Poetry without Poets is thought of as a multilingual translation group, falling in & out of language(s); a longing to rest in indeterminacy, with many. During these five-days’ lab/reunion/assembly of forces (in which to rest) we insist on enfleshed ways of sensing-thinking-moving, in complicity with one another (à l’ombre les uns des autres), committed to the obscurity of transindividual assemblages.

A little word of welcome to Poetry without Poets #2 / Choreosomatics of Resting Dissidence.

Four days of quiet lab in the company of beloved people, books and pieces of text. For those who have not been with us in this kind of tedious gathering of studies yet, the ‘Poetry without Poets’ in  Lisbon is an activity which was thought up within the framework of the artistic research projects of Alix (Institute of Rest(s) 2023…) and the Expanded Practices All Over encounters that Paula has been organizing since 2019 (of which: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpB_g7sfIy0). Poetry without Poets is a branch that emerged around the idea of collective experimental reading and translation practices.

During these five-days’ lab/reunion/assembly of forces (in which to rest), at Forum Dança / Espaço da Penha studio, we supported each other/ strolled around and embroider on the remains of material and pre-texted forms from February 2023 in Vienna. We extended their rests, went over them, forgot them, fell through other translation exercises and other ways of rendering them, re-drawing, re-hearing, stretching them (on walls, pages, tapestry fabrics, etc.). We inhabit collective translation as a way to study, think and explore texts together, a journey of indetermination, of unbuttoning sentences.

A collection of texts & bits scrutinised, slept on, massaged into (each) other’s tongues:

✤text by Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea” (and thereby spend some time with parts of Krista Franklin’s book, Under the Knife (2018)) ✤bits of Mark Fisher’s unfinished intro to the book he was going to write — Acid Communism: “The Specter of a World That Could Be Free” ✤ (again!) parts of books by Vinciane Despret: Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation (2021) and Les Morts à l’Oeuvre (2023) ✤Noémie Grünenwald, Sur les bouts de la Langue. Traduire en féministe/s (2021) ✤ a chapter in All Incomplete (2021), “Plantocracy and Communism” (F. Moten & S. Harney). ✤poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs taken from her book Undrowned ✤ excerpts from a letter written by Shivangi Mariam Raj in issue 47 of The Funambulist magazine ✤maybe another thing to share before October: the bibliography of Noa & Snow, the other project that brought us together already ✤Voyages au centre de la thèse #1 : « Que faire d’archives au ras du sol ? Retour critique sur une expérience documentaire » par Marine Bellégo (article which led to the book: Enraciner l’empire. Une autre histoire du jardin botanique de Calcutta (1860-1910) (2021). ✤ Deleuze sur le langage ✤ “refusal: a rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation (i.e., a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible); the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.” Tina M. Campt, in Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” 2018′