excerpt on lyric and social agency

Talk of witnessing tends to sound hollow without a more sophisticated approach to history, and it tends to presuppose powers as agents that are precisely called into question by our experience of history. As Charles Altieri writes in an essay on Joshua Clover: “If there is to be lyric that can accurately capture the contemporary conditions of social agency, it will have to render the strange impersonal or transpersonal dependencies that bind us to out cultural moment. And it will have to recognise the partial blindness of the damaged subjects who are working their way toward expressing their situations.” Charles Altieri, 'The Pleasures of Not Merely Circulating: Joshua Clover's Political Imagination,' in Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, eds., American Poets in the 21st Century, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2007: 164-79, p. 169..

We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

ActUp NYStockExchange 1989

Largest-Ever Protest at McDonald's HQ | Registration | May 20

Largest-Ever Protest at McDonald's HQ | Registration | May 20

You are effervescently active on the margin of social life, and the workers are passive right at the core of it. That is the tragedy of our society. If you do not deal with this contrast, you will be defeated.

• Issac Deutscher, speaking to American students at the height of student activism in the 1960s

“Rufus is a pimp for three girls.  If the price is $65 per trick, how many tricks per day must each girl turn to support Rufus' $800 per day crack habit?” --  Question in a Winnipeg maths exam for which a teacher was suspended, 2002

 "Hector knocked up three girls in his gang. There are 27 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of the girls in the gang that Hector knocked up?" 

Parents of the 13-year-old and 14-year old students who attend Juniper School in Thompson, Manitoba, said they were outraged. ... Guess that was the teacher's idea of 'keeping it real'!!!

note by Ungaretti

In his prefatory note to all editions of L'allegria from 1931 on, my birthdate brother (and James Dean's!), Giuseppe Ungaretti writes:

if some progress has been made as an artist, he [the poet, Ungaretti] hopes it also indicates some perfection reached as a man. He came to maturity as a man in the midst of extraordinary events [i.e. the War], to which he was never a stranger. Without ever denying the universal necessities of poetry, he has always thought that, for the universal to be imagined, it must harmonize with the unique voice of the poet by means of an active feeling for history.