200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
What is action?
Two collectives: anon and not
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws.
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws. So what is action?