THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT —
DIESE ENERGIE FLÜCHTEND VERSCHWENDET—
Lotte L.STranslated into German by Lotta Thießen
136 Pages
14.8 x 21 CM
ISBN: 978-1-915341-12-9
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“I wanted to remember how to forget:
I found something I thought I knew well—
the colour of a childhood room; the path taken to school each day;
a pool of water collecting in the iris,
—took something: lines of a poem
or the pages of a book, placed them in these spaces
I thought I knew well.
I had to train myself, I couldn’t carry
all the pages—”
THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life.
"THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is thought turned [into] song. The singer, an ‘ambivalent woman / of non personhood’, trusts the productive energy of doubt to take her deeper into feeling and farther from naming. Lotte LS reveals the violent imperatives placed on us to speak and inhabit our pains as the limits of our personhood. In tracing the ‘tyranny of language under capitalist authoritarianism’ what emerges is the chance to become a subject always in motion, one who knows that what is not remembered is not identical to what is forgotten. "
--Mira Mattar
"THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is a nightbook for 'life beneath the ground', an insomniac constellation that works against the familiar command, in the words of Anna Mendelssohn, 'to be taped named, known'. Lotte's poems refuse the condition of being made simply visible, pushed into the streetlight of state clarity. In this beautiful book the ambivalent prospect of lyric confession is put under pressure, when the guards let you sing as much as anyone, thought-feelings on trial and all scars up for sale. So remembering to forget produces a deeper act of historical witness, one that keeps schtum when called to the box. Flight depletes energy but that doesn't mean you'll never need to take off, away from the great sadness where '"resistance" [is] state apparatus' and reportage governs and destroys. Really the murmuration brings the earth with it. And poetry's loneliness finds oblique ways to glint through our enforced permacrisis, full of a quiet, mobile optimism that slips between worlds of violence and surveillance, intimacy of the hermit treading up the shoreline, 'her' friends flitting overhead. 'That you will find chances | in other people | to feel anything but muddled, hurt, exhausted': a sky where 1 a.m. becomes I am."
-- Dom Hale
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Lotte L.S. is a poet living in the town of Great Yarmouth, England. Her writing includes a pamphlet with Tripwire, titled, A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a "death", two solitudes, façades, four loose dogs, a doppelgänger, a likeness, three airport floors, thirty-six weeks...; translations of the Moroccan poet and Marxist feminist Saïda Menebhi, who died on hunger strike in prison in 1977, with See Red Press; and shorter self-published pamphlets of poetry such as untitled (Iceland), and TWELVE DAYS OF 21st CENTURY RAIN. From 2020, she ran the poetry reading series no relevance in Great Yarmouth, and founded red herring press, to print, publish and distribute local writing in the town.
Lotte L.S. lebt und schreibt in Great Yarmouth, im Osten Englands. Ihr Chapbook „A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a ‚death’, two solitudes, façades, four loose dogs, a doppelgänger, a likeness, three airport floors, thirty-six weeks…“ erschien 2021 bei Tripwire (Oakland). Ihre Übersetzungen der marokkanischen Dichterin und marxistischen Feministin Saïda Menebhi, die 1977 infolge ihres Hungerstreiks im Gefängnis starb, wurden bei See Red Press publiziert. In diesem Verlag veröffentlichte Lotte L.S. auch die Gedichtsequenzen „untitled (Iceland)“ und „TWELVE DAYS OF 21st CENTURY RAIN“. Seit 2020 leitet Lotte L.S. die Lesereihe no relevance in Great Yarmouth. Im selben Jahr gründete sie den Verlag red herring press, in dem sie die literarischen Arbeiten der Bewohner*innen von Great Yarmouth druckt, veröffentlicht und in Umlauf bringt.
Lotta Thießen grew up in Portugal and now lives in Berlin. Between 2015 and 2022 she co-organized the reading and publication series artiCHOKE for which she translated contemporary poetry from Portuguese, German and English into German and English and wrote critical texts contextualising the works. She is a founding member of Gegensatz Translation Collective. Her latest chapbook “Fragments of Baby” was published by Materialien (Munich) in 2019.
Lotta Thießen ist in Portugal aufgewachsen und lebt derzeit in Berlin. Zwischen 2015 und 2022 hat sie die Lese- und Publikationsreihe artiCHOKE organisiert und zeitgenössische Lyrik aus dem Portugiesischen, Deutschen und Englischen ins Deutsche und Englische übertragen. Sie ist Mitbegründerin des Gegensatz Translation Collective. Ihre eigenen Gedichte erschienen zuletzt als Chapbook mit dem Titel „Fragments of Baby“ bei Materialien (München, 2019).