In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote. Later, she added that “there are no new ideas … only new ways of making them felt.”
Monday, August 03, 2020
Call me "unconvinced"
If I was one to use the meme, I would be saying this quote has me reaching for my revolver:
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Yeah I vaguely remember a quote where some poet was asked "What is the point of poetry" and his answer was something like "To save the city." The girl might be doubling and tripling down on these notions.
We have to recapture the sense of what the old days were like. People planning their travels around the waxing and waning of the moon. Isolated families where the old bloke might be trying to write or read some poetry by firelight. You could see some level of importance to the poetry under that kind of scenario.
I'd get home from afternoon shift and I can remember getting plastered and reading the rime of the ancient mariner. This is before the internet worked much at all. And it was because it was dead outside. Once a bulldozer gets going and a few cars drive past the poetry doesn't seem anything like what it must have seemed in the old days.
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