‘The revolutionary epic is never a “finished” narrative, let alone uniquely nefarious. The unruly and dense “archives” that revolutions (or an epic past) embody are liable to tell different stories, stories that bequeath different “lessons” and, thereby, possibilities.’
Category: poetry
Jared Marcel Pollen: “For Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literature Was the Spark of the Revolution”
After the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the young radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed he was deserting “the odorous gardens of literature” for “the great sandy desert of politics.” Instead, he infused literature with revolutionary political ideas.
Owen Holland: “‘What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents’: The Paris Commune and the Poetics of Martyrdom in the Fin de Siècle Socialist Print Culture”
“The problem of how to relate to, and retrospectively valorise, the Commune’s failure created a tension in the socialist periodical press between the motivational need to celebrate such a heroic defeat, in order to justify sacrifices both past and present, and the evaluative need critically to assess the reasons that underlay the defeat.”
Caryl Emerson: “The Revolutionary Specters of Russian Letters”
The great Russian writers between “apocalypse and nihilism.”
“Scoundrel Time:” A New Literary Site Takes on Trump
“JRC: How can art battle politics in this era of fake news and open hostility and fascist rhetoric? PW: Art tells the truth. It’s that simple. Fiction, in particular, reveals the truth through fabrication.”
Aleksandar Hemon: “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump”
‘The necessary thing to do is to transform shock into a high alertness that prevents anything from being taken for granted — to confront fear and to love the way it makes everything appear strange. Love the new frequencies; what is noise now will be music later. The disintegration of the known world provides a…
“Averse to Trump, America’s poets fight back with words”
“Poetry slams and other literary events are being organized nationwide in the run-up to the president-elect’s Jan. 20 inauguration. … But for many men and women of letters, Trump is the galvanizing factor.”