Occupy with Poetry!


Among the many Occupy events I've been following are literary ones. It's a good moment in history for poets and writers to speak up through their art. I was happy to see that Fringe Magazine started an Occupy area on their blog. An Occupy poetry anthology is online and still accepting more works, I've heard. And I'm sure much more literature will come out of this new movement some are calling "the end of the beginning" of a change in world consciousness of equality and justice.

I feel that, as the Arab Spring demonstrated, and the Autumn Occupy is reinforcing, a new awareness of the need for more humane values is spontaneously emerging among great numbers of people on our planet. I don't believe this can be contained within politics -- certainly not politics as usual. It's organic and self-organizing, as my wise and funny friend Emily Levine pointed out, the way water molecules organize themselves to be liquid. You can't stop or even define this kind of thing. You can't demand it produce its list of demands. But you can make poetry about it.