Many thanks to Charles Bernstein for How Poetry Survives, an excellent article about the vitality of alternative institutions of poetry, including reading series and small press practices that evidence the world outside [the] semblance of culture represented by commercial publishing and too often reinforced in classroom settings, as [alt] institutions continue, against all odds, to find value in the local, the particular, the partisan, the committed, the tiny, the peripheral, the unpopular, the eccentric, the difficult, the complex, the homely; and in the formation and reformation, dissolution and questioning, of imaginary or virtual or partial or unavowable communities and/or uncommunities. AMEN. Heres a taste of the whole reposted 20 years later in The Baffler One of the cliches of the intellectual- and artist-bashing so fashionable in our leading journals of opinion is that there are no more “public intellectuals.” The truth of the matter is that writing of great breadth and depth, and of enormous significance for the public, flourishes, but the dominant media institutions—commercial television and radio, the trade presses, and the nationally circulated magazines (including the culturally upscale periodicals)—have blacklisted this material. Intellectuals and artists committed to the public interest exist in substantial numbers. Their crime is not a lack of accessibility but a refusal to submit to marketplace agendas: the reductive simplifications of conventional forms of representation; the avoidance of formal and thematic complexity; and the fashion ethos of measuring success by sales and value by celebrity. The public sphere is constantly degraded by its conflation with mass scale since public space is accessible principally through particular and discrete locations.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 17:37:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015