Hi friends,
A few weeks ago I sent you a reading from an interview with Saidiya Hartman in The White Review. Since then, I’ve read her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and can’t recommend it enough. I also attended a (virtual) talk hosted by Silver Press with Hartman, Canisia Lubrin, Nat Raha, and Christina Sharpe in conversation, Poetry is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition, which you can now listen to on NTS. I sent it to a friend and she sent me back the same quote from Hartman that I had written down: “poetics is the possession of opaqueness, the key to producing the otherwise. Poetics as a way to think critically about making. A theory. A form itself. The reformation of form.”
Speaking of friends sending me things straight to my soul, this week’s recording is courtesy of Charmaine Li, who read a passage from Tao: The Watercourse Way about the yin-yang polarity, “in hopes of sending some calm vibes.” It had exactly that effect, and now I’m sending it on to you. As she transmits, “It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive. For it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent end of the universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being, as sound from silence and light from space.”
warmth and relaxation,
meg
p.s. have you guys heard emma rae norton’s website with the sound of its own making? It’s a digital response to Box with the Sound of its Own Making by Robert Morris.
