Wrote an essay for with my friend Ryan Eckes about American poetry from 9/11 to the present, reflecting on the possibility of poetry being part of a non-alienated anti-capitalist life. Thank you @annuletpoetics for publishing it
oh yeah sure keep em all locked up at home and the poor working and the poorest starving from now, until. and if they get sick and pass it, health is virtue and sickness is sin. medieval
'the best american poetry" account having a zionist meltdown should be a good reminder to all of us that literary prestige is often not really about quality at all and more about vetting appropriate forms of political discourse in literary production.
The big lie perpetuated by the 60s was that the lifestyle you choose is more important than what you do as a political actor. The big lie of now is that what identity position you're born into or choose to identify with is more important than what you do as a political actor.
this is the thing i'll say about fred jameson: what i loved most about jameson's thought was how much it showed us that history and particularly aesthetics is the movement of the proletariat, rather than some rarified thing far from us, inaccessible to us.
The Palestine situation is also a great pretext for a long-due purge of the professional classes by the ruling classes. It's not just censorship, it's remaking what speech makes you employable
I really hope this antizionism is not antisemitism thing at least begins to chip away at representational politics. It's like we constantly need to rehearse that people from different ethnic or religious groups do not hold monolithic political beliefs or even identities
Honestly being into conspiracy is completely necessary at this point at least to have a few people to talk to who are willing to break the tacit agreement to not point out how psychotically abnormal everything is now all the time, right out in the open, continually
If you listen to this interview in its entirety, it's actually deeply sus. While Coates does make an apt parallel between the conditions of African-Americans and Palestinians, his takeaway is that only an ethic of nonviolence can solve the genocide of Palestinians...
“dropping bombs on children, on refugee camps.. i worry for the souls of people who can do this & can sleep at night.”
ta-nehisi coates just put the whole silent literary/media community on notice🔥