WEBVTT

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So thank you so much.

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That's much better.

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Thank you so much to everybody
here, at the Poetry Center,

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and at the Jewish History
Museum for the invitation

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and for the incredible
hospitality.

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We're going to begin--

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Why, did you want me
to say something else?

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We're really excited to be here.

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I'm going to resist the
impulse to just repeat

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all the names you just heard.

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But a lot of the people who
supported us in being here

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are here tonight.

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And thank you.

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You know who you are.

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And it's kind of
a strange feeling

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to be excited about
an institution,

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but the Poetry Center
is really exciting.

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And I should just say
that the way that we've

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considered this
evening is to begin

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with some talking about ANTENA.

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ANTENA's history,
what ANTENA is,

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what some of the things that
we've done or what have you

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learned from some
of the manifestos

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and getting some of
you active as well in

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this process of poem making.

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And then we'll have some time
with Myriam Moscona's poetry.

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And then we'll return to ANTENA
to do an improvised poem live

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here with all of you.

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So we're going to
begin by reading

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from the manifesto for
discomfortable writing, which

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Ariel has just quoted from.

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Also, there will be a Q&A.
So if you have questions,

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we encourage them.

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A manifesto for
discomfortable writing.

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To make common
currency uncommon.

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To make us strangers in a
place we thought was home.

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To find spaces for listening
inside strangeness.

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To refuse complacency
and allow risk

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to alight inside our own bodies.

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Thinking is doing.

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Doing is thinking.

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We write discomfortably
because we

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are probably wrong,
yet compelled to learn,

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to learn from our errors.

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We are language workers in a
workspace made of language.

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We are using language
to push language

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into wild, unsettling,
discomfortable forms.

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This process might be painful.

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This process might be joyous.

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This process will be infinite.

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Language and world
are inseparable.

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Language and action
are inseparable.

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We use language to think
about the world, the world

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being language.

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We turn our minds and
bodies to the language

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we're using, aware of
the constant constraints

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and impositions of
that language upon us.

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The language being the world.

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Its multiple and
multiplicitous brutalities,

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the perpetual brutalities
of an unjust language,

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the perpetual possibilities
of justice in language.

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We use the term writing to
refer to a range of forms

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of aesthetic work and practice.

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If writing is a
form of art, then we

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insist on the
cohabitating inverse.

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Art is a form of writing.

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We embrace the different
materials and techniques

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that various forms of art-making
and organizing entail.

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The discomfortable
welcomes them all.

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If our work does not question
the terms of the status quo,

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it is the status quo,
the murderous status quo.

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Our context is an avant garde
that has, throughout history,

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aligned itself with
revolutionary political

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movements.

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It is our responsibility
to make the world

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as we wish to experience it.

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To create the conditions of
our resistance, our solidarity,

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and our irrepressible
liberation,

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even as we acknowledge the
very real and concrete effects

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of living in a world where
injustice is institutionalized

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and enforced via all kinds
of subterranean and overt

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violence.

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We have no patience for the
divide between art practice

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and political practice.

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We have endless
patience for doing

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the hard, imaginative, and
practical work of building

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a more humane and just world.

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We are here to dismantle
the master's house.

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Audre Lorde.

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The master's tools will never
dismantle the master's house.

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Yvonne Rainer.

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You can dismantle the master's
house using the master's tools

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if you expose the tools.

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ANTENA.

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The master's house began to
collapse on its own long ago.

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Use any and all tools
you can get your hands on

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and speed the process.

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Demolish the master's
house carefully enough

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to recycle the
building materials

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and make tiny houses
for everybody.

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With any leftover materials,
we'll make small books.

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Discomfortable aesthetic
work is necessary

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if we are to imagine it and
to begin to build a new world.

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Art is more than graphics
to accompany our slogans.

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Poetry can imagine new
possibilities within language.

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Poetry and other
non-conforming forms of writing

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can create discomfort,
manifest expressions

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of our distress and
dysfunction in the context

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of unjust structures.

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Our work is made of attempts and
failures and further attempts.

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We'll learn to think dream
and imagine differently

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and it will not be easy.

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Our work is ongoing.

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All language is in conversation
with other language.

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Writing is not a purely
individual pursuit.

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It emerges out of communities,
movements, relationships.

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We read and write in
order to interact not

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only with other
individuals, but also

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with other formations,
other systems of thought,

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other histories.

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We need to hear and
experience things that are far

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outside our comfort zone.

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We need to question the very
divisions between zones,

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between comforts,
between persons.

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So that was an excerpt.

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[INAUDIBLE]

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As you just heard,
discomforter already

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has something to do with
all of us working together.

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That's something
in the communities

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and not just the
two of us, but also

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everyone who's in this room.

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And it also, writing, emerges
out of those communities

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and out of those
relationships with each other.

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So I'd like to invite Jen
to talk to us a little bit

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about this next experience.

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And I just want to ask
if you have your phone

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to do the timing because
my phone is at the table.

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Oh, there's a clock.

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Look at that, analog.

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All right, so--