Most Revolutionary - Part Three - Heart - Prefatory

A Nature Shape Poem & Liberatory Criticism

• MOST REVOLUTIONARY — A SERIALIZED NOVEL

During a killer Iowa blizzard, fearless DAPL militant and radical plant nursery grower Sabia Perez first saves then kidnaps the stranded President of the USA to ransom a better world.

Where do birds sleep at night?

I never do see sleeping birds
the littlest ones especially.

If I were a bird I would be afraid
to fall.

I would never know where
to sleep
where the wind would not catch me
and spill me out
feathers pointing the wrong way.

Perhaps I would recover mid tumble
just in time
to fly into the ground
or the side of a house.

Then again I might crash into a mouse.

Wouldn’t that be fun
if we both survived
dazed and lumpy side by side
and no hawk nor owl?

We might make friends
that mouse and I.

I would have to learn the mouse tongue
or maybe that mouse and I
we would run away and hide
until it felt safe
to wing back up
to fly.

NOTES ON LIBERATORY LITERATURE

Audre Lorde – Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, “Why don’t they?” And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.

V.F. Calverton – The Liberation of American Literature

...except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics…. The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary [critic]. ...literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. ...most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.... In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

Arundhati Roy – “Come September”

The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as nonfiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once wrote: “Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.” There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a story-teller who wants to share her way of seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories; it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a State or a country, a corporation or an institution – or even an individual, a spouse, a friend, a sibling – regardless of ideology, results in excesses such as the ones I will recount here.

W.E.B. DuBois – African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)

…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

Kenneth Burke – “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism”

...the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon “pure” art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. ...much of the so-called “pure” art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the “century of progress,” and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the “priestly” function was carried on by the “secular” poets, often avowedly agnostic.

Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that “pure” art or “acquiescent” art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of “toleration.” Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to “tolerate” it.... Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the “pure” or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened “intellectual,” is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously.

Ursula K. Le Guin – “Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters”

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. … And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.