ANNELYSE GELMAN IS NOT DEAD YET

Stubborn — Words by Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Illustrations by Clara Bessijelle Johansson 

Jonas Mekas - A Walk (1990)

Written Minneapolis (The Last Tomb) is a crooked memory of my childhood and adolescence in Tehran, and later on after I came to Minneapolis. Empty spaces were filled with poetry that I had to memorize as a student…

My brain is filled with a lot of poetry, force-fed. That is how we communicated. Sometimes walking in the streets of Tehran we heard poetry being recited on the other side of the wall. In fact, poetry was the glue of all in our lives. Out in the city, poetry was arguments, political discourse, love and death, happiness, laughter, quiet weeping, misery, suffering, friction, bad-mouthing, praising and admiring. That was the whole life in the city.

Croatia-born, Amsterdam-based artist Nora Turato: poetry + graphic design + performance. Kind of the polar opposite of the “flat-affect, distant-dissociated but very charged” language that’s so excited me about Robert Ashley & Arda Collins, and it doesn’t resonate in the same way, but—she makes it work. Fearlessness and commitment (and an extension of some Holzer-esque “hot language” inflammation?). I really like the cigarette-packet aesthetic too.

“Poetry is haute couture.”