The MiraculousOctober 2020New York
22. (The East Village and Points Beyond)
Word count: 168
Paragraphs: 3
A poet living in the East Village launches a write-in campaign for the 1992 Presidential Election. Promising to turn all her “upcoming art events, readings and performances until election day into political events,” she folds her campaign into the tour of a one-woman show titled “Leaving New York” that takes her to 28 States. In a campaign letter she describes how her personal experiences have impelled her to run for office: “I am a 41-year-old American, a female, a lesbian, from a working-class background, a poet, performer and writer making my living pretty exclusively from those activities. I am a taxpayer. I’ve lived the majority of my adult life under the poverty level, without health care. I have never made over $20,000 a year nor have I ever lived in a household where our combined incomes approached that amount. More Americans, far more Americans are like me than George Bush. Why is he ruling the country and our lives?”
(Eileen Myles)
Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.