Abstract

Placed in the context of ongoing moral disaster, Finding Places to Make Places is a discussion of language and poetic usefulness, specifically how collective discourse survives the unimaginable through personal recourse. It examines the ideology of cultural superiority and intellectual migration in public squares and private homes. With skepticism and love, this poetry and poetics attempts to explain the failure and potential at the heart of revolutions: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a communal existence across time. It is meant to speak, with many voices, beyond these known failures and into our many futures. It is a defense of the art of poetry as a means to evoke the necessary accommodations human beings can make to survive what is unsurvivable. The organizing principle for the poetries has been divvied into a curious binary that works to mirror both the similarities and differences in the concepts of each section. These political and/or personal poems demonstrate the culture-bound logistics and flourishings and shortcomings of certain poetic voices during the Cuban Revolution of 1953-59, the Cultural Revolution in China of 1966-79, the Civil War of Lebanon of 1975-90 and the Arab Spring in the MENA region of 2010-11, as well as ongoing revolutions in the lands currently known as the United States and Canada. The poems center around healing these wounded places in the often more ambitiously universal interiors of the psyche.