On Nanni Balestrini's 'Blackout'
Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout is a requiem for the generation of 1968, whose hopes and ideals were exhausted by the time of the poem’s composition in 1979. The original impetus for the poem was the blackout in New York on July 13, 1977, that lasted for twenty-five hours and drew widespread media attention due to countless episodes of violence and looting.
To understand Italy one must understand the United States. — Sylvère Lotringer / Christian Marazzi
Recasting poetry
'The long biography of a poem'
Kaia Sand
In Distant Reading, Peter Middleton describes reading a poem as though it has a “long biography.” This approach involves “mining what is available of the aggregative textual archive that composes the textual memory of the poem, its showing in magazines, performance, anthologies, its construal in reviews and commentaries and other treatments” (23).
Consider the long life of Claude McKay’s "If We Must Die."