Readings:
*Galina Rymbu, “Gates of the Body”:
https://granta.com/summer-gates-of-the-body/
*Bill Griffiths, “Starfish Jail” & excerpt from this interview: https://www.invisiblebooks.co.uk/archive/bill-griffiths/
*Stephen Hastings-King, “Parallax: Four Perspectives on Russia”:
https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2022/04/06/parallax-four-perspectives-on-russia/
[bullet points represent 'minutes' of individual contributions; names have been left out, but the Report represents the flow of a group conversation]
- Some general questions to begin. We've been through several years that have been politically dislocating. They have been literally dislocating, in that the pandemic for a long time prevented us from talking and sharing thoughts in the same physical spaces, but they have also been conceptually dislocating, in that what has happened has created new difficulties for our ways of thinking and acting politically – and also for our writing. Is it possible to confront this. Even naming the problem can be difficult, as each of us will experience it differently.
- Griffiths in “Starfish Jail” as destroying or destituting social discourse
- amid much conversation / discourse / thinking of the historical form of the individual, it still feels as if those of us who would wish to substantially alter this form, - and in flashes perhaps succeed at this - still remain largely inside some version of it, in our lives. How to jar this?
- speaker in “Starfish” interpellates himself into a sectioning in prison – what makes a self do that to themselves before being done to
- Likes / feels closer to the one page of the Griffiths interview than the Hastings-King: Grifffiths says it all non-theoretically—it is down to earth (though of course there’s plenty of information and analysis in the Hastings-King)
- where the ending is not already closed to us – still open – for example, how to escalate the ongoing strikes today so they can be successful? Possibly with poetry, how?
- unsure about intensification, both politically and in poetry. What would intensification in poetry be? In “Starfish”, the repeated colons an instance of intensification: as if everything that follows after the colon is a proposition
- to what extent is “Starfish” co-authored? (With Bill Griffiths’s name signifying on the cover.) This feels different than poetry writing workshops held in jails, but is there also some relation?
- Griffiths intentionally left Delvan’s name off the cover to protect him, as those in jail could be penalized for publishing. In subsequent editions once Delvan was out of jail his name was on the cover
- The poem of Rymbu, as of Griffiths, seem to be in a collective voice already—spoken from a whole range of positions where those distinctions [between individual / collective] are melted away
- avoiding dissonance is how people forget – a common thing in all three texts. Can dissonance be individual? Is it already collective?
- the spiraling alienation of joining collectives being a part of collectives. It’s become a very commonly expressed desire on the left, to be a part of some collective. But there are also the difficulties involved in this
- the need to be an individual in some ways in order to be effective within a collective
- the voice in poems, don’t tend to think of it as collective, or individual, but the place one can sometimes speak from, stripped of ego, where whatever’s left to speak speaks something in common—but this could also be a kind of collective—the desire to not remain confined to previous imaginings of ‘collective’
- don’t feel at ease with any definitions -in general-, and specifically, neither of the individual, nor of the collective, but some liquid medium in between. Previous comment about the collective voice in Rymbu and Griffiths was said as a kind of shorthand, it’s not to be defined that way either
- ‘the new sociality of suicide’. There are so many collectivities, and collectivities that overlap. I want to reverse the question of how to form a collectivity: what collectivities are we already in we want to opt out of? Being part of a collectivity can perhaps be instantaneous, sudden, or completely unconscious. We already in multiple collectives.
- The way that some communists did not (& do not) want to take responsibility for what happened in the Soviet Union
- The Syrian website (which published the Hastings-King piece) includes real physical derangement and trauma and thus connects with Griffiths’s text. It’s impossible to take world politics into account without taking mass incarceration into consideration.
- the photographers Chris Killip and Markéta Luscacová: each in different circumstances, very consciously, were able to take photographs of people at work without those people posing, by allowing time for people to think of the outsider (at first) with a camera, differently
- having recently read Walter Rodney and thought about problems of extraction, of people as well as resources, and the scale of this – not a question of scaling up, of collectivities getting larger, but perhaps the opposite, a kind of world-wide de-industrializing
- In Rymbu’s poems, much language of the ‘natural’ world, in a country (Russia) of massive extraction of resources
- a general impression of an intensely physical poetry, in which time often flows backwards
Potential readings for next time:
- Photographs of Chris Killip and / or Markéta Luscacová
- Chuang, Social Contagion, https://chuangcn.org/2021/09/state-of-the-plague/
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