[New-Poetry] CD Wright's body count

[TheOldMole]

Wright’s emphasis on bearing witness, on counting and recounting 
victims, and calling the powerful to account, makes up one crucial 
aspect of her project, and calls to mind the work of 20th-century 
activist poets like Kenneth Fearing, Langston Hughes 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/langston_hughes/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
and Muriel Rukeyser. But the fragmentary forms and skittering attention 
of her poems suggest that 21st-century activist poetry may face some 
novel challenges, since it is obliged not only to bear witness to 
obvious evils but also to elucidate more subtle, tangled and disguised 
patterns of injustice. Wright’s new poems take up a wide variety of 
thorny issues — the war in Iraq, the post-Katrina debacle in New 
Orleans, illegal immigration, the human consequences of global 
capitalism — but Wright understands it won’t suffice merely to tote up 
the soldiers wounded, levees breached, Mexicans arrested and jobs lost. 
She also has to consider the interdependent systems that rely on and 
engender those phenomena, the buried roots from which those statistics stem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Brouwer-t.html?8bu&emc=bua2

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford