(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Reader Joshua Clovers Red epic, reproduced by Paal Bjelke Andersen, with an afterword by Remi Nilsen, Audiatur publishing house, 2017. Premise: Know nothing about the author, know nothing about the book. Reads unconditionally open and without any context other than that the collection of poems should be reported in the form of 1000 words in these columns.
The communist red totality of the book cover fills the entire screen in my digital version. It's beautiful. And the first two words of the collection: "To comrades." I think I understand in what direction it is heading: an unconditional political book with a purpose and a purpose. Chapter breakdown with headings such as "My Life in the New Millennium", "Year of Analysis for a Day of Synthesis", "The Fire Ceremony". One epic headline, one analytical and one poetic. The chapter "Fab, beta, volatile equity" more than suggests a meta perspective on language and economics and how the language of capital is also an alienating factor. The final headline, "Our Contemporary Question," provides an essayistic perspective. Motto for the book: "... Remember / you can get what you ask for, ask for everything. ” (And after finishing reading shows Red epic said to be "a remix" by many others Vergil, Dante, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robyn, MIA, Marx, Lenin, Giovanni Arrighi and Fredric Jameson.)
Linguistic guerrilla. Pirates are guerrillas, independent as the cats and loved as the few friends, just as poetry can be a form of linguistic guerrilla and alien activism. Thus, in a style with a zigzag-like line split, Joshua Clover exhibits great speed in a poetic analysis of what a poem might be in its diversity of references in all directions, such as the heterogeneous rhizome, to which it is also referred. It is informative poetry, if one can say such, and hard, and epic, in Andersen's rhythmic Norwegian, with namedropping by Parmenides, Francesca (Dante), with further references to poetry before and after modernism, to the Mediterranean and Rimini (Fellini's hometown), Casa San Giorgio, Genoa, Amsterdam (capital). As a reader, I find myself in "a morning of metaphors". Clover launches cryptic images as "factual fog", in vexing attacks on debt buyers, greedy shareholders and the blessed equity and other sacred within the domain of capitalism. Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons is mentioned on the move, and then clear speech comes in the prose poem "2. Transistor ":
… An unconditional political book with a purpose and a purpose.
"There will be a revolution or not. If the latter, these poems would be nothing but entertainment. If first, it will succeed or fail. If the latter, these poems would be better than nothing. First, it will involve rioting fire and looting and this will spread or not. If the latter, these poems would be curiosities. First, it will offer further riots manifest barricades and slogans and this will become popular songs or not. If that was the case, it would have been everything. First of all, these popular songs will succumb or not. If the latter, these poems would have been indistinguishable from the songs. First, the popular will itself be abolished with riot barricades manifesting occupations and fire or not. If the latter, we would waste even more decades talking about culture. If at first, the revolution at this time will be destroyed inside or out. If the latter, these poems would go down in battle. Firstly, it will offer cruel clashes with former friends and it will further manifest new slogans of ongoing occupations and municipalities and lovers will become enemies. We do not know what will happen after this time, but this is undoubtedly enough to draw some preliminary conclusions. The poem must take the side for riot looting barricades occupations manifest municipalities slogans fire and enemies. ”
Joshua Clover writes in a fragmentary, collage-like style, such as: "I have consciousness under my arm," where poetry is the language most suited to analyze and read the linguistic realities of technology, fascism, science and economic algorithms, such as the flickering digital and abstract flames in our daily life of consciousness. Red epic is cruel theater, perhaps a more controlled scream than Artaud in poetic language costume, but nevertheless expresses the language's will detour along the periphery of language and meaning than "normal" lyrical poetry we see all too often in ordinary publishing publications.
Unconditional rebellion and anarchy. Clover writes without sentimental detours. "In the Negative's Blood," this poet sings his anger and disdain into wild verses of disturbing movement. It awakens this reader's rebellion and arouses action and activity and a willingness to set language for a justified abhorrence of injustice and abuse of power and linguistic surplus against the powerlessness that bends the individual into silent majority-craving idiocy. This book's will to life is unconditional rebellion and anarchy. It is not enough to choose the law or the justice of the ministry or to point to the property's natural natural glories as an excuse for inaction, nor must we dream, or hope for that matter, for the dream and hope are the comfort and embalming of the subject and do not lead to anything else. than stupidity, stagnation and conformity.
To dictate is to move in unknown terrain. To be in the dark and to move blindly, to be listening and sensing and thinking. So also go into a book. A book should be like the unknown. The author should enter into the unknown and show us into the unknown sentence by sentence, sentence by sentence. Only in this way can we discover the unknown and the stranger in ourselves. Too many people are looking for a familiar template and itinerary for the reader experience. Too many seek meaning and their plot of banal meaning. The real meaning lies outside and beyond itineraries, calculated emotive prose and indifferent novels with fictional cardboard characters in constructed single-
dimensional houses and homes and Norwegian fir forests.
Primordial Communism. Communism as concrete form and not utopia, is what this poet writes about. Original communism, like that, or Majakovsky and Sapfos communism. And you do not become a Communist until you are conscious of the social strategy and oppression, whether it be the individual's working day and working conditions / contract, or whether you are punished, ostracized by the good company, or if you only doubt for a moment that capitalism as an ideology should last forever. To stand outside the community and look inside. Joshua Clover is a poet who has understood poetry as a consciousness researcher
and that poetry must also require linguistic quantum leaps and super-symmetric forms to put everything at risk, to throw all consciousness-poetic grumble overboard and get to the realities and realities of the facts,
worthy of reality. The contradictions are met in the poetic.
A few words about Remi Nilsen's afterword. About financial acrobatics (what does a book about poetry have to do, many will ask) and the mathematical world of finance with economists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes in the lead (I don't know them). Remi mentions in his almost cool, factual postscript the financial mathematics that fronts capitalist financial speculation. These are concepts far beyond the normal poetic world of concepts. No lyrical nature metaphors here – the concepts of economics nevertheless possess a fascinating metaphor of mathematical abstraction. And from financial speculation to Dante's Vergil and Francesca da Rimini and the realm of death in The Divine Comedy. And, as you know, Dante was expelled from the capital of the capitalist banking system of Florence. Remi Nilsen performs a super-short and impressive cavalcade on protocapitalist city-states in Italy, money management and the birth of capitalism around the Mediterranean trade network in the 1200th and 1300th centuries. He ends like this: “Cats and pirates and flames. Nothing is given. In the red epic where Clover is guided by Arrighi [Italian economist and sociologist, my comment] in the world system's fast cycles, there is also the possibility of a completely different narrative. ” Yes. There will be a revolution.
