Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally

Posted on by under Poems

Malick Sidibé, Portrait de Mselle Kanté, 1965

 

 

Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally

by Fred Moten

 

 

1.

between the object and the floor
the couch is a pedestal and a shawl
and just woke up her hair. she never

 

ever leaves the floating other house
but through some stories they call.

 

later that was her name the collaborator

 

of things shine in the picture. hand

 

flew off her early hair though held
by flowers. later her name was grete.

 

her hair feels angles by flowers that

 

before her name was shori the
penetrator in the history of no décor.

 

the station agent intimate with tight
spaces refuse to hit back or be carried.

 

later her name was danielle goldman

 

and his serene highness thierry henry.

 

her head is cut off by a shadow of primary

 

folded streets she harrass with enjoyment.
later her name is piet. she come from cubie

 

with the whole club economy in her hand.
when she reclines her head is lifted

 

by a turn, someone’s arm they left there.
later her name was elouise. watch her

 

move into the story she still move
     2.

 

and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned
deep brown of faces in the otherwise
whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand

 

still. apparatus tear shit up and
always. you see they can’t get off when

 

they get off. some stateless folks
spurn the pleasure they are driven

 

to be and strive against. man, hit me again.
_____________________________
Fred Moten is a poet, literary critic, and professor of English and African American Studies at Duke University. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press). His latest collection of essays with Stefano Harney is, the undercommons, (Minor Composition, 2013). “Fugitivity is immanent…” is published in Hughson’s Tavern, (Leon Works, 2008).

Theme of Farewell

Posted on by under Poems

[no title] 1999 by Jannis Kounellis born 1936

[no title] 1999 by Jannis Kounellis born 1936
[no title] 1999 by Jannis Kounellis born 1936
[no title] 1999 by Jannis Kounellis born 1936
[no title] 1999 by Jannis Kounellis born 1936
Jannis Kounellis, [no title, Series 99], 1999

 

from Theme of Farewell

by Milo de Angelis

translated by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli

 

In you all deaths gather, all
the broken glasses, the sere pages, the derangements
of thought, they gather in you, guilty
of all deaths, incomplete and guilty,
in the wake of every mother, in your wake,
motionless. They gather there, in your
weak hands. The apples of this market are death,
these poems retreat into their grammar,
in the hotel room, in the hut
of what does not join, souls without rest,
aged lips, bark ripped from the trunk.
They are dead. They gather there. They failed,
the operation failed, they failed.

 

The place was motionless, the word obscure. That was
the place we agreed on. Goodbye, memory of the sparkling
nights, goodbye, big smile, the place was there.
To breathe was a darkness shutters had made, a primitive state.
Silence and desert were switching positions and we
were talking to a lamp. The place was that one. The trolleys
rarely passed. Venus was returning to her hut.
Out of the warrior throat, episodes broke free. We didn’t
say anything more. The place was that one. It was there
that you were dying.
____________________________________
Professor Susan Stewart has published new bilingual translations of Italian poet Milo de Angelis (with Patrizio Ceccagnoli) at the University of Chicago Press: Theme of Farewell and After Poems, 2013.