wordtomydead

Sadé Powell

wordtomydead is a practice in black feminist poethics. using a 1940’s mechanical typewriter, sadé mucks up orthography to investigate disorienting practices of refusal and wade through the fundamental feltness and unintelligibility of thingness.

the concrete poetics deployed on/with/against the typewriter serve as scores for plenum sociality: your head stretches to the page, eyes squint, tongues stutter as you read the cascading letters falling off the margins you race to find understanding to rest on. you may find yourself spinning in circles, zigzagging across the page, deciphering what you can and being jolted by the static of what recedes from you.

'roaring through this project is an embodied feeling of black study, an illegible, unspeakable, and unreadable social aesthetic practice."to want to riot so much more than matter wants to matter so riotously, so differently, so invaluably, that it runs over itself in tremble, buzz and moan. neither the book nor the very idea of the grammar book can hold it back. flow clots to spill at broken natural tempi. surfacing abounds the letter’s natural twists and turns. what we get is supernatural flower. no petition for recovery, then a gig; just verbal streetlife in the common wind repeating: wordtomydead, by sadé powell.' – Fred Moten