Thank you for thoughtfully and patiently following the twists and turns, folds and twistings of the "information" that has been predigested for our consumption. I have been thinking about poetry and its demise while reading Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry. Is there a poet alive today whose newest work would be noted and read by a large portion of any culture in a way, say, Tennyson or Wordsworth or Eliot would have been in their time? Poetry's revolutionary content has been stripped and sold for parts, its emotional capacity to connect deeply with others reduced to puppetry that enables readers to return quiescently to their own cells. I suspect your writing on the prevailing forms and techniques of communication will help me dig into this more fruitfully.
Thanks for the kind words and the very important remarks.
I think the loss of poetry you refer to is quite suggestive of much of this complex set of problems. I don't believe that there is any such poet, no. I mean, people hardly read novels anymore. Poetry, insofar as it actually exists anymore, has very much been reduced to something quaint, some sort of meaningless decoration of no importance whatsoever.
Compare that to e.g. Plato's views of poetry as in many ways superior to science.
But you might be able to find something akin to poetry in the lyrics of popular music. I think e.g. Regina Spektor gave it a good try:
I think of this world, and media especially, even more so social media, as a propaganda machine. The machine aspect stresses that it's not about propaganda and true or false, but about a reality that is created and perpetuated
It's why Twatter has become so intolerable to me - the machine has stripped off its trappings like that incredible scene in The Terminator where Schwarzenegger becomes his underlying robot exoskeleton.
Thank you for thoughtfully and patiently following the twists and turns, folds and twistings of the "information" that has been predigested for our consumption. I have been thinking about poetry and its demise while reading Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry. Is there a poet alive today whose newest work would be noted and read by a large portion of any culture in a way, say, Tennyson or Wordsworth or Eliot would have been in their time? Poetry's revolutionary content has been stripped and sold for parts, its emotional capacity to connect deeply with others reduced to puppetry that enables readers to return quiescently to their own cells. I suspect your writing on the prevailing forms and techniques of communication will help me dig into this more fruitfully.
Thanks for the kind words and the very important remarks.
I think the loss of poetry you refer to is quite suggestive of much of this complex set of problems. I don't believe that there is any such poet, no. I mean, people hardly read novels anymore. Poetry, insofar as it actually exists anymore, has very much been reduced to something quaint, some sort of meaningless decoration of no importance whatsoever.
Compare that to e.g. Plato's views of poetry as in many ways superior to science.
But you might be able to find something akin to poetry in the lyrics of popular music. I think e.g. Regina Spektor gave it a good try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62rfWxs6a8
I think of this world, and media especially, even more so social media, as a propaganda machine. The machine aspect stresses that it's not about propaganda and true or false, but about a reality that is created and perpetuated
It's why Twatter has become so intolerable to me - the machine has stripped off its trappings like that incredible scene in The Terminator where Schwarzenegger becomes his underlying robot exoskeleton.
I think you're right. Debord and Ellul (and basically the whole Frankfurt School) had the same idea.
We need to get out from under this nonsense before it collapses.
Thanks, sister. It really means a lot to hear.
And I of course wholly agree with your interpretation.
Here's something beautiful for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5RUcUUI1Dc