Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

I offer two spontaneous pieces back-to-back, Catskill Mountain patchworks, because I am distracted these days, letting surface what will, and because Sam and Michael asked. Much thanks to those who speak and challenge via “the socials” (as my students say) and face-to-face, mask-to-mask.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.  — Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

In an attempt to locate by other means (than commentary posts) the pith of each member of our Hudson Valley group’s take on the relationship between poetry and the 2020 elections, we invited them to participate in a livestream gathering on the evening of October 4th, a month before the vote, at Green Kill, a peer-to-peer arts space in Kingston, NY. Here the poets who chose to respond (above) read from their poetry, selecting pieces that seemed to them to touch a political, electoral verve, or not (it was open). Afterward we responded to the “burning question.” To enhance the visual field, behind them as they spoke appeared scrolling upward the text of William Blake’s America a Prophecy; the rationale for its addition is discussed in part in the introduction to the event.

And a transformation within language, in the very syntax of thinking, feeling, and acting in an endangered and dangerous world.

Addressing what’s happening at this particular moment in our collective experience is a lot harder than it might seem. Not that “we” don’t tend to agree in broad terms about the extraordinary challenge of the present — we being those who might actually read this series, poets and others interested in poetry with “a certain edge.” Rather because there’s so much agreement, the situation seems in fact to need somewhat less repetitive comment within the “group.” I can’t think of anyone I know, for instance, who isn’t experiencing fear of the terrifying consequences of the Abominable Four: a Trump win, another SCOTUS right-winger, more climate disaster, unending pandemic. 

In this election season my desk is littered with post-it notes, images, and quotes: