Slow Poetry

“Systems disruption, made effective superempowerment, has now gained control of pricing on global energy markets,” writes John Robb at Global Guerrillas. His blog entry looks at recent open source methods of attack used by MEND 75 miles off the coast of Nigeria to disrupt oil production.

Just as warfare in contemporary global cultures transforms to correspond to dynamic regional situations, poets look for ways to disrupt systems of thought, bring reflection to habitual patterns of action, and extend capacities in audiences to help show other modal perceptions of the world where ideological conflicts erupt. While conceptual poetry and flarf provide contemporary approaches to poetry, it seems that more radical uses of the poem could be theorized.

The slow food and slow biking movements offer possible models. By turning away from innovations that increase the speed of production, poets could rediscover valuable skills from older methods. Pace in this slow poetry sense becomes a greater concern. Value could be placed on the withholding of vital details and the slow release of vivid particulars within rhetorical situations driven by a desire to disclose new knowledge. Such disclosures of knowledge, feeling, and perceptions help expand capacities for living in contemporary cultures, empowering potential agents for other forms of disruptive acts. Poetry, if concentrated on plausible conjectures of reality, can help transform other conjectural definitions of it. Poetry can prepare readers for disruptive shocks to systems—"black swan" events—that increase as global open source warfare increases in sophistication.

Systems analysts in other fields are engaged with accurate analyses of global events and their consequences. I’m not sure why poets often turn away from such confrontations with reality. Certainly, our special kind of irrelevance has a value of sorts—in its necessary obscurity, cultural definitions and expressions of value, and so on. As artists, we need to ask more complicated questions and form practices with greater potential for ourselves—if no one else—to prepare for confrontations with global disruptions of communications, distribution systems, and political and social tyrannies.

A Slow Poetry movement (SP for short), would bring focus to immediately accessible regions using technology such as letterpress and Xeroxing to reach local audiences. The computer can be used, of course, to spread words of particular value for addressing the potential capacities of distant readers. But instead of thinking of poetry as an instrument of transformation, we might start by using it as a means of understanding our own capacities of mind and feeling. Instead of forming arguments of resistance, we might consider what is common with ourselves and others in places like Nigeria as we respond, locally, to the ongoing erosion of Constitutional rights. SP contributes to systems disruptions by generating an open source platform for self-reflection in contexts where such meditations are more frequently discouraged. SP perhaps could salvage ancient technes of poetics in order to create imaginative approaches to living locally. While poets in the U. S. for a long time have turned to letterpress, mimeo, and other production sources, these relatively inexpensive printing costs have produced a glut in term of over-production of work with an under-production of relative value. SP embraces greater consideration of the compositional process and the poem’s value to audiences beyond supportive coteries. SP takes seriously the current impact of global financial crises and oil supply shortages and seeks to produce texts that address our predicament as individuals reliant upon diverse systems. SP promotes irrelevance, but in less aggressive ways, perhaps, than others. SP provides a method of observing slower movements of thought and conversation with diverse minds in other fields to help extend reflection on our situation today as global systems come under increasing attack from outside and within.