Digital Poetics 3.20 Freedom in the Lyric Continuum: Workshop @ AP Berlin
Image by Kashif Sharma-Patel
During a workshop on June 25th, facilitated by Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel, participants discussed 3 critical texts on poetic practice (by Rene Menil, Keston Sutherland, and Kamau Brathwaite) and participants were invited to contribute with questions and comments, followed by a writing exercise. Here we are publishing some of the participants who contributed on the day.
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glyph /ɡlɪf/
by Giulia Ottavia
my parlance is tainted by tides of fallacious ecstasies. while reality is fraying, collapsing, blending, morphing, convulsing by releasing here and there shreds of time. it leaks. drops punctuating the instant, engraving the present, corrupting my limits. the fluidity of existence pervading the now, a permeable membrane beyond linearity. does a liquid embody a truth? words are liquids in the making. verbal epiphanies from the everyday where the superfluous becomes a moment of disclosure, erasure, dissolution, hybridisation. words. entities of water, plasma, blood, gastric acid, semen. words and their fleshy consistency. incautious heralds of liminal significance. they collide, voiced from the abyss of this body, an imperfect emitter in fact. my identity as such. the womb as the cradle of some meaning, exuding an utterance that touches the vocal cords, reaches the throat, mates with the tongue, falls through the lips. i tremble in awe of intimate estrangement. it is my corporeal manifestation that infuses the space, moulding a diegesis with no end and no beginning. words as strings of an impermanent system of belief, longing to escape and yet viscerally entangled to my inward dimension. thoughts that become so tangible to transmute in pure feeling, dismantling the I. and my mouth, portal for a cry, pleasure or pain, always an opening. have i ever met myself? outside my voice? am i an echo from the inside? language, the human endeavour to vocalise an alienation. uterine alliance among signs and sense. the contradictions of being, the otherness in you, you in the stranger. meaning? meaning. the sacred and the profane. speaking like loving like writing like craving ask for the other. rituals of absorption and rejection, a perpetual divergence. i drift in my own amniotic fluid. my parlance is pierced by blades of fallacious ecstasies.
Giulia Ottavia Frattini is a poet and writer based in Berlin. She currently collaborates as a contributor for several art magazines and is involved in art-oriented projects while developing her literary path. She perceives words as metamorphic elements, and her prime focus gravitates toward the unfolding of identity, language's physicality, and lyricism's disruption.
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Ich bin ein Berliner
by Susan Finlay
running away from the commune
where they stole perfume I bought
to avoid the itch of soap
I find myself as if by chance
on karl marx allee or strasse
or some other wide bold road
all I have is a history
made up from as if by chances
and a phone full of guardian news
did you hear the one about
the oxbridge graduate who spent
two whole weeks on a fishing boat
gutting haddock and drinking pints
with big men who know their place
then writes a piece on community
I’d rather have guardian angels
opium and statues of myths
than read this propaganda
too close to those stinking workers
I struggle but want to believe
that art at least owes me a goodness
Susan Finlay is an artist and writer. Her most recent novel, The Jacques Lacan Foundation, is out now with MOIST.
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Unfinished Business
by Sofia Varino
Something about him makes his wives want to die
Breathing in carbon monoxide with children safely locked in rooms
Upstairs, waiting for sleep to come, waves a jeweled
Black, a crown of foam waiting to reach the shore
Where bare feet can feel for the bottom,
Sink into the sand, sole to seashell,
The slippery slime of algae burst open,
Makes wives want to die leaning against tables,
With purple lips & glossy hands,
Heads bobbing,
Feeling for the rocky bottom,
Fish feet growing scales.
Sofia Varino is a non-binary queer feminist based in Berlin. Varino's research and teaching can be situated at the intersection of feminist political ecology, science & technology studies, and intersectional gender studies. Their poetry is forthcoming in Poetry Wales and has appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Poetry International, and bad poetry quarterly, among others. Their poetry pamphlet Natural Language was published by dancing girl press (Chicago, 2017). Varino's essays and articles have appeared in the journals SHIMA, Whatever, Somatechnics, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, and in The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2022). Their new book Aquatopia: Climate Interventions, a study of environmental politics and aesthetics co-authored with May Joseph, is available now for pre-order (Routledge, 2022). Varino is a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with the minor cosmopolitanisms doctoral program at the University of Potsdam’s department of English & American Studies and teaches at Humboldt University of Berlin's Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. sofiavarino.com Twitter and Instagram: @ sofiavarino
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
