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The New Vertical

'What the anus has got to do with the trousers' is a Brazilian saying. People commonly use it when one thing has got nothing to do with another thing:

  1. Anus

  2. Trousers

 

'What the anus has got to do with the trousers' was also the title of a collectively planned exhibition. Yet, some of the artists involved in the exhibition wanted to withdraw their works because they regarded the title unpoetic. Some of them said they immediately had to think of shit in the in between:

 

  1. Anus

  2. Shit

  3. Trousers

 

If poetry is something that leaves you behind with wondrous encodings, the saying surely does not count as poetry; yet, if the poetic is understood as something that concerns the relations between things, as something that unfolds between things, the clash of anus and trousers can be categorized as poetic, not least because there will always remain a distance in between, in which spaces of thought might open up:

 

  1. Anus

  2. Space of Thought

  3. Trousers

First published in PaperWork, issue 3 "iilwimi lipsing", 2018. http://www.paperworkmagazine.com

Image: PaperWork.

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