Hugo Ball Quote

.



A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins.

- Hugo Ball



.

I look at my life and think...

.



I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness
I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness but
I have no one to blame but myself
because I can’t really deal with others
but lord knows I try

I look at my life and think:
is the loneliness I feel the
loneliness I’m actually experiencing
or am I feeling something different
than my experience, am I feeling
a fantasy of what is or isn’t possible
and what is or isn’t possible
for me to feel

I dissect the phrase: I look at my life
I look at my life instead of living it
there is summer rain and winter rain
my poems aren’t as complex
as some of the other poems I read
but I like their simplicity
all those years ago I decided
I didn’t want to be a poet anymore
all those years ago I decided
to be lonely or not to be lonely
still doing that as well



.

Town Crier's first ever double feature review

.



Excited that Polyamorous Love Song is the recipient of the Town Crier's first ever double feature review:


When Filmmakers Don’t Make Movies: A Review of Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song / Sex, Guns, Revolutionary Orgies, and the Problem With Forgetting About Propaganda / by André Forget


“Artists are Lepers”: Another Review of Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren / The Winnipeg Review Misses Wren’s Uncanny Cultural Realism / by Domenica Martinello



.

Two end of year mentions for Polyamorous Love Song

.



Saelan Twerdy includes Polyamorous Love Song in his 2014 Staff Picks:

For what it's worth, I finished this book in the hospital during my partner's 48-hour labour. Even if I'd read it in more prosaic circumstances, though, I don't think I'd forget it. Jacob Wren is an endlessly fascinating individual: no writer I can think of is so sincere in their pursuit of questions about the value of art and its relation to life. Like most of his writing, Polyamorous Love Song straddles the boundary between essay and fiction, art and literature (Wren is also active as a performance artist). He asks himself difficult questions about why we make art and what we hope it can do while also offering a rollicking, sometimes absurdist sci-fi adventure featuring an organization of terrorists in mascot costumes and a virus that only kills political reactionaries. It's a book that defies boundaries and categorization: Wren's art is total or not at all.



Polyamorous Love Song is also one of The Globe and Mail's best 100 books of the year:

An experimental novel with interests as multiple as its title suggests: art, anarchy, freedom, but most particularly, the power of dreams. Dark yet hopeful and unabashedly avant-garde.



.

Some favourite things from my 2014

.

(As is often the case with me, many of these things were released prior to 2014. I have listed them in the order they gradually came to me.)



Music

Oddisee – Tangible Dream
Ratking – So It Goes
Leikeli47 - Lk-47 Pt. II
Little Simz – E.D.G.E
Pearls Negras – Biggie Apple Mixtape
Noname – what the fuck is a noname gypsy
Karol Conka – Batuk Freak
Cate le Bon – Mug Museum
Planningtorock – All Love’s Legal
Destroyer – Five Spanish Songs
1970s Algerian Folk & Pop




Books

Forgery – Amira Hanafi
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination – Sarah Schulman
Islands of Decolonial Love – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis
Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge – Renee Gladman
The Book of the Dead – Kgebetli Moele
The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
Thou – Aisha Sasha John
Records Ruin the Landscape – David Grubbs
The Story of My Accident Is Ours – Rachel Levitsky
History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom – Oxana Timofeeva
The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings of Claudia La Rocco
Karmic Traces – Eliot Weinberger
So Far From God – Veronica Gonzalez-Peña



Films

Concerning Violence – Göran Hugo Olsson
Seven Blind Women Filmmakers – Mohammad Shirvani



.