09 November 2012
Rend Asunder Conditions of Belief
"...the implication that science, values or ethics, and art are distinguishable from other forms of human activity because they impose order on anarchic experience, is entirely unacceptable. When any human being speaks a sentence, he creates order and imposes it on experience; and when he puts two sentences together he creates a world. The mark of greatness is not the ability to create order. Anybody
can do that, and does it all the time. Most people rarely do anything else. The mark of greatness is the ability to rend asunder the patterns and ideas of order which his environment has transmitted to a man and conditioned him to believe."
Morse Peckham in some journal reviewing some book some years ago.
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Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
ReplyDeleteby Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....
This can happen only in the poem.
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