“I was talking to one of my grad students last night about the place of art in our political and cultural movements. What is art supposed to be “doing” there? Is the expectation of pragmatism what cripples the art by making it have to be didactic and dogmatic? Or is there something deeper we need to look at? I think about claiming to be disconnected from great literary traditions as a community, such that we get to a point that we feel we have no great literary traditions, which leads to the sentiment that great literary traditions have nothing to do with us. This is fallacious logic.
I keep thinking of an introduction to a volume of poetry by Nobel Prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, in which it is mentioned that one can move through the Indian countryside and hear workers in the fields reciting Tagore’s verses from memory. Similarly, I think about the Latina custodial workers in a nearby Oakland school, who know and remember the poems of Nicolás Guillén. And I think of Philippine poet Emmanuel Lacaba, the “Brown Rimbaud,” whose poems that I know best (from Salvaged Poems) recognize complexity, irony, contradiction, and the artist as warrior and tightrope dancer…”
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