2019 has been a year of reckoning—from inquiries in D.C., to staggering statistics on the effects of climate change. Our wealth of data and far-reaching media platforms allow us to list facts and share images in real-time.
In an increasingly codified world, the effects of our words and actions are often presented to us rapidly, perhaps even intrusively. How can the poet compete with the rapid-fire sign and signifier—the canned experience, the summary, the streaming footage?
In, And: Phenomenology of the End, Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes, “. . . poetry is precisely the excessiveness beyond the limits of language, which are the limits of the world.” As we enter a new year, with promises of further digital abstraction, let us look to the poetry that continues to push boundaries—that places us beyond the evidential to the sensorial—the beginning and the end of our human experience.
- C.M.