Occupy: Images Worth 99% of 300 Million's Words

"A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound." - Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

Tuesday, Police assault on Zuccotti Park


Yesterday, Police attack on peaceful students at the University of California, Davis


UC Campus Police pepper-spraying peaceful students

UC Campus Police Pepper-spraying peaceful students

Today, Newt Gingrich: "Go get a job right after you take a bath."


Why are people protesting? Why can't they "get a job," Newtie?

Jesse LaGreca, on This Week, with Christiane Amanpour


In case they still don't get it, some facts:

 

Human Micropoem 2 @ OccupyChicago

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.

A performer at the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago

A performer at the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago

Organizer Jen Karmin, in plum hat and wearing sign

After the Human Micropoem event @ OccupyChicago

A photographer capturing a resistor, with sign, @ OccupyChicago

People before the silent candlelight march began

The first portion of silent marchers

Marchers on Wacker Drive

Marching

Glittering downtown Chicago and the Chicago River

Gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

A veteran

"I KNOW WHO I SERVE"

The candles lined up in tribute, at march's end

Happy Halloween + HUMAN MICROPOEM @ #OccupyChicago

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Be safe and have fun if you trick & treat tonight!

***

(Since Shakespeare didn't create the word and apparently no one else has either*, I am going to: embogment. That is my state these days. In a bog of competing deadlines, responsibilities, layers of materials to read--and thus, the paucity of new blog posts. It's always hard to convey how the quarter system's pace creates ever new layers of tasks more quickly than some of us can tackle them, but so it is. Nevertheless before another week passes, I wanted to post some entries, so here is one, and as I complete the stubs for the prior ones, I'll post those too. - *Of course this word already exists in English, as quick Google search suggests. P. J. O'Rourke of all people has already employed it.)

Yesterday I temporarily broke my weeks-long engagement with (reading and marking up) fiction and joined some local poets who were reading at the Occupy Chicago main site, on the corner of Jackson and LaSalle Streets, across from the Federal Reserve Branch of Chicago. Dubbed The Human Micropoem, after the Human Microphone approach that Occupy Together protesters have adopted across the country, the gathering, organized by Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, drew a decent number of participants, among them the longstanding Occupy Chicago resisters, who for over a month now have been standing their ground, leading rallies and marches, and calling attention to the many gross economic and social disparities that the current Global Economic Depression has only magnified.

The organizers invited readers to bring poems to read--and be human miked aloud--of no longer than 5 minutes.  As with any human microphone, the speaker says a line and everyone who can hear it repeats it, roughly in unison. The call and response choral form has the effect of making the words of any statement linger in the mind, and the effect of hearing so many different types of voices speaking- the musical and rhythmic lines of the poems together, sometimes altering based on what was heard and misheard, was multiply resonant for me, not just aurally but at times emotionally. The repetition gave each line weight, but also made the pieces, no matter whether they were prosy or more conventional in their poetic form, comprehensible, and, as I noted, the amplification and harmonization increased their power.

I arrived a little late. Other local writers, artists and activists present, some of whom may or may not have read, included Jen, Laura, Andrew Cantrell, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, John Wilkinson, Kurt Heintz, Braden Coucher, Eric Elshtain, Barbara Barg, Daniel Borzutzky, Larry Sawyer, Chris Gallinari, and Jen Besemer. I was, I believe, the last to read and did not present one of my poems but instead chose Carl Sandburg's "I Am the People, the Mob," because of its appropriateness on many levels. Interestingly even though I mentioned Sandburg before I began, several people afterwards wanted to know about "my poem," so I directed them to the behemoth Google so that they could find it online. I think it, Sandburg, and all the late, past great poets of labor should be invoked as often as contemporary ones are, as often as possible, particularly during rallies and marches. Their words are important and vital today as when they wrote them, and when channeled through human microphones as Human Micropoems, they recapture, even if for a second, the worldly and otherworldly power that words had for our oral ancestors and still have for our mostly oral peers.


Jen Karmin (in the plum cap and coat) beginning to read, as a participant walks to the poem's music

One of the poets reading

Another poet reading

Some of those present

After the reading, the Occupy Chicago announcements
An important message (even though these days it often seems to be a foregone conclusion, to quote Shakespeare)

Occupy Chicago + Poem: Carl Sandburg

One of the signs from yesterday #occupychicago

I've posted a few times about the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) and other Occupy Financial Districts protests, but I had not been able to get down to the Occupy Chicago gathering until yesterday. (Today participants will join the Mass Mobilization to Take Back Chicago by marching from their main site at Jackson and LaSalle across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Trade to the Art Institute of Chicago at 4:45 pm, where a reception for the Futures Industry Association and the Mortgage Bankers Association will be held.)

For those in Chicago, this is Take Back Chicago week, which will include several events each of the next few days. Today's mobilization:

TAKE BACK OUR JOBS
@4PM: Jobs March
Federal Plaza @ Adams/Dearborn
Daley Plaza @ Washington/Dearborn

On Tuesday, October 11, 2011
TAKE BACK OUR HOMES
@4PM: Homes March
Hyatt Regency @ Wacker/Stetson

On Wednesday, October 12, 2011
TAKE BACK OUR SCHOOLS
@4PM: Schools March
Hilton Chicago @ Balbo/Michigan
Chicago Board of Trade @ Jackson/LaSalle

As I wrote to friends today, when I heard Congressperson Eric Cantor's (R-VA) comments the other day referring to Occupy Wall Street and similar protesters as "mobs," I immediately thought of several poems by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), the great poet of the Midwest, industrial America and labor.  Perhaps the best of these Sandburg poems specifically mentioning "the mob" is "I am the People, the Mob," of one poems I read earlier this year at the Poetry for Labor event I organized down at the Haymarket Memorial Sculpture on May Day.  "I am the People, the Mob" grounds the meaning of the latter term in the historical and material conditions of working people, suggesting that without the labor, the intellects, the bodies of workers, the vaunted corporations-persons would have been and would be nothing. Here is Sandburg's poem (I must remember to bring a copy with me in case I want to read it at an event) in case you don't have it handy:

    I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

    I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
    Do you know that all the great work of the world is
         done through me?
    I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
         world's food and clothes.
    I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
         come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
         then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
    I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
         for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
         I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
         I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
         makes me work and give up what I have. And I
         forget.
    Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
         drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
    When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
         People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
         forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
         a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
         say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
         sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
    The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

Copyright © Carl Sandburg. All rights reserved.

Below are a few photos from yesterday's gathering.  What impressed me was not only the enthusiasm of those present, but of so many people driving, walking and riding--in Chicago's double-decker tour buses--by. Perhaps because the rally was smaller than some prior ones have been, the day of the week and the hour determining attendance, everyone who wanted to could command the microphone for as long as she or he saw fit and speak, and many of those who stepped up did have thoughtful things to offer the crowd. (There was one person who shrieked out a call for violence then fled--agent provocateur, no doubt, for a true anarchist would have been willing to defend his views, no?) I did not attend the General Assembly, which began at 7 pm, but the notes from previous ones are available at the Occupy Chicago website.  I will heading back this upcoming weekend and at any other times that I can.

The Fed Bank of Chicago across from the protest site

Occupy Chicago, beneath Bank of America banners

A photo worth 30 years of bad policies

A speaker (he spoke about corporations' pushing "plastic sh*t" on us)

One of the participants, a musician

Making music as someone else sang-rapped political aims

Participants across from the Chicago Board of Trade & Library

Occupy Chicago particants ("End Corporate Welfare")