After a record-breaking 600 entries, we are delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s Short Story Prize. The selected stories will be judged by Omar Robert Hamilton, Kishani Widyaratna, and...
(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name)
This is a site for production This is a site for presentation
What is to be produced? What is to be presented?
This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject
A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation By the sophistication of its speech
This is what we do with our comfort
This is what we do with our plenty
You are watching me, and I begin to watch Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it Cobwebs2 Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for
Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick
This is a violence that can be overcome
What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? 3
Imagined public space
imagined public law
and in the air
experience and habit float…
experience, he says, is the way through danger4
I wait for Him to come
And I am nothing outside of this
While waiting, I swim,
stalk the interior
One way to move through the world among many
I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming –
monotone address, edge and end
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes
2
Two words –
equality and equivalence
these are frequencies in the expression
of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality
I didn’t want to individuate
and now I am nothing
but a self-interrupting whole,5
a memory full of holes
haunted by the unpolitical
Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred It is our
