dumbfoundry

Poetry: The Weatherwomen’s Terror [US]:

[...] Factory School’s Southpaw Culture series has reissued a book far more obscure than Prairie Fire—a collection of anonymously authored inspirational/agitprop, and sometimes feminist, poems from the same period and presumably the same (and related) folks who, though dangerously misguided, and destructive for U.S. progressive politics, still smell sweeter than those in and around the U.S. government who worked to actively, and often violently, undermine democratic governments abroad and domestic protest at home. [...]

The failure of these poems is also the failure of the politics behind them, just as the failure of the politics is a failure of the poetics: the shackling of imagination to principle, the desperate need to be so clear and so accessible that nothing in particular is left to say, and an identification with the struggles of others so crushing that it fatally represses the struggles within oneself. This book provides telling evidence that you can judge a movement by its words, especially when the movement was primarily an act of rhetoric, a poem-in-action. [...]

(review by Charles Bernstein)

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 8:50 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.