i like massive home inventory.
re: all literature is inside the system. i think yes and no. i think academy probably wants it all (and then wants to not give attention to big parts of it).
william, i want to get you a few quotes from this adorno article. he says sort of the same thing. or maybe not the banal part. but the difficulty in saying anything that isn't taken up by the system. i'll try and do this once i am at the office.
jessea: i'm not sure what a real answer on this language poetry question would look like other than the mass of articles already published around this issue. i think one has to find one's own way through it. at the least, the questions are interesting.
i think actually there are lots of poets doing interesting political work in both writing and life and at same time exploring intersection between the two. although this is going to be a short list b/c of time.
first, a lot of the poets that we read last semester do this work. trask is obviously more of a political activist than a poet although both are connected for her. but one could easily include james thomas stevens as someone who does cultural activism and writing activism. and another obvious one is gloria anzaldua. then we could fight over some of the other ones.
also...
rodrigo toscano: works for labor institute and charts labor issues in a lot of his work (see Platform which i think is super-excellent). but he doesn't have mfa.
kaia sand and jules boykoff are doing work that mixes activism and writing. we are doing a piece by them in next chain where they've gone around and put up signs with various sorts of political content at stop lights in rural maryland. i think kaia has mfa if this matters.
mark nowak does union organizing and writes a lot about labor also. not sure if he has mfa or not.
but there are endless examples of how people try to connect their writing to their activism and the examples of activism, like the writing, are really various and often personal.
maybe we can start a list of those whose work in both areas you respect.
a lot of work gets done by poets around canon issues. by which i mean the huge amount of poets who organize reading series and do arts admin work where they work to expand what gets heard, supported, etc. elizabeth treadwell at spt. anselm berrigan at st marks poetry project. truong tran at kearny st workshop. and then all the poets who edit journals. especially journals like tripwrite (buuck and morrison), xcp (nowak), etc.
but i think that there probably isn't a recipe. i just think that it is something to think about. a sort of interesting question.
re: why poetry? there probably isn't an answer to this one either. but poetry is for many reasons the genre that has closest ties to protest. i think this has a lot to do with how open the genre is and also with its usual shortness. but also poetry is the genre w/o national point of origin. it is a truly international genre (drama also). so it seems to be more culturally fluid than say the novel (which always comes with its western history). but i like to think when i say poetry i just mean writing. sometimes i joke that poetry is anything that isn't the novel. by which i mean that genre's rightness disappears at turn of 20th century. so we end up with genres with economic uses (the novel). and then we end up with a huge amount of "writing."
on this issue about writing something for h.s. students to come across: well, only a few manage this. for various reasons. but shouldn't one write as if one was writing for some impossible audience? whatever one feels that that impossible audience should be. i keep thinking of harryette mullen's piece about she sees her future reader is “the offspring of an illiterate woman” and that she writes (echoing Stein) “for myself and others.” [Mullen, Harryette. “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded.” Boundary 2: 99 Poets/1999: An International Symposium. 26:1 (1999) 198-203.]
anyway enough. i got no sleep last night.
re: all literature is inside the system. i think yes and no. i think academy probably wants it all (and then wants to not give attention to big parts of it).
william, i want to get you a few quotes from this adorno article. he says sort of the same thing. or maybe not the banal part. but the difficulty in saying anything that isn't taken up by the system. i'll try and do this once i am at the office.
jessea: i'm not sure what a real answer on this language poetry question would look like other than the mass of articles already published around this issue. i think one has to find one's own way through it. at the least, the questions are interesting.
i think actually there are lots of poets doing interesting political work in both writing and life and at same time exploring intersection between the two. although this is going to be a short list b/c of time.
first, a lot of the poets that we read last semester do this work. trask is obviously more of a political activist than a poet although both are connected for her. but one could easily include james thomas stevens as someone who does cultural activism and writing activism. and another obvious one is gloria anzaldua. then we could fight over some of the other ones.
also...
rodrigo toscano: works for labor institute and charts labor issues in a lot of his work (see Platform which i think is super-excellent). but he doesn't have mfa.
kaia sand and jules boykoff are doing work that mixes activism and writing. we are doing a piece by them in next chain where they've gone around and put up signs with various sorts of political content at stop lights in rural maryland. i think kaia has mfa if this matters.
mark nowak does union organizing and writes a lot about labor also. not sure if he has mfa or not.
but there are endless examples of how people try to connect their writing to their activism and the examples of activism, like the writing, are really various and often personal.
maybe we can start a list of those whose work in both areas you respect.
a lot of work gets done by poets around canon issues. by which i mean the huge amount of poets who organize reading series and do arts admin work where they work to expand what gets heard, supported, etc. elizabeth treadwell at spt. anselm berrigan at st marks poetry project. truong tran at kearny st workshop. and then all the poets who edit journals. especially journals like tripwrite (buuck and morrison), xcp (nowak), etc.
but i think that there probably isn't a recipe. i just think that it is something to think about. a sort of interesting question.
re: why poetry? there probably isn't an answer to this one either. but poetry is for many reasons the genre that has closest ties to protest. i think this has a lot to do with how open the genre is and also with its usual shortness. but also poetry is the genre w/o national point of origin. it is a truly international genre (drama also). so it seems to be more culturally fluid than say the novel (which always comes with its western history). but i like to think when i say poetry i just mean writing. sometimes i joke that poetry is anything that isn't the novel. by which i mean that genre's rightness disappears at turn of 20th century. so we end up with genres with economic uses (the novel). and then we end up with a huge amount of "writing."
on this issue about writing something for h.s. students to come across: well, only a few manage this. for various reasons. but shouldn't one write as if one was writing for some impossible audience? whatever one feels that that impossible audience should be. i keep thinking of harryette mullen's piece about she sees her future reader is “the offspring of an illiterate woman” and that she writes (echoing Stein) “for myself and others.” [Mullen, Harryette. “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded.” Boundary 2: 99 Poets/1999: An International Symposium. 26:1 (1999) 198-203.]
anyway enough. i got no sleep last night.
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