Poetry Anthology 1.0 (Occupy Wall Street) available for download.

Anna Akhmatova

I spent some time with Stephen J. Boyer this afternoon. He'd slept maybe three hours since his--all of Occupy Wall Street's--eviction from Zucotti Park, but being young and glowing with fires of sane righteousness, was still working on the Poetry Anthology.

The Anthology was stored in organizing white binders, by week and month. Poets from around New York, the country, the world contributed. That the Anthology would be digitized seemed a lazy inevitability last Sunday night when Occupy Language held its weekly meeting. When Bloomberg and Kelly ordered their henchmen and henchladies to pepper-spray and sometimes beat, to, at the very least, evict, without warning, protesters at Zucotti, when the Occupy Wall Street Library was nearly destroyed and cartons of books thrown in Dumpsters, the digitization became a necessity. Like, now.

And Stephen, who I caught up with at a friend's apartment, wouldn't sleep until he'd put it online. My hungry ego wants you to know that I cut and pasted the poems into a document (yes, I did a Control-A, Control-C, Control-P--I'm fairly amazing), and suggested a way to create a pdf. I didn't live at Zucotti, didn't night and day build a library like Sean, Stephen, others.The Poetry Anthology was not my idea.

Here's the first version of the Poetry Anthology. Consider this Anthology 1.0. There are many more poems waiting, and many more will be sent in. In the meantime here it is. If the great library of Alexandria had been digitized,well, there'd be less mystery, less a sense of loss. The Poetry Anthology from the Occupy Wall Street Library is being digitized.

Hoorah.