the smell of falling rain

To whomever it was that claimed happiness is the smell of falling rain – we’ve had soooo bloody much, we must all be feckin’ ecstatic!

our bodies unrestrained

We said little more to each other than our names; I had never heard a more beautiful poem than you and me, me and you. My innocence and his shyness, our bodies unrestrained. I could not have dreamed what my limbs replied to the questions of his lips. What desires his scent would confer on me.

Christa Wolf
Cassandra

The music of language

As poets, what can we learn from all of these nursery rhymes? The first thing is that sound itself intoxicates and that we connect sound, rhythm, and rhyme to form very early on, probably from infancy. The music of language forms our understanding of the world and that is why it seems so fundamental, in poems, to follow the music and sounds over sense, and to trust that your ear will take you where you want to go. We also learn that language is deeply connected to play — riddles, jokes, nonsense, and, for lack of a better word, fun. But it is also wedded to tragic losses, lost time, lost childhood, the loss of the child itself and the body of the child. Even when we survive childhood, some part of us has fallen through the ice never to return. Children are connected to that loss too. They are constantly warned about strangers, about the instability of their surroundings, constantly reminded about how small they are. As poets, we take that smallness with us into adulthood and turn it into poetry.

Sandra Simonds
Notes on Nursery Rhymes

violate your own identity

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

no vulgarity

I wanted to present things that were both truly ritual and erotic. It seems like we have made ugly everything that is erotic. We have lost a sense of our sexual awareness for things from social history, practices that were used in totally different ways but we are not used to reading them – such rituals are de-eroticised to us because they are unfamiliar. You see this man with an erection becoming the energy for a different purpose and it puts a new meaning (which is actually the old meaning) back into this gesture. There is no vulgarity – it is something else completely.

Marina Abramović
Interviewed by Aaron Moulton in Flash Art, XXXVIII, October 2005

In 1974, Marina Abramović did a terrifying experiment. At a gallery in her native Belgrade, Serbia, she laid out 72 items on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit. Some of the items were benign; a feather boa, some olive oil, roses. Others were not. “I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. I was ready to die.” At the end of six hours, she walked away, dripping with blood and tears, but alive. “How lucky I am,” she says in her still heavy accent, and laughs…

Emma Brockes
Performance artist Marina Abramović: ‘I was ready to die’, The Guardian 12th May 2014

What happens if you allow a group of onlookers to do anything they want to you for six hours? Marina Abramovich found out in 1974 when she laid out dozens of items on a table, including a gun with one bullet, and allowed strangers to use the items on her however they saw fit.

She endured through the entire performance, which included sexual abuse, and when one visitor placed the gun in her hand and tried to use her own finger to pull the trigger, a fight broke out. She continued the piece for the full six hours.

ANDREA JAMES
Marina Abramovic describes her harrowing 1974 performance of Rhythm 0