It felt strange to read Audre Lorde’s words to the Lower Manhattan crowd today. For some reason, the sign holders along Broadway were overwhelmingly male, as well as predictably pale, and because I always read with the fantasy that my voice is being heard (even when it probably isn’t, at least not in any sustained way), I felt an insecurity akin to what I used to feel in the classroom when I imagined that students weren’t in sympathy with some text that I wanted them to embrace, or at least seriously engage with. Yesterday, when I was reading Brecht, it felt as though the distance between the situation out of which the poems were written and the situation highlighted by Occupy Wall Street was largely formal: obviously, that guy was German and this crowd was American; the enemy in his poems was the Führer and the Reich and in ours it’s the corporations. But it was so easy to extrapolate from then to now! Who would be such a dolt as not to grasp the analogy between the “fearful” regime he describes and the one we inhabit?’

Today, I heard everything with a double consciousness: on the one hand, I felt incredibly vulnerable, above all because of the insistence on female experience, and authority, in Audre’s poems. (The contrast was heightened because almost everything in Brecht is about men, with “he” unashamedly the default pronoun.) Somehow, I figured that a lot of today’s audience wouldn’t even be able to get past gender to wonder what race had to do with anything. And yet every bit of work I read today was, if anything, even more relevant to our situation than my sampler from Brecht. At one point, the cops were doing their daily thing of trying to push us back to the very edge of the sidewalk, and someone started a picket line as a way to claim the space; I marched around in a small oval holding the book in front of me and reading “Power” as loudly as I could (“The difference between poetry and rhetoric/is being/ready to kill/yourself/ instead of your children”). The poem, one of the most searing and miraculous that Audre ever published, is about racist police violence. Of course I read “A Litany for Survival,” and “Between Ourselves” (“if we do not stop killing/the other/in ourselves/the self that we hate/in others/soon we shall all lie/in the same direction….”) and “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches.”

Finally, I read the entire text of the essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” long portions of which seemed directly addressed to the throngs of bedraggled occupiers just waking up on their bedrolls in Zuccotti Park behind me: “Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened….We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality.” [Headline yesterday in the Metro, a free New York City newspaper: “Sex, Drugs, and Occupy.”]….For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”

When I took a break to survey the scene, a young sign holder warned me not to trust a loud guy who was wandering around with an accordion under his arm, and appeared to be a plant. “For one thing he says he has a fulltime job but he’s here all day every day. And then he keeps asking where he can get some weed.” A tall man with elaborate face tattoos, an attention-getting costume I didn’t observe closely enough to describe, and a sign about somebody called Bobby Steele was getting a lot of attention. (Maybe it WAS Bobby Steele, who apparently is a punk rock musician, according to Wikipedia.) Off in the distance, a serious-looking crew held a large banner about solidarity with Occupy Boston (over 100 of whose members were arrested in a police clampdown overnight) and next to them, yet another white guy was holding a sign reading “Ronald Reagan Sucked Balls.” I thought of giving him a piece of my mind but reminded myself I didn’t need to take responsibility for the whole messy shebang. Instead, I said hello to a dark-skinned man who was holding a sign about Teamster solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, identified myself as a UAW member, and eventually went to look for the labor solidarity table. Then I picked my way through the almost surreally overcrowded park and exited behind forty or fifty people who were listening to an impassioned speech about World Government (whether for or against wasn’t immediately clear). Heading in the direction of Century 21 to buy an umbrella–it is supposed to rain tomorrow–I was further depressed by the spectacle of a huge reflective ziggurat that is being constructed just to the west…can it be the vaunted Freedom Tower, or is it some other downtown excrescence? I counted six construction cranes canted at vertiginous angles, a monument to Yankee ingenuity and all the hardened verticality billions can buy.

Zuccotti Park, which I understand we are now supposed to call Liberty Park (the renaming registers with me more as rhetoric than poetry) is, unsurprisingly, a bubbling microcosm of much that stands in the way of the 99% taking any degree of real power away from the 1%. It is also a matrix of possibility. I arrived home to see notices of plans for an afternoon march in support of OWS by a group called 99 New York. The plan was to visit the Fifth Avenue homes of several wealthy overlords, starting with Rupert Murdoch and David Koch. An e-mail invited me to an outreach meeting to plan how labor and other groups can bring the OWS message to their various communities and constituencies. Oh ye of little faith!