{"id":7238,"date":"2011-11-14T06:49:35","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T10:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7238"},"modified":"2011-11-13T18:55:19","modified_gmt":"2011-11-13T22:55:19","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-time-to-occupy-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/it%e2%80%99s-time-to-occupy-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time to Occupy Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

This, on SUNDAY, NOV 13, 2011 12:00 PM EST, in Salon Magazine. You can read the full article here<\/a>. Opening paras, below:<\/p>\n

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Merry pranksters call the Poetry Foundation elitist and beholden to Prozac cash. Are they right, or just annoying?<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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BY\u00a0JEREMY AXELROD<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"occupy<\/p>\n

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\u00a0(Credit: YouTube)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

TOPICS:<\/strong>POETRY<\/a>,\u00a0OCCUPY WALL STREET<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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One evening this fall, two young activists walked through the bright, modern library of the new Poetry Foundation headquarters and marched up to the glass balcony. Some 30 attendees had gathered that evening in Chicago to hear a free poetry reading, and now many turned to view long, hand-painted banners unfurling from the second floor. With solemn fanfare, the two men, members of a small rebel alliance called the Croatoan Poetic Cell, had launched their latest defense of poetry \u2014 shortly before someone at the foundation called the police.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat would have happened,\u201d asked one banner, \u201cif Emily Dickinson had been prescribed Prozac?\u201d Idle speculation aside \u2014 one pictures long, glazed-over afternoons spent knitting frocks in New England \u2014 the protesters were implying that Prozac stymies creativity, and that the Poetry Foundation, lavishly funded by a pharmaceutical fortune, does business with the kind of people who might, given the chance, have put Dickinson on antidepressants.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The story of how a nonprofit literary foundation became a stage for anti-Prozac agitation begins in 2003. That year, Ruth Lilly, the heiress of the pharmaceutical family, gave a fairy-godmotherish gift of $200 million to the Poetry Foundation. In the cash-poor world of poetry, it was like dropping a quivering church mouse into a gourmet cheese emporium. Since then, the foundation has built a sleek new headquarters in Chicago\u2019s West Loop, which boasts a gorgeous library, a public garden, an auditorium and the offices of Poetry, the foundation\u2019s storied magazine.<\/p>\n

To the CPC, the foundation has also settled comfortably into its new role as an oppressor of the masses: a monied bastion of \u201cstate-corporate control,\u201d according to their leaflets. They believe the foundation now wields the anti-creative influence of its financial overlords.<\/p>\n

As the Occupy movement nears its third month, the CPC \u2014 though not strictly an Occupy offshoot \u2014 is among the many groups decrying arts institutions as clubhouses of the 1 percent. In October, New York protesters occupied Sotheby\u2019s, MoMA and the Artists Space gallery in SoHo. \u201cWe, the artists of the 99% have emerged!\u201d one protester\u00a0wrote.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cNot as pawns in your fraudulent art market where the royalty of Wall Street rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This, on SUNDAY, NOV 13, 2011 12:00 PM EST, in Salon Magazine. You can read the full article here. Opening paras, below: Merry pranksters call the Poetry Foundation elitist and beholden to Prozac cash....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7238"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7246,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7238\/revisions\/7246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}