WILL ROWE ON POETRY AND TRUTH

[Thanks to LR for alerting me to the availability of this video.]  

Provisional notes from Will Rowe on truth and poetry in a revolutionary epoch, posted 1 November 2013 at Militant Poetics:

   1. The truth of poetry seizes history at the same point as Benjamin’s angel, at the abyss between the pain and suffering of the oppressed and the classless society that’s possible.
   2. Poetry translates the Real into an absolute language, which is not natural language. The gap between poetry and natural language is insurrection, the ‘waves of fire’ invoked by Rimbaud after the defeat of the Paris Commune, absolute negativity.
   3. ‘The True is [ . . . ] the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk’ (Hegel).
   4. The truth of poetry has passed through death, the second death: the symbolic, not the physiological one.
   5. It will break down the walls of literature as it currently exists, and will seize hold of the means of production of sense and place it at the disposal of the proletariat to come.