Monday, September 17, 2012

Occupy/Poetry

"When Zuccotti Park was still occupied something that impressed me were the various tents that provided medical and emotional aid to occupiers. This is something that we too often disassociate from struggle: mutual aid. And it is also the reason for struggle, maybe its primary reason: to become a society of mutual aid. Poetry provides not just a Kantian critical distance from events and subjects, as I notice certain poets arguing for; but it binds and is immediate to intersubjective formations that undergird collective social action."

The latest Boog City features talks from a panel I was on with Tyrone Williams this past August, regarding poetry, activism, and Occupy Wall Street, edited by Brenda Iijima and David A. Kirschenbaum

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Doug Ashford


"The forms in my working process these days are chosen for both their factual reportage and their imagistic drift. I want to know what motivates the figures depicted, if they imagine in unknown relations; figures that are beautiful because they respond to emergency, moving as if empathy has taken them into a momentum that overcomes catastrophe. Although sometimes hard to see, political disaster creates events of extraordinary love because it makes the enduring of life imaginable beyond dark practical economies of getting and selling."

The Hegemon Say (Chapbook)






Check out this chapbook, hot-off Michael Cross's COMPLINE press in Oakland, CA.


Designed after Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Pomegranate Offering (1975), it features a single poem dedicated to Cha.