Exclosures

Description:	Dimensions: 6.5 x 8.5Medium: Letterpress; hand-stitched embroidery binding; printed on linen stock. Emily Abendroth is a writer and teacher currently residing in Philadelphia. Her print publications include: NOTWITHSTANDING shoring, FLUMMOX (Little Red Leaves), Exclosures 1-8 (Albion Press), Property : None (Taproot Editions), and Toward Eadward Forward (horse less press). An extended excerpt from her piece “Muzzle Blast Dander” can be found in Refuge/Refugee (Chain Links, Vol 3). Founded in 2011 by Karen Hannah, Zumbar Press prints limited broadsides and other poetry book objects using a Chandler & Price press. The press endeavors to print work that sounds the unrecorded or the unvoiced. The word zumbar is Spanish and is onomatopoetic for the sound of spinning thread. Karen Hannah is also a poet and occasional book reviewer. Her own poetry, reviews, projects, or sound files can be found in Telephone, feedbag, Little Red Leaves, Open Letters Monthly, Delirious Hem, and Fulcrum Annual. The three Exclosures that Karen Hannah (of Zumbar Press) and I selected to assemble into a discrete broadbook for Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here are part of a longer serial poem that I have been working on over the past three years that bears the same title. These particular sections are, to my mind, intimately in conversation with the larger al-Mutannabi project in that they attempt to explore all those “quotidian wars in miniature” by which our daily acts, lives and language reflect the overwhelming tendencies of militarism and alienation that surround us, but also embody our simultaneous efforts at resistance to those motions. Through this writing, I was attempting to push myself to sound out the catastrophic and debilitating reverberations of living in a society that has effectively criminalized our most basic characteristics of livelihood and requirements for existence (our youth, our old age, our poverty, our needs for housing or a doctor’s appointment, our hunger) and fed them back to us as “dangerous” behavior and/or “unsustainable/unassuageable” demands. A set of conditions that has thus created what philosopher Judith Butler refers to as “those ‘unlivable’ or ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated.”Unfortunately, zones such as these are as vividly present in Baghdad, as they are in Oakland or Philadelphia; although, at the same time, certainly the contours and context of difference in each of these locations (be they geographical, cultural or literary) must be attended to as well. In these poems I take as a key tenet, the observation of Elizam Escobar (a visual artist and former Puerto Rican political prisoner) that, “The political aspect of art is to confront all of reality, without ideological permissions and through its own means.” Through this writing, I’m trying to find for myself (and hopefully, by extension and in conversation, for others) some means to investigate and invigorate the possibilities of poetic practice in response to questions such as: How do we insist on keeping our artistic practices “risky” in ways that actually nurture us as a community - cultivating and supporting an ample and “dangerous” dedication to reciprocity and its extension? What does it mean for so many of us to be at sea in these “liquid times” while next to entirely without “liquid assets?” In lieu of that access to material property or security, what other kinds of “assets” might we seek to build or restore among ourselves and how much richer by far might we be for that outcome? What happens if we, in a very serious and daily way, seek to hold our very preservation as a “commons” rather than as an individual stake? How does that change our lifestyles, our rituals, our relationships, and our writing practices? If, as the inimitable James Baldwin expresses, We have to - in every generation, every five minutes - make human life possible,” what is that human-life-possible-making poetics?The final poem that Karen and I picked for this broadbook closes its first page with the statement: “Impact is not a contract. It is a wager.” As I see it, poetry, too, is a wager; Art is a wager. It represents an effort at contact in a setting where the odds of meeting, let alone understanding, are not in your favor, and where the disobedience to a directive that says to do otherwise is of paramount importance.1The phrase “quotidian wars in miniature” comes from contemporary fiction writer Miranda Mellis.
Origin:	2013
Created By:	Hannah, Karen; Abendroth, Emily
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/498
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks

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