(Still Life (Black Mountain College), 1951)
--after Cy Twombly
In every piece, something moved or missing. Two
Tall bottles and one cup, two bottles and two cups
And two more bottles, then no bottles, then another cup
Then another cup and another bottle. You can see
Nothing of these pictures is true, or that nothing of these
Is lying to you. The table, the wall, that light, shadow
And sand made glasses and tint
Of color. Not one of us misses the human face of composition.
(Paessagio, 1986)
Monster moves through the house at night but the rooms
are too small
And monster so large so incalcitrant, chalk body
Leaving a trance a trace up and down the angles
And over the bridge—
To arrive where Commodus jousted
In forests that would make a normal person
Insane, such were the stories. Monster without ears
Hears no such stories.
(Apollo and the Artist, 1975)
It’s like he said, anybody
in here got a Bible I can use, and held it upside down in photos.
You can measure the synchrony of dancers and moments,
the audience enjoys that.
Most of the data shows the audience loves both chaotic
moments and synchrony.
Rarely was there a significant result in between,
though you won’t mind me saying
APOLLO doesn’t not match the Apollo underneath and the
four petaled flower does
Not NOT match the formula of day | month | year or
even the year 1 4 1 1 when either
The artist called Information
or the 06 in my social cost some bits
Of Citizenship. No matter, color white over the
mistakes, color over code [the NO]
(Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963, Part II)
Within two weeks, blood islands between host and
offspring.
Host in this instance MOTHER but what does
MOTHER of MONSTER resemble?
Single-cell vessels, transport mocking itself.
From the future. Let’s say spawn to separate
What’s human. From Icon and the rest of us pickling
Cucumbers, brining in the jar over the years.
Measure underneath, drops and splats so watch
Yourself. People watching you across the islands.
Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She’s the author of the poetry books Syncopations and Twang. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. For Bergen Assembly 2019, she and her partner Ali Gharavi created How to Pass Time With No Reference, an multi-media installation about their experiences inside/outside the Turkish prison system. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation; she researches the dancer's use of language and the writer's use to/for dance. She’s a member of the performative collaboration MISLEADING SUBJECTS and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts.
