, "for instants at a time I know what it is like to be a corpse."

in one postcard, an image of a girl, layered, purple, half smiling. the landscape, distinct and European, old buildings, a cafe, sipping coffee facing the street watching each passerby stroll through life continuous and still. captured, the intent of sharing adventure, a scene of symbolic space: we are here, we have discovered architecture, we may decide to never return home. romantic notions of food, drink, visual collaboration of time split and standing.

from Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

by Mark Epstein

Most of us exist in a state similar to that of Freud's friends. Our minds are running on without us, keeping us at a distance from that which we love, or from love itself. We justifiably complain of feeling unreal because we are busy keeping ourselves at arm's length from the biggest reality of all--the transience of which we are a part. Rather than permitting a flow, we impose an interruption that interferes with satisfaction or fulfillment. As my rabbi discovered, successfully permitting an intimate connection requires the ability to embrace impermanence. The flower that blooms for only a single night is indeed a sight to behold. (72)

from Retallack's Experimental Feminine

Which is to say, experiment and tradition should, in an ideal world, form the dialogic energy that creates vital cultures. In fact nothing of interest happens without this synergy which is not to say that it’s business as usual. Our Western cultural image resembles a brain with a severed corpus callosum—each side functionally innocent of the other. Did an evil surgery occur while we were all asleep in one fairy tale or another? One side happily thinks everything is simple; the other side unhappily thinks everything is complex. In this chronic bifurcation, a potentially collaborative “we” is missing the fact that complex dynamics aren’t monsters lurking in forests, threatening the simple pleasures of blue skies. They are the forest. They are the blue skies. They are our entire natural-cultural environment. They may indeed consume us, but this is only a grim certainty if we don’t embrace them with respect and understanding. Since Mandelbrot presented us with computer models of the fractal geometry of nature, we have recognized the beauty in forms of chaos, which is inherently fractal. It was apparent before in turbulent romantic landscapes, but not yet identified as global dynamic principle. Perhaps our dysfunction, at this point has less to do with a paucity of intellectual and aesthetic evidence than the lingering wound of Occam's razor regularly sharpened by market logics. Chaos theorists may tell us that things are not as simple as we’d like them to be, but can we afford to believe that?

The Clem in Winter

Berlinale to screen restored 'Metropolis' at Brandenburg Gate

released or in process can you put the pieces or maintain a puzzle assortment of wandering each color like Picasso in shapes across the image reflected against my memory having heard you sleep like red or orange in displaced lines curving and undecided can you reflect this intended or forgotten sometimes there are dots or stripes a geometry of body breast simultaneous association can you place or replace with each new thought (specifically) (constructed) for this or every purpose rearrange the letters the lines with a color one color for each notion though sometimes notions are confused having listened to misplaced memories ((re)constructed) a process of coping antipathy surviving a modern visual aesthetic with too many possible immediate layered inflection or innuendo how many ways can you see this me the clarification of disorder explosion of detail communication of the impossibly simple.