The
Dusie Kollektiv began as a somewhat yearly
publishing project that began in 2005.
This page was created in an effort to archive the kollektiv issues separately from the regular poetic journal.
The kollektiv issue 9, curated by Elisabeth Workman with Dusie now live!
Marthe Reed Tribute
das kollektiv 9, ISSUE 22
In the wake of Marthe Reed’s sudden departure from the world, we are left with the body of work—her books, including Nights Reading, Pleth (with j hastain), (em)bodied bliss, Gaze and Tender Box: A Wunderkammer, her many chapbooks, collages, essays, works in progress and notebooks--as well as the books and chapbooks she helped bring into being as an editor of Black Radish Books and Nous Zots Press and the myriad connections and threads and actions she inspired through her advocacy of other writers and poets and in her activism. In her essay “somewhere in-between: Speaking-Through Contiguity” in Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, the anthology published by Wesleyan University Press in 2018 which she co-edited with Linda Russo, Marthe Reed (1958-2018) directs us to Timothy Morton’s re-framing of human/other-than-human relationships as “drastically collective”—“All kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention.” Marthe writes: “Escape from this truth lies through no doorway, no slippery construct of language or argument: ‘we’ are ‘it,’ inextricable from our circumstances. The point on which all else turns: within this ‘drastically collective’ condition, how, then…live? Indeed, how write?” For our 9th iteration of the Dusie Kollektiv, we asked poets, friends, and readers of Marthe Reed to explore this urgent question. “In times like these,” she writes in a revision of Rich, “it is necessary to embrace the ‘somewhere in-between’ affording and sheltering difference not as distance but as intimacy.” Marthe Reed not only illustrated how to fiercely create, be a poet and fight for what she believed, she most importantly demonstrated how to be in this world. The examples of what Marthe did for others in life and in poetry and publishing should not be forgotten, as she moved forward in the world all the while bringing others onward with her. The example of Marthe should continue in her remembrance— her endless ability love, see beauty in the everyday and in her immense spirit. We invited poets around the world to create digital chapbooks for Marthe and in her memory and poetics of Somewhere in the Cloud or In-between, held a reading of participants who were also at the New Orleans Poetry Festival in April 2019 and now present the works here of “that somewhere in-between self and other near and distant, paradoxical poles resolving moment-to-moment into contiguity. Meeting place.’
In her honor, this issue will remain as drastically collective as usual and in this case remain ‘open’ as a digital sandbox of sorts. We invite you too to write a chap or project for Marthe Reed and her poetics. Somewhere in the Cloud or In-between will be static and continual with hopes to host many more chaps in way of Marthe, drastic collectivity and the Anthrocepene. I think Marthe would agree that the only true radical kind of publishing would be that which is easily and widely disseminated and accessible… and free.
Omnia sunt communia,
Elisabeth Workman & Susana Gardner & the Dusie Kollektiv
