New Year's Resolution 2004: more focus

Resolved: To keep this blog on topic, i.e., "literature & politics." By "politics" I mean the power dynamics in a society, whether the actors are classes, races, genders or clans, even when these forces don't consciously organize themselves as parties. Mainly what interests me is the politics assumed by or implied by poetry and fiction, and the poets and narrators who most interest me are those who are aware of those implications.

So I'm going to try to refrain from sounding off about politics without literature, or literature without mentioning its politics. And that's why for now I'm replacing my old slogan (which was an inversion of a passage from Marx) with these famous verses, from William Carlos Williams:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

For a longer excerpt from the poem, see Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

P.S.: For those of you who read Spanish, acabo de reorganizar la Pequeña Biblioteca Comentada, y de agregarle otra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa.