Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Post-Crisis Poetics preview

Editor Brian Ang’s response to “Can poetry have a socio-political impact?” for Jacket2’s Quick Question series, as a preview of his forthcoming “post-crisis poetics” essay and series projects:

“In a forthcoming essay, ‘Post-Crisis Poetics,’ I connect readings of poetries that I’ve published in my magazine ARMED CELL. I started my magazine in August 2011 to publish poetry and poetics open to values emerging from the global waves of struggles since the 2008 economic crisis. The magazine’s title was drawn from a desire for militant intransigence signified by that form of struggle, a value of the California anti-austerity university struggles that began in 2009, the first significant resistance to the crisis in the United States. The university struggles are the context for the magazine’s first poem, David Lau’s ‘Communism Today’: its first section ends ‘Occupy everything, including Humanities,’ an extension of the university struggles’ slogan that influenced the Occupy movement that began in September 2011 from a politicization of space and time toward a politicization of knowledge, an emblem for the magazine’s desire for an historicized critical poetics. My editing has aspired to assemble complexes for thinking about each issue’s moment’s unfolding multiple dimensions suggestive for further critical writing.”