“Theory can explain why revolution may be necessary and analyze what constrains us. But perhaps only poetry can show how that cry emerges from modes of awareness more intimate, more widely shared, and more desperate than theory can develop.” 

^{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. 173.}

The Collapse of The American Dream Explained in Animation

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