The
Human Micropoets met up again, this past Friday, on
Veterans Day, for another round of
HUMAN MICROPOEM public poetry recitation, in support of the
Occupy Chicago and
Occupy Together movements. This time the organizers aimed to convene performers during rush hour, in part to reach the large number of workers finishing their day near and those commuting past the base site. The crowd was, unsurprisingly, larger, and as before, passersby did stop and listen, watch, and sometimes participate in the "mic checking" collaborative poetry recitations. I read/recited
Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," which sounds quite different in call-and-response, choral fashion. "What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?" What did we know, what did we know, of the bravery and resolve of hundreds of thousands of Americans and people all over the globe, to stand up to the economic, political and social thuggery to which we've been subjected for decades?
Afterwards, a number of the participants marched with the Occupy Chicagoans on a silent vigil to the
Vietnam Veteran Memorial Site, on Wacker Drive, to show respect for and pay tribute to all US veterans being honored on Friday. The walk, with candles, to the site, was moving, and afterwards I chatted a bit with poet
Dan Godston, before heading off to catch up with a friend who was visiting town. I look forward to more such gatherings, and to poetry's and the arts' active interconnection with these incredibly important and vital nodes of resistance to the dominant ideology of today, which has caused and continues to wreak so much destruction in this country and across the globe.
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A performer at the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago |
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A performer at the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago |
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Organizer Jen Karmin, in plum hat and wearing sign |
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After the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago |
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A photographer capturing a resistor, with sign, @ OccupyChicago |
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People before the silent candlelight march began |
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The first portion of silent marchers |
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Marchers on Wacker Drive |
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Marching |
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Glittering downtown Chicago and the Chicago River |
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Gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial |
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A veteran |
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"I KNOW WHO I SERVE" |
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The candles lined up in tribute, at march's end |
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