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E-book Incomparable Poetry : An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and Irish Literature
What is it like to write poetry right now at this moment in world history? What is it unlike? Or, to avoid comparisons at all, what is poetry now? Fascists and an “alt-right” search for platforms, opposed but not often enough; global warming renders laugh-able our comfortable and anachronistic sense of cyclical change; secular stagnation mocks the entire program of austerity; a frantic media, its profitability untenable, devours and annotates every tweet it can. We could compare the moment to anything from the discount bin of history — why not, right? — whether it be China in the seventh century CE or the eleventh century BCE. A common touchstone for Europe or the northwest is the 1930s in the same region. It was a decade haunted by an economic crisis, a period of decline. Culture is an uncapturable swarm of what living people really do, say, sing, paint, photograph, and write, but our inability to delineate it in total does not lessen the imperative to ask what happens when our nebulous and uneven cultural moment is compared with a sense of doom and panic inscribed into other eras, or brought into contrast with other times and ideas. We need to pay attention to the ways in which those transpositions might in their inadequate commensura-tions be an impediment to grasping what is at hand, while they nonetheless jolt us into describing how those comparisons fail, and thereby perhaps become reotroactively justified.
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