So thank you so much.
That's much better.
Thank you so much to everybody here, at the Poetry Center,
and at the Jewish History Museum for the invitation
and for the incredible hospitality.
We're going to begin--
Why, did you want me to say something else?
We're really excited to be here.
I'm going to resist the impulse to just repeat
all the names you just heard.
But a lot of the people who supported us in being here
are here tonight.
And thank you.
You know who you are.
And it's kind of a strange feeling
to be excited about an institution,
but the Poetry Center is really exciting.
And I should just say that the way that we've
considered this evening is to begin
with some talking about ANTENA.
ANTENA's history, what ANTENA is,
what some of the things that we've done or what have you
learned from some of the manifestos
and getting some of you active as well in
this process of poem making.
And then we'll have some time with Myriam Moscona's poetry.
And then we'll return to ANTENA to do an improvised poem live
here with all of you.
So we're going to begin by reading
from the manifesto for discomfortable writing, which
Ariel has just quoted from.
Also, there will be a Q&A. So if you have questions,
we encourage them.
A manifesto for discomfortable writing.
To make common currency uncommon.
To make us strangers in a place we thought was home.
To find spaces for listening inside strangeness.
To refuse complacency and allow risk
to alight inside our own bodies.
Thinking is doing.
Doing is thinking.
We write discomfortably because we
are probably wrong, yet compelled to learn,
to learn from our errors.
We are language workers in a workspace made of language.
We are using language to push language
into wild, unsettling, discomfortable forms.
This process might be painful.
This process might be joyous.
This process will be infinite.
Language and world are inseparable.
Language and action are inseparable.
We use language to think about the world, the world
being language.
We turn our minds and bodies to the language
we're using, aware of the constant constraints
and impositions of that language upon us.
The language being the world.
Its multiple and multiplicitous brutalities,
the perpetual brutalities of an unjust language,
the perpetual possibilities of justice in language.
We use the term writing to refer to a range of forms
of aesthetic work and practice.
If writing is a form of art, then we
insist on the cohabitating inverse.
Art is a form of writing.
We embrace the different materials and techniques
that various forms of art-making and organizing entail.
The discomfortable welcomes them all.
If our work does not question the terms of the status quo,
it is the status quo, the murderous status quo.
Our context is an avant garde that has, throughout history,
aligned itself with revolutionary political
movements.
It is our responsibility to make the world
as we wish to experience it.
To create the conditions of our resistance, our solidarity,
and our irrepressible liberation,
even as we acknowledge the very real and concrete effects
of living in a world where injustice is institutionalized
and enforced via all kinds of subterranean and overt
violence.
We have no patience for the divide between art practice
and political practice.
We have endless patience for doing
the hard, imaginative, and practical work of building
a more humane and just world.
We are here to dismantle the master's house.
Audre Lorde.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
Yvonne Rainer.
You can dismantle the master's house using the master's tools
if you expose the tools.
ANTENA.
The master's house began to collapse on its own long ago.
Use any and all tools you can get your hands on
and speed the process.
Demolish the master's house carefully enough
to recycle the building materials
and make tiny houses for everybody.
With any leftover materials, we'll make small books.
Discomfortable aesthetic work is necessary
if we are to imagine it and to begin to build a new world.
Art is more than graphics to accompany our slogans.
Poetry can imagine new possibilities within language.
Poetry and other non-conforming forms of writing
can create discomfort, manifest expressions
of our distress and dysfunction in the context
of unjust structures.
Our work is made of attempts and failures and further attempts.
We'll learn to think dream and imagine differently
and it will not be easy.
Our work is ongoing.
All language is in conversation with other language.
Writing is not a purely individual pursuit.
It emerges out of communities, movements, relationships.
We read and write in order to interact not
only with other individuals, but also
with other formations, other systems of thought,
other histories.
We need to hear and experience things that are far
outside our comfort zone.
We need to question the very divisions between zones,
between comforts, between persons.
So that was an excerpt.
[INAUDIBLE]
As you just heard, discomforter already
has something to do with all of us working together.
That's something in the communities
and not just the two of us, but also
everyone who's in this room.
And it also, writing, emerges out of those communities
and out of those relationships with each other.
So I'd like to invite Jen to talk to us a little bit
about this next experience.
And I just want to ask if you have your phone
to do the timing because my phone is at the table.
Oh, there's a clock.
Look at that, analog.
All right, so--