21, 19 Quotes

“Knowledge of the invaluable is prior to the experience of being-(de)valued. The invaluable brings value online, after all, as a bad thought or a kind of vicious offspring. It’s just that the experience of being-(de)valued helps us not forget what we already know. What we already know is given in Jacobs’s refusal to buy herself, but it persists even in those who have to buy themselves, even in those—like Jacobs—who have to sell themselves, when what we already know motivates the transaction. Take this. This is not my body. There’s no such thing. It’s not that it wouldn’t be better if it were. It’s that it wouldn’t be good enough. Blackness is a blessing of the bodiless, just as indigeneity is a blessing of the landless. They form neither repertoires of countermeasures nor collections of counter-subjective standards. They dig transverse earth and flesh to displace the total situation. They make a book like a museum for durational art, formed in walking through curational air. “The music is happening,” Monk says. “I don’t need to play.” Live album. Light blue. Bright, Mississippi flowers.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Sometimes we’re so deep in it we’re outside of it. There, we know two things: how fucked up it is to be in the life and how beautiful it is to live in and with and as what has no value.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“When have the born again not doubled down on death?”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Being-valued, which is to say being-devalued, emerges in the proximity of things. There’s an evil you and I can’t get away from. Sometimes you and I want to call it home, collapsing our presence into an absence of extension, an instant of argon blue, where and when all our things can be accounted for. And insofar as subjects have a place and time they have a price. This is the private imperative of an American rebirth predicated on expropriating birth’s radical impropriety so it can clock how we keep having played that tune tomorrow.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Every anthology is about what’s been excluded; these essays try to bring that close as they range from riot to recipe in their common refusal to be collected. In this sheaf, the truth of black cake has always already displaced the lie of the melting pot. In this bouquet, that truth is displaced, too. Such displacement teaches us all we can know about everything, which is that everything ain’t all; that everything’s not the erasure of exclusion but its management; that it’s not things but nothing that goes together, apart, after all. That’s why we have to look through what’s gathered here, which what’s gathered here facilitates. In this anthology, the incompleteness we desire breaks the brokenness we abjure.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Forewords tell you about, thereby displacing, what you’re about to read. They postpone your reading in the interest of your reading so closely that you start weaving, so you can bring to light what’s not there in what you’re reading.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive