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but before i do that, i am interested in hearing more about your thoughts regarding “acts of poetry” and “acts of power”, if you get the chance. do you think that it is necessary that power and poetry are contradictory categories? i guess i’m asking this because i’m thinking about history, archival knowledge, and mythologies (cultural, national, gender and otherwise) and how poetry and literature are often their condition of possibility in constructing a coherent discourse.

‘poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge’ – aime cesaire

but i’m also thinking about how that quote might also apply to scientific discourses being understood as a consensus of shared vocabulary and a controlled environment, and how poetry can contribute to our political imagination as an inventive language that investigates symbolism, singularity and the errancy of categories.

“Are there circumstances where we can justly occupy a position of intransigence?”

Certainly. Not all things can be resolved simply, but presenting one’s position reasonably, without dismissiveness or arrogance, will create a healthier exchange, which will open (or fail to close) the possibility of resolution.

“Is grace or compassion the only poetic challenge we can face against despicable acts of ‘power’?”

The use of the word “poetic” here seems multiplicitous. Taken literally, I do not believe poetry can combat power. Perhaps once it could have, but I simply don’t feel that it is relevant, anymore. Figuratively, if poetry is the opposite of rhetoric, as Lorde suggests, then public discourse itself has the potential to be acts of poetry (compassionate, yet not divisive, as with Dove) instead of acts of power. Here, I think there is a chance I am contradicting myself, and there is no better time to contradict oneself than when discussing poetry because it’s a fine transition to quoting Whitman from “Song of Myself” (http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html):

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Of course, this is a can of worms. One could read this as intransigence – “I will not budge, despite my lack of reason.” This would reveal an irrational position, a divisive one in a sense. One could also read it as the opposite, as the rough synthesis of two positions (the statement, the contradiction, and the acknowledgment of the disunity between the two) Never mind.

“Is consensus the only way to ‘move forward’?”

I can’t imagine what “move forward” means, but I think striving for a reasonable dialogue is different from striving for consensus. Consensus is nice, but it is a dream. Perhaps Democracy is its contemporary (though not perpetual) waking-life equivalent, at least in the context to which the blog is addressed – political discourse.

One last note: the name of this blog is “Graystate” – this is chosen deliberately because it’s not blue, not red, and not purple. Gray is not a blending of two opposites, but a third position that comes from observing and opposing the two. In the metaphor, I am not suggesting that I have the solution, the synthesis of competing theses/anitheses, nor am I suggesting that the matter is simply black and white (which is good because “white state” or “black state” or “black and white states” would have been comically racially suggestive. This would certainly have increased my hits from white supremacists – haha. They’re dumb – note the intransigence in that statement, and in fact the divisiveness and arrogance, which is apt for my supposed audience, though it would certainly be a turn-off to some readers who might happen by). At best, this blog asks, what happens when blue and red make gray? I don’t know, and there is not a definite aim here. I don’t think I dream of “a better democracy” or a replacement of democracy, and this meager blog certainly wouldn’t have any impact on either of those goals. It must be, then, just an exercise, a passing of time by chewing on culture, perhaps with some vague hope that someday I’ll think of something useful to do with it (note the multiplicitous/ambiguous pronoun use).

Touch base.

so, because of that, i’m not sure what your post is trying to communicate. are you saying that patient translation of difference, compassionate negotiation of otherness, allows for a more productive or just relation of exchange? i’m not sure if i dispute that. but then i wonder, also, if you’re then advocating or reinforcing a sort of meritocratic fiction of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that seem to mask a relation of force, a disparity of power and real operations that uphold and privilege certain discourses over others? are there circumstances where we can justly occupy a position of intransigence? is grace or compassion the only poetic challenge we can face against despicable acts of “power”? is consensus the only way to “move forward”?