The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker;

Author:Rachel Zucker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)

I love Ewing’s three pillars: be personal, be respectful, and be critical. These pillars overlap with the five rules or cautions I gleaned from my engagement with Foucault. One might say that Ewing’s commitment to “being personal” includes #2 and #5 above (the poet assumes responsibility for both the content and form of speech and the content engenders significant risk to the poet—there is something personal at stake). Being respectful might include (but is not exactly the same as) telling the truth and writing to ensure the well-being of the community. The third pillar—being critical of power structures and who controls the narrative—is necessary when one is trying to live by #3: punching up, not down.

In his craft talk “Poetry in the Age of Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston,” given on June 20, 2015,5 Roger Reeves elaborates a similar set of rules and cautions, this time about how to write about violence and brutality, especially state-sanctioned violence. Given three days after a white supremacist terrorist murdered nine African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Reeves asks,

What is the work of poetry in this age of brutality?…What shall we ask of the poem, of the story, of the essay? How shall our work encounter, explore, and interrogate these moments, these images? How do we, poets, fiction writers, essayists, write our poems, stories, and essays that engage the political and sociological spectacle of police brutality against black and brown bodies, engage US imperialism, engage neoliberal excess exported as diplomacy and goodwill without reproducing the spectacle, reproducing the wounds of the initial instantiation of violence, without uncritically reproducing what it is we seek to confront and possibly dismantle and subvert?

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