February has never been an easy month. I seem to run into this question: "what am I doing with my life?" The gray days. The snow that will never melt. My own meltdowns. I'm reading some Jeanette Winterson to get through the days.
While on vacation I finished reading Adrienne Rich's What is Found There.
"The moment a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political."
She delves into many literary and political ideas, which I am thankful for because I now have a text to reference when I am struggling to grasp this arena. She articulates the ways in which sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for life and how that sensuality is inseparable from politics. The collection is mind-blowing.
Points that resonated with me the most:
*writers weave the fictions of many lives and they are truest when most imagined
*never stop responding to new passions and new forces- never oversimplify, as believers and activists are often tempted and pressured to do.
*casual storytelling, music making: people used their human equipment- memory, image making, narrative, voice, hand, eye- unself-consciously to engage with other people not as specialists or "artistes"
*communal art has never been co-optable for commercial ends
*nonassimilating in spirit and therefore living amid contradictions, a constant act of self-creation
*craft: control of tone and image allow the wild and desperate quality of experience to be heard
*the refusal to segregate art from daily life and work
*...might be pondered by all poets who too fluently find language for what they have not yet absorbed
*...a tough and searching empathy-observant and participant: totally unsentimental consciousness, rather a being who instinctively responds to growth, deprivation, persistence, wildness, tameness
*poems live amid complex tensions even when its texture may appear transparent
*to act on a criminalized sensuality demands many kinds of decriminalization- not only of sexual acts, but of poverty, skin, difference
*no sentimental haze- an energy that is restless and impatient of resolution
*the communication of poetry takes place beyond frameworks of explanation
*speak for continuum, spectrum, inclusion as laws of life
*in each case the poet refuses to let form become format, pushes at it, stretches the web, rejects imposed materials, claims a personal space and time & voice
*on avant garde/experimental poetics: what is significance in a society of immigrants and survivors of genocide, the meeting place of many colonized cultures, whose emerging artists, far from being disgusted with their people's traditions and styles, are trying to repossess and revalue them? -not abandoning meaning; the artistic imperative to make it as clear as possible
*the economy of the nation, the empire of business w/in the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare
*images that burn true outside of the emotional theme park/commoditized spirituality
*poetry, like bread, is for everyone
I agreed with her arguments for the most part, but was left with several questions and would love nothing more than to get into a conversation with someone about this book and the literary landscape now (and musical landscape for that matter).
Tonight we are having a fundraiser for Wild Mind Magazine at the MayDay Cafe. We have a lot of work to do: build the website, choose/solicit first issue content, figure out how to maintain literary and communal integrity when choosing what to include- how to provide essential information not available in the mainstream press?
Some Tennessee lovin for ya:
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