Commentaries - February 2016

Tania De Rozario: On the monstrous feminine

Henry Fuseli The Three Witches 1783
Henry Fuseli The Three Witches 1783

Tania De Rozario is an artist, writer and curator interested in issues of gender and sexuality, representations of women in Horror, and art as activism. Her practice hovers on the intersections between text and image, and her work has been showcased in London, Spain, Amsterdam, Singapore, New York and San Francisco. Tania is the author of Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press | 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize, the winner of the 2011 NAC-SPH Golden Point Award for English Poetry, and recipient of the NAC Arts Creation Fund for her literary memoir, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down.

 "Does one named woman communicating with another named woman still count as a positive on the Bechdel test if one woman is not actually human?" - Tania De Rozario

The resonance continues: From the constellation of Diana Arterian

Two black holes merge into one. Credit: the SXS Project.
Two black holes merge into one. Credit: the SXS Project. Courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory

If you work with words anywhere within a thousand miles of Los Angeles, you're likely familiar with the extraordinary force of literary citizenship that radiates from poet, editor, scholar, and translator, Diana Arterian. Her generous presence here shimmers in a sequence of conversations compelled by the wonders of strangeness. How is it age-old questions spiral into new responses? How is it that from the crashing of steel triangles to supernovas, new resonances arise? From one week to the next, a silent mystery of the universe revealed?

Adonis in Osnabruck

Foto: Jesus Ochando/epa
Foto: Jesus Ochando/epa

Last September I wrote a blog entry about the Syrian poet Adonis receiving the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize of the city of Osnabrück & the resistance from a range of quarters to this award. You can read my original post here. Since then a fair amount of pressure has been put on the award committee demanding the award be rescinded, while the man who was supposed to give the laudatio — last year's winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Navid Kermani, — bowed out. The committee has stayed with its original choice and today Adonis will be awarded the prize.

Jerome Rothenberg: From 'Further Autovariations,' three poems, 2016

Reminders of a Vanished Earth

 

1/

the poem as landscape

 

the definition

of a place

is more than

what was seen

or what was

felt before