As the Police Move in, so Does Poetry

The poet Sparrow, who ran for President
as a revolutionary communist
within the Republican Party

When I met with Stephen (see previous post), he streamed a video of the eviction from Zucotti Park. Yes, there were  policemen and women, there were batons at rest before the cops started moving in. There was the gloomy, cold night, odd city lights, confusion, taunts. And there was poetry.

Whatever was happening as part of the melee, Stephen J. Boyer was reading from the Poetry Anthology. The cops were standing at attention and Stephen was reading from the Poetry Anthology. The cops were rousting and Stephen was reading from the Poetry Anthology.

Among the poems he read, Stephen told me, were some by Sparrow, who, as I recall, stormed The New Yorker years ago, no small feat. So of course Stephen said "Sparrow" more than once. Later--the next day--I'm not sure, the police were calling him Sparrow. Not mocking. Identifying the poetry purveyor and acknowledging the flame of art burns a hell of a lot brighter than the quick, bitter triumph of violence.

Once policeman told Stephen he'd liked hearing the poetry read.  I'll try to get Stephen to post the video. I'm writing now so I don't forget. A major aim of Occupy Language is use poetry to disseminate ideas and also to disseminate poetry.  This here seems like a good enough example.

Maybe you'll come up with another way to disseminate.

Here's a terrific profile of Sparrow by Chris Dodge. In Utne. 

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.