Today, Monday, October 10th, was the first day of my poetry project in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The plan is simple: go to Zuccotti Park, Occupation headquarters, and stand on the park’s periphery (Broadway, south of Liberty Street) alongside other sign holders, displaying my hand-lettered foam board sign that reads “BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF.” Read poetry out loud. Blog about it.

So far, so great. Of course I recognize that today can’t have been typical, given that the weather was so perfect (if you can call weather in the low 80’s in the second week of October “perfect”–I find it depressing if I stop to think). My rationale is as follows: reading poetry on a daily basis at Zuccotti Park will give me a concrete way to support the Occupation without becoming a round-the-clock occupier, something I have neither time nor physical stamina nor the temperament for. I have seen how OWS is making energy by engaging more and more people with the belief that our unfiltered voices can be heard. Since poetry is what I “do,” and since one of the most injurious ways I feel unheard (most of the time) is in my capacity as poet, it seemed to make sense to bring the voices of poetry to the Occupation site, with the same faith that motivates all others who show up: we cannot know which aspect of what we are saying will be heard, but this is a place where the act of voicing is respected as it is not in other (corporate) locations. It is a place where the impact of individual and collective voices is likely to register in unpredictable ways.

Thus, I went to Zuccotti Park with the attitude that my “reading” would be a success simply because it occurred as part of the Occupation, without reference to the usual standards for successful poetry readings, such as numbers of audience members and enthusiasm of (immediate) response. In the back of my mind at all times was the example of my fictional heroine, Paula Schweike, one of the protagonists of my unpublished novel The Company of Cannibals, who attracts a large nucleus of rebels with public performances in which she “sacrifices the word” (by burning pages from her journal). It is Paula’s chief disciple, General Lizz, who offers “because they’re trying to drive our planet off a cliff” as her answer to the question why she is so determined to disrupt the existing social order by any means necessary. (Excerpts on line at http://lodestarquarterly.com/work/390/
 http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Fall05/Clausen.html )

In the event, the experience of reading to a crowd that is going about its business, but whose members are also extraordinarily open to engaging with each other, proved remarkable. After I’d read a couple of poems, a middle-aged West Indian man standing near me with his own sign started asking me what my sign meant and what I thought we should do about it. We talked for a while until I said that I’d better go on reading. Thereafter, my readings were repeatedly punctuated by interactions with photographers (including an art photographer named Victoria who actually moved me to another location so that she could get a better shot of my sign juxtaposed with the cover of the book I was reading from, Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956). While I found it ironic that the visuals I was providing seemed, on the whole, more immediately compelling than my words, I was not in the least daunted and continued to read quietly over the roars of “mic check, mic check,” and the flurry of concern when a young woman was arrested for writing on the sidewalk with chalk. Shortly before I left the scene, a young man with a British accent leaned in close and said, “Read me a good one,” and I gave him a private reading of “The Anxieties of the Regime.” I plan to feature work by Audre Lorde tomorrow, and a different poet every day thereafter, in rotation with some of my own work.

Brecht turned out to be a great choice. I hadn’t read him in many years, and was immediately struck by the direct relevance of his poems, particularly those written in exile. When reading “The Anxieties of the Regime,” I was able to add “at Guantanamo, and Bagram” after the lines, “Why do they fear the open word?//Given the immense powers of the regime/Its camps and torture cellars….” When I read “On the Death of a Fighter for Peace,” which is dedicated to Carl von Ossietzkey, I was stopped by a young visitor from Germany, who (in impeccable English), told me he knew the poem and explained exactly who von Ossietzkey was.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could turn the financial district into a permanent poetry reading? I believe the Occupation is important because of its potential to mobilize dissent from the rush towards the brink of that nearby cliff. But on a personal level, I am also moved to participate because I believe that Occupy Wall Street has the potential to be about more than the economic or even the environmental impact of “Wall Street greed” and ubiquitous oligarchy–central though these are. It offers a space for all of us who are heartsick that the regime of capital is depriving us of our last opportunities to contribute to our society freely, creatively, in ways WE define. The present regime says that our contributions are unwanted and meaningless unless they can make a profit for someone (usually a large corporation). In education, we see this in the drive towards privatization and the explosion of investment in technology for the classroom while teachers are being laid off. In medicine, we see it in the transformation of hospitals into major businesses and in the devastating impact of insurance requirements on the ability of doctors and nurses to devote themselves to care for the sick. In the book world, we see it in the fact that the first thing an editor now asks about a manuscript is not whether it’s original, well written, or thematically compelling, but what “platform” the author can point to that will guarantee a large sale. Everyone understands that it’s horrific to be without an income or health insurance. It’s harder to articulate the deadly impact–for teachers, for writers, for artists, for healers, for farmers, for community organizers–of being forced to trim one’s creative capabilities to the narrow requirements of corporate service delivery and mass entertainment. While we keep pressing our demands for economic justice, we need to keep refining our expressions of the demand for our life-sustaining work to be valued in some way other than by market success.