01/8
It's time to Occupy Poetry
"Poetry happens when we are shaken out of our psychic, linguistic, phenomenological, and indeed even physiological compliance with the spectacle and its myriad illusory modes of reification.” So says the Croatoan Poetic Cell, who launched an #OWS-inspired, Situationist assault of creative mayhem this autumn on Chicago's Poetry Foundation.
Cultural institutions, says the CPC, “are an integral part of the Spectacle. They are the conduits through which images, objects and language ‘transform’ into high art.”
All well and good, writes Jeremy Axelrod in Salon. But is pissing on a well-attended poetry reading truly "cerebral anarchy" that makes the arts more democratic and accessible?
link source: salon.com »
Page Excerpt
One evening this fall, two young activists walked through the bright, modern library of the new Poetry Foundation headquarters and marched up to the glass balcony. Some 30 attendees had gathered that evening in Chicago to hear a free poetry reading, and now many turned to view long, hand-painted banners unfurling from the second floor. With solemn fanfare, the two men, members of a small rebel alliance called the Croatoan Poetic Cell, had launched their latest defense of poetry — shortly before someone at the foundation called the police.
“What would have happened,” asked one banner, “if Emily Dickinson had been prescribed Prozac?” Idle speculation aside — one pictures long, glazed-over afternoons spent knitting frocks in New England — the protesters were implying that Prozac stymies creativity, and that the Poetry Foundation, lavishly funded by a pharmaceutical fortune, does business with the kind of people who might, given the…
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“What would have happened,” asked one banner, “if Emily Dickinson had been prescribed Prozac?” Idle speculation aside — one pictures long, glazed-over afternoons spent knitting frocks in New England — the protesters were implying that Prozac stymies creativity, and that the Poetry Foundation, lavishly funded by a pharmaceutical fortune, does business with the kind of people who might, given the…
Read Full Article »
Also appears in:
Hiawatha Review
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