Support the Occupation of Wall Street!

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OCCUPY WALL STREET

Don’t listen to the ridiculous distortions or the simply lame reporting of the protests that you hear on corporate owned media, PBS/NPR and the BBC. There are thousands of very articulate people in these protests, and their various demands are serious. Watch Democracy Now!‘s coverage. All the anger about Wall Street, capitalism, the wealth gap, unemployment, the scam that is health insurance, the corporate ownership of politics and media, student loan debt and the cost of education, etc. etc., that came out of me for the past two years in 6x6x6 seems to be verified now in all of these people taking a stand. I thought that people weren’t ever going to start up anything. Whatever city you are in, support this thing. I’ll be in Pittsburgh this weekend and I’ll find the protest there.

Here’s a prayer:

May the American People arise
Where they have not arisen;
And where they have arisen, may they not disperse,
But increase further and further.

New Article up on 9/11 Poetry: Beyond Grief and Grievance by Philip Metres

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You may have noticed that I’ve been obsessed with 9/11 recently. So much disturbs me still about it, especially as the anniversary comes and goes each year: how it forced such a negative sea change in international politics (or was manipulated to that end) as well as a return to a McCarthy era-like culture of fear and self-censorship. Also disturbing is how so much of the evidence from the attacks was literally carted away and destroyed before any serious and thorough investigation could be conducted. The spectre of Virtuality haunts the entire spectacle, regardless of the particular narrative ascribed to the events to make them more real and, as would be expected, more terrifying with each detail. This goes for every theory of events I’ve read or listened to. The fact that we will never know everything, regardless of how often the standard narrative is reinforced or how many times you watch Loose Change, is perhaps the most disturbing thing.

Anyways, I’ve been reading a watching just about everything of any value that I can find about 9/11 and the response to it. I was looking through the Articles section at Poetry Foundation today and found this excellent reflective essay on the issue:

Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath by Philip Metres

It very thoughtfully examines a number of poems which responded to 9/11, providing a thorough summary of the 9/11 poetry phenomenon. I especially appreciated it’s treatment of Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” which I agree was a very important poem that few were willing to listen to. For me, it’s most important point was to emphasize the fact that there has never been a unified America, that the 9/11 attacks did not bring us all together, and to say so is to whitewash the violent and divisive history of America, both in its past and its present. Metres essay gives it a fair reading and treats it’s message with the respect it deserves.

 

The Bleed 0.1 Is Up and Out in Print

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The first issue of the only journal I know currently devoted to Vispo (and really good vispo at that) is now up. The range of different types of visual poetry presented there is truly stunning. You can purchase or view it online via the links below (I love issuu!).

Oh, and I’m in it, too. Pages 73-78.

Enjoy!

][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][

Available in print and digital edition through MagCloud.

Avantexte – The Bleed 0.1 (or direct link to issue @ issuu)

]] is up at Gnoetry Daily

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Over the past two weeks, I have been working on a chapbook of poems (or maybe poetic compositions would be more accurate) which deal with my feelings and thoughts about September 11th, 2001 on this tenth anniversary in a way that I hope is both artful and tasteful.

I’ve written an introduction and posted the three (somewhat incomplete) parts of the chapbook up at Gnoetry Daily over the past three days under my alter ego username eRoGK7, so I’ll stop introducing the thing here. Know that there will be more of the Gnoetry section (Part 2) going up for a while still.

I hope you enjoy it, and that it makes you think about and reflect upon various important things.

All Posts for ]] and Other 9/11 Works

Watching Art21 on Hulu and Thinking about Writing

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I’ve started to watch episodes of Art21 on Hulu Plus now through my PS3. Seems you can watch all of the episodes on the PBS Art21 website. I’ve always been fascinated with all kinds of art: music, visual art, literature, dance, film. I’ve also liked to listen to interviews with artists, which I often find much more stimulating than interviews with writers. They usually seem so much more passionate, intense, and wrapped up in what they’re talking about, what they’re working on. It’s this mentality I would like to bring to my poetry, to my projects and what I am doing with language. Some of my favorite poets sound more like abstract visual artists describing a display than writers talking about a poem or the situation that it arose from. Writers like Jackson Mac Low, bpNichol, Gertrude Stein, Leslie Scalapino and Christian Bök that continue to engage my curiosity and respect after repeat engagements with their work and thought. It is not really so much an idea of an avant garde that I want to connect with. Instead, there is a curiosity and openness to their work that is constantly (constantly did) re-emerg(e)ing throughout their careers, a necessity to change the approach, the materials, the aesthetic of their projects as new focal points emerged. And the concepts, perspectives, states of mind, spaces that their works engage with and recreate for readers are a pleasure am undeniably thankful for. This is how I would like my past present and future works to be. If there is a poembassy to bomb, it is in my mind, and I will continue to build it up, blow it up, and build it back. Or maybe stretch out a bit in its hollow shell and look around.