Poetry without Poets #1 is a chapter, an annex, a fore room, a suffix, and a prefix all at once, to an Institute of Rest(s).
Somewhere along the lines I rest between your tongues, plant dances where perfume meets your smell. I fall, I slip, in the sleep of your tongue, around my languages. Please fold your time slowly near me.
How I love the mutual indebtedness that is not about paying one another back, but about enjoying resting in that depen-dance, listening to the ghosts – our protections, our protextions – in the quilts of our (shady) studies.
Poetry without Poets is thought of as a multilingual translation group, falling in & out of language(s); a longing to rest in indeterminacy, with many. In these five days’ lab/reunion/as
sembly of forces (in which to rest) we insist on enfleshed ways of sensing-thinking-moving, in complicity with one another (à l’ombre les uns des autres), committed to the obscurity of transindividual assemblages. A whispery-thin precarious slime, a presage, a turbulent summersault, a complex dampness, a tab that doesn’t close, Poetry without Poets #1 feels like a dance in the undergrowth, a dance that works to under-grow. There we rest in the clandestine capacities of barely perceptible light variations across meteorological fields of indetermined kinds, loiter under bushy foliage that (hopefully!) protects us from blinding identities and obscure and unzip our sentences. Texts that will be scrutinised, slept on, massaged into (each) other’s tongues: Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest by Danielle Goldman and Which Way Is Down? by Jason King, in the shades of Sur les bouts de la langue: Traduire en féministe/s by Noémie Grunenwald (2021). The lab will end in a cascade of words published in a giant notebook: Grimoire #2.’