A Manifesto of Questions
Who owns rural america?
Who does not own rural america?
Where is rural america? What is rural america?
Is rural america at the edge of some center of america? If so, where is the center?
Are there multiple centers? Are there multiple edges?
What happens at the center that does not happen at the edges?
What happens at the edges that does not happen at the center?
What is gained when someone moves something from the edges into the center? What is lost?
What is lost when someone moves something from the center to the edges? What is gained?
More
Who does not own rural america?
Where is rural america? What is rural america?
Is rural america at the edge of some center of america? If so, where is the center?
Are there multiple centers? Are there multiple edges?
What happens at the center that does not happen at the edges?
What happens at the edges that does not happen at the center?
What is gained when someone moves something from the edges into the center? What is lost?
What is lost when someone moves something from the center to the edges? What is gained?
More
Bell Hooks
“Returning to the Kentucky landscape of my childhood and most importantly to the hills, I am able to reclaim a sublime understanding that living in harmony with the earth renews the spirit. Coming home to live in Kentucky was for me a journey back to a place where I felt I belonged. But it was also returning to a place that I felt needed me and my resources, a place where I as a citizen could be in community with other folk seeking to revive and renew our local environ-ment, seeking to have fidelity to a place. Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence.”
Bell Hooks, Belonging, 2009
Bell Hooks, Belonging, 2009
Why we stay with poetry
...despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies: despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another—from forest to city, from story to computer—at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open and we sail them for everyone.
Édouard Glissant from Poetics of Relation
Édouard Glissant from Poetics of Relation
Off The Bus
How many cultures choose their griots
their shamans, their poets
by putting them off the bus?
Frank X Walker from Black Box
their shamans, their poets
by putting them off the bus?
Frank X Walker from Black Box
Landscape
Vanderbilt Avenue, just south of the southeast corner of Vanderbilt and Lafayette.
Brooklyn, New York
Brooklyn, New York