[Farzad Kamangar was a thirty-two-year-old Iranian teacher, poet, journalist, human rights activist, and social worker who was hanged on May 9, 2010. At his execution, he offered chocolates to all the observers.]
[NOTE: In the more than six decades of my friendship with David Antin the pleasure of talking & thinking together was foremost, as much where we disagreed as where we agreed, & David & I knew that for any surface differences we had, the underlying impulse was nearly identical & made for a bond that even now fills me with wonder. I was also keenly aware of his trickster side — as he was, I know, of mine — & never sought to turn him away from it but always relished his thrust toward the unexpected & outrageous.
River Dee: photograph by Hannah Devereux, 2016 (from ‘gathering’)
Alec Finlay is a Scottish poet and artist based in Edinburgh. These texts come from a series of ongoing projects derived from research into place names, in particular Gaelic (from his book gathering, forthcoming from Hauser & Wirth in 2018) and Norn — the dialect of Scots and Norse spoken in Orkney and Shetland Norn c. 1800 (from MinnMouth, forthcoming in 2017). This sequence derives from a performance given at the 2016 O-I/I-O Poetry Festival in Glasgow as a closer to the whole event.
Henri Thomas, the young novelist who had been corresponding with Artaud about an article he was writing on The Theater and its Double, came to visit Artaud at Rodez on March 10, 1946, and brought his young wife, Colette Thomas, who was an aspiring actress. She was only 23 years old when she met Artaud and her marriage was falling apart at the time. For Artaud she seemed to represent a life of new possibilities and freedom. Soon she became one of his “daughters of the heart,” and occupied, for a time, a central position in Artaud’s fantasy world. They often wrote letters to each other during this time and Colette incorporated fragments from these letters in her one book, The Testament of the Dead Daughter, published in 1954.
Poems and poetics