On my calendar next week: Go to Zuccotti Park when Jan Clausen is there.
On Cara Hoffman’s blog today Jan writes:
A. I’m at Zuccotti Park, where I go every day, wearing a sign that says BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. Cold rain is blowing sideways and I fight with my umbrella while reading Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.” Looking up, I spy a tall young man clad in excellent rain pants, standing a few paces away. He pronounces each line as I do, with such assurance that it’s clear he knows the entire poem by heart, all the way to the famous ending (“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”). We talk. It turns out he’s one of the Occupy Wall Street librarians. “We have a whole Allen Ginsberg section in our library!” he exults. For the rest of the day, I feel more alive, because poetry lives.
And she also writes, about an anthology of essays about writing and the writing life, about the “the ragged edges and torn borders that truly invite creative motion”:
I’m certainly not saying word artists don’t need to spend lots of time alone, wrestling with their materials. Or that we shouldn’t be paid. Or that we shouldn’t study craft. I’m saying that art is more than the sum of these things, that the central impulse comes from elsewhere, from someplace webby and tentacled. What if the artist’s vocation as prophet simply isn’t compatible with being a profit center? Although Alchemy of the Word can be put to fine use, it is not a ‘useful’ book. It’s a bountiful array of forking paths leading back into the thicket where one person’s imaginative language always reverberates with the languages, purposes, visions of human others.
It is “our offering.”
Read her full essay here.