About rivulet 9
May 2022
Hello, and welcome to rivulet 9: reflex.
Taking Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s film Reassemblage as a compass for her “Just speak nearby”: Dis/Course workshop, Kimberly Alidio writes that poetic text “may already be an assemblage of sonic, visual, graphic, oral material. Listening is composition as potential. What’s being composed in your listening, and what ‘poem’ can be composed nearby? Is it a translation of the languages in listening? Is it a sounding: an echo, a mimicry, a chorus, a response?”
The works comprising rivulet 9, in modular and multimodal forms, play in the spirit of Minh-Ha/Alidio’s proximal, assembled “nearbys.” Across centuries, modes, speakers, and imaginative planes, the collaborative and sensuous pieces in this issue explore re-sounding, inviting us into ceremony where diverse subjects and lines of inquiry can emerge coterminously in reflexive critique.
In this issue, we’re pleased to share:
a blue-jean pantoum for two cowboys in love;
language and light refracted from simmered water laced with green tea leaves;
transfigurations of ash into burial urn into the arc of a cricket ball leaving the fist;
swaths of earth rendered in digital paper, echoing ruin-irradiated poems;
repurposed text, sound, image collaging the connective tissue between meaning, memory, and friendship.
Thank you for reading.
@rivuletdotnet
A bibliography:
Alison, Jane. Meander, Spiral, Explode.
Dhompa, Tsering Wangmo, My rice tastes like the lake.
Énard, Mathias. Compass.
Graeber & Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything.
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Mansoor, Adil. Amm(i)gone.
Ganatra, Nisha. Chutney Popcorn.
