1 Poem
OLJA ALVIR & CLEMENS BRAUN
OLJA ALVIR (olja.at) and CLEMENS BRAUN (clemensbraun.tumblr.com) met in Vienna, Austria studying Comparative Literature and bonded over a shared interest in pop culture, obscure political theory and all things ‘End of History’. Both of them work as writers, translators and literary scholars between Berlin and Vienna, Graz and Zagreb. Their poems, written in German and English, have appeared in various magazines. They are the founders of Partners in Grime, an international poetry project exploring collaborative creativity, collective identity and language matters in times of climate crisis. You can find them on Instagram – @oljaalvir and @james_brentano – or reach them at grimepoetry@gmail.com.
elsewhen
what is this plot?
enter a landscape, barely
something and an inlet,
where the adjecting mind
tries to grow an eye
from nothing, from less
squinting at an angle
and approaching on all sides
a peculiar crest.
on its back are surfaces
that push the view
and at a bend, the peat
mounds continents
over the miming water.
furs concern a copper men
into riverine surrender.
first the level rise, then
ferric fall
not from a place
but from a boundary,
a glacial bridge unmoored.
still, the gneiss clocks everything,
its nomadic metals wield
a pain that’s yet to come
excavating futures
sooner, at all times
in search of thaw’s prehistory.
at the brink of skill
there is no mercy of forgetting,
no icy hide will shield
the vision in this setting,
oblivious sediments reshuffle.
it heralds but a murky
era, pantone vetiver.
what is there
left
skyover
moving waters fall
into disremember.
the sea is inconspicuous.
what animal is that?
it is an iceberg turning. but
if new oceans can come
so can another
elsewhen
Partners in Grime
Project description
What does it mean to write poetry in unprecedented times?
What does poetry look like in the Anthropocene?
What does poetry written by two – or more – people at once look like?
Partners in Grime is an international poetry project exploring collaborative creativity, collective identity and language matters in a time of climate crisis.
The project is concerned with the intersection of natural history and subjectivity: Its texts are efforts in collecting and passing along words like pebbles; a geological poetics of excavation, solidarity and desire. Partners in Grime follows the ways of the water, the trajectory of landscapes, the goings-on on the periphery.
Partners in Grime dabbles in several languages. Its poetics are informed by the aesthetics of etymology and processes of translation, its aerial roots constantly grasping for meaning in multilingual landscapes of the 21st century.
Partners in Grime started with two people, but since each of them was several, it was already a crowd. Still, the project is looking to expand until it reaches the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I, a collection made of variously formed matters.
The political dimension of Partners lies in its devotion to creative complicity, non-hierarchical forms of production and publication. Solidarity, as we understand it, is not the production of identity, but the collaborative processes of non-identity, not homogeneous smoothness, but a stickiness that opposes unity and yet is needed by unity.
