‘home school reading 1’ [ONLINE]

home school is happy to announce our poetry reading series. Taking place online and in Portland, OR, the home school reading series will showcase makers who work in a slippage between art and poetry. The first installment, featuring Aurelia Guo, Jamondria Marnice Harris, Sophia Le Fraga, and manuel arturo abreu, will take place online on 10 January 2016 at 9pm EST. The view link will be available soon!

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Sianne Ngai argues that poetry's "powerlessness in commodity society [can be] reconfigured as... its distinctive ability to theorize powerlessness in general.” Poetry seems useless. Global white supremacy continues killing black and brown people. Like most exoticism, art's crush on poetry emerges from escapism. The fantasy of poetry as refuge, as circumvention of the demands of value, free of the white cube. The truth: the poetic expression is the securitization of the individual. The lyric empire.

Unless it comes from the mouth of whoever cannot speak. Is that the shadow of poetry? But it would be silly to ask “what comes after poetry.” Is that sillier than asking “what comes after whiteness?” Poetry generates a managerial relation to phenomena, perhaps similar to how whiteness does. The problem for the future of poetry, or what comes after poetry, is: white supremacy can work fine without white people. In fact it may even work better. Black and brown people may make the best white people, because they are affected enough to appear unaffected (Hamishi Farah).

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Aurelia Guo (b. China) is an artist and poet living in Melbourne. She has published poetry in Codette, The Fanzine, and Imperial Matters. Forthcoming at PublishingHouse.me, Christmas Day 2015.

Sophia Le Fraga (b. 1990, New York) is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently literallydead (Spork 2015). She is the editor of Imperial Matters and teaches poetry at BHQFU, New York's freest art school.

Jamondria Marnice Harris is a poet & artist living in Portland, OR. She uses words, sounds, wires, instruments, textiles & whatever is at hand to engage blackness, desire, decolonization, fairy tales, femme supremacy, & body horror. She is a VONA Workshop Fellow & board member at In Other Words feminist bookstore, among other things.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. Their work is about precarity, magical thinking, and the possibility of surviving.

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