Stephen Collis - To the Barricades

The true drama of contemporary culture lies in the fact that it has become almost impossible to imagine social change that is not cataclysmic. Sven Ltticken The poem distributes itself according to the necessity of subjects to begin, to begin speaking to anybody, simply because of the perception of continuous co-embodiment as the condition of language. This shaped speaking carries the breath of multiple temporalities into the present, not to protect or to sanctify the edifice of tradition, but to vulnerably figure historicity as an embodied stance, an address, the poems most important gift to politics. Lisa Robertson

after Gerald Raunigs Art and Revolution I had thought this was Outside the barricades No street in time But a space left Uneven and cluttered With broken ballot boxes Like a poem with Everything in it so Nothing you write Isnt it and Nothing you write is But everywhere your Hand over the page Is shadowed by Another hand taking Up what youve written Down and finding the Spatiotemporal scale At which it Makes the most sense Its not a matter of Imposing no Guidelines So long as they Tinkering with the Art machine / the Revolutionary machine Rise up from below Evading the narratives Of major ruptures 1789 / 1917 Andconstantly moving Permeable fluctuating A swarm of points of Resistance not crushed By apparatusthey Find their own way To the supper of All historys comers Im talking about a poem And a revolution Dear decaying discourse The lacunae of every Word we pitch Brick by brick Up against what Contents and discontents We are wanting To wall out or Wanting to wall in One foot firm In the reals We have been While the other Steps off into the Unimaginables we Havent Or brushing the dust off An old familiar form Say sweet fringe Of what I think Im sayingI can Feel your pulse Wherever I touch The hand you hold out To my place within Or without this poem Whats utterly common What we set out To accomplish together Now that the entire world Is one occupied square Vibrating and red and At the very edge of this page 1. MILITANT PARTICULARISM We are everywhere in flight annihilating space one digital widget at a time is this what we want it to be like? Made a city out of quotations other voices lived there too I caught glimpses of them in all the glass where neon races reflected the names of bars and restaurants that no longer exist steering towards uncertain markets their boat in the street a barricade we could assemble ourselves This was sort of real / unreal the city throbbing gulped seajet years primal terror of spatial edges where changeless nothing pulses against our fragile real estate bubble Thus we contrived power electric sign illuminations geographic billboard space but that blast of unevenness snuffed our dwarfdom left us rafts a nude beach glaring Hollywood lights of Plutonian descendants stretching night to canvas crests and gabled gateways to imagined orients east See the impact on our bottom line glows in the dark lighting the dream world of the collective its lost halo of sign culture consuming sublime objects like narrative it threads us into seductive structures one neon tube at a time Discordant vitality will the soft porn of windows allow us to imagine other Vancouvers to alight on? Cars race in reflection everywhere red is advertising itself a young boy drives a pretend shiv into anothers willing abdomenits all good funimmigration exclusion head taxes house after house confiscated for securitys racialized insecurity Dear glittering ghost to be watching all this fading around us that old farts memories this fence that once formed a surface for postering is to watch a geographical transformation (oiled by flowing electronic accounts) from mill-town glow to metropolitan glare millwrights to lumpen extras milling around the city set of entertainments we can no longer afford Dear common crossing Powell at night this is a love story a recycled badge used vacuum cleaner punks outside the wig shop shadows walking south the masters have no mercy and the Internets growing arms to pull us into the soup of debt Helpless puppets magnetic ropes connect earths upper atmosphere with the sun cant we give this a good solid pull? The body is porous what is said seeps into the skin we absorb ideology one camera click at a time clerk waiter usher thief the colony dismantled its neon and shipped out with the containers crowding the pier into the unlit vacant space it erased boundary fixity surface for a moment there let us learn this then put it in the pocket of our endless open projects engaging with closure one backlit city block at a time 2. your continuation mounts what cap she now sports I cannot name the logos ofWalls built without attention given to levelling,
drainage and binding often disintegrate as a result
of winters freezing and thawing. Curtis Fields, The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall The ends of pipes drip Emotion or write Cities back to Jumbled origins as In unfenced space People gravitate Towards margins While in fenced Space they spread out Evenly (unevenly) And found cities And countries and Economies so let us All loose against Limits dreaming beyond All striving to come Into existence where There is a buried Quotation from Paul Celan Dear common this Has become personal For all of us Our species beings Torn by heat And profit in each And every instance There must be a speaking And an acting out And against these Blinders as guardrails The fires in oil skies The chemical wind And the banks And the nations And the pretend greenery Surrounding money Stop this day And night with me Digging a grave in the sky Or raise a lament As together were thrown Against this Facebook Mur des Fdrs this Global moments big tent Falling around our heads Spiralling videos As we destroy the very Terms of our slippery Existence and photograph The barricades from Above for our inner Cavaignacs And the rue Saint-Maur Looks quiet In the pre-dawn As poetry assumes its Stillness once again In the spring of 1871 In June 1848 On September 4 1870 As was the case in 1830 and 1848 Early on the morning of 18 March Between 21 May and 28 May Between March and May 1871 During the Cultural Revolution Outside the revolution of 17 October The Parisian workers of 18 March 1871 When Lenin danced in the snow Over the terrible days of June 1848 The Trois Glorieuses of July 1830 February 1848 and the fall of Louis Philippe As regards 1830, 1848, and 1870 On the evening of the resistance in the workers districts The declaration of 19 March 1871 Since at least 1830 Again in May 1968 In the uncertain world of the spring of 1871 From 18 March to May 28 1871, the brute force of uprisings This beginning called 18 March 18 March, now a predicate Under the sign of an eruption of being By which 18 March comes to appear The site a figure of the instant Will dictate to them the morning of 19 March This empirical 18 March A consequence of 18 March The enthusiasm of 18 March 1871 When on 10 May the central committee proclaimed Whose result is that 18 March gets instituted To save the revolution of 18 March In all certainty on 18 March 1871 By October 1917 By the summer of 1967 in China and May 1968 in France Lets return to 19 March Three times the French proletariat made the republic for others On 18 March something more important was destroyed Whatever therefore its fate at Paris Beginnings can then be measured by the re-beginnings they authorize The task is to think its content Revolution is the search for happiness we know history repeats itself thanks to all the dead anarchists! I make you a chain of flowers a grave of roses now lets not lack audacity in dealing with the banks even in a democracy we arent free to demonstrate freely things kept germinating long after the event its time we stop being represented and start being the commune echoes were still at the same point * Same ideas other methods to get out of this shit burn down markets shout out of streets whose streets? our streets but we fell asleep at some point the film went on another world was not yet possible today we need more than a barricade the street is wired maybe a wall in time too hmm? * When its up to each person to be their own barricade then weve lost thrown ourselves down solitary wells where capital wants us where is the enemy now what wall in what street can keep them out or keep us safe? we are all the commune they want to kill with sleepy devices apps and gigs is this poem too easily read? is it doing anything to end oppression? were searchable yes but we can still search too the cops use barricades now when did we give them up? the question is: are we going to rest or wrest? We common Parisian into our texts pry books up and make a heap across the read street Weve had our labour dematerialized we shatter data and stack up bits We common have our entertainments too the business of scores and scales operates the pleasure of our insides soothing our least and our levers We have an angry indignant threat too we keep for public shouting: it coughs trying not to disturb us in some night folded in our city Common will culture keep us safe or just sell us to the highest bidder? Common dont tell them were open dont tell them our hearts have sleeves the shelter weve made in this structure is a surplus mostly unseen Dear common I think we should up the anti get even more against it turning all tables all cobblestones all streets Orand I know this is exactly the opposite of that admit we know nothing about art or revolution or the glint of light on damp utopian streets Get out of the way stop making so much noise and quietly listen to our vowels and the way they come up against consonants the gaps between words between paving stones between people Commune we have not failed though we have been shot against the walls of May (where later it was easier to meet us with tear gas clubs pepper spray mass media disdain feed us soda pop and video games trampled into the dust of disregard while amped-up powers managed to hide themselves in discourse paring their fingernails to one side of money) Or if we have failed this failure is the maintenance of continuing possibility if only we remember that we once tried that we can try again and that this is what strikes fear into the industry of false hopes and mindless entertainments Commune they have us all on the wrong side of the global tracks watching the show unfold on the other 1871 through 2011 Commune which side will you be on? Can you see what is happening as the puppets drop from the hands of hidden dictators reaching for their balance sheets guns and cameras? Commune does it make sense to speak this way anymore? The terms us and them are being re-inscribed each day to their advantage where is it that we fell off the map? Absence is contagious just ask every revolutionary nobody we have long forgotten But if we could find that place we went invisible maybe some shooting gallery in an eternal Paris side of a cable TV truck or city intersection once blocked by barricades we might through the magic of atemporal solidarity conjure ourselves back onto the brink arm raised with a stone everywhere some kid with a stone in front of soldiers and tanks Commune I like a little crack in my sidewalks a gap between my cobblesyour monuments to barbarismhow are they built now? All glass arent they see that stone lying there Commune? See your reflection in that bank or department store window? How many hands do you have Commune? How many years of bad luck have you already suffered smashing nothing? Commune Im writing this after the fact In Egypt in 2011 bumper stickers proclaim today I wont run traffic lights I will change Something is happening Commune and we are it but the question is will we be different than the last time as farce is to tragedy was? Commune I hope so listening to the words of Ahmed Fouad Negm echoing across Tahrir Commune we are an endless poem and we are right here at your elbow In the middle of October 2011 When in September 2011 Then in October in cities across While October was brewing On January 25 2011 Because of May 15 2011 Because the Indignados had already been That was in January 2011 September 17 2011 it began with No one was much aware before September 24 when Nearly one thousand cities on October 15 The movement of May 15 had City squares on October 15 when January 2011 will be remembered for Global day of action on October 15 2011 as When we heard about the May 15 movement Inspired by the events of January and February in Egypt No one could have guessed on January 25 that But without May 15 2011 On September 17 in Lower Manhattan just Occupy Everywhere October 15 2011 Wall Street on September 17 2011 was where Towards the Puerta del Sol on the eve of May 15 Not even the Egyptians on February 2 2011 could have Our Martyrs of January and February 2011 never had In the surprising Spring of 2011 As the long Spring of 2011 began to Then in the fall of 2011 After the September 24 video went viral Long after October 15 although we still are not Next page