#social commentaries

[alphabetsoup-blogposts]

Attack by Siegfried Sassoon | Poetry Foundation

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, 

They leave their trenches, going over the top, 

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, 

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, 

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

[normaltd]

You Who Wronged by Czeslaw Milosz | Poetry Foundation

You who wronged a simple man

[protoslacker]

Bullet Points by Jericho Brown | Poetry Foundation

I will not shoot myself

Jericho Brown

I do nothing. And I know that Twitter and the social media I visit and engage in isn’t real-life, only a slice of it. But it guts me to see little Black children protesting because it’s so clear that they know they are endangered. The point is to be uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that I join in the movement for life against death.

[warriormale]

Character of the Happy Warrior by William Wordsworth

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he

Read this poem written by Wordsworth.

The essence of Manliness in poetry.

WarriorMale

[lionofchaeronea]

Mother to Son by Langston Hughes

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Happy birthday, Langston Hughes (Feb. 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967).

[thoughtportal]

What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away

Rather than establishing a set of rigorous habits, we may need to rethink our approach to life in general.

Odell elegantly aligns the crisis in our natural world and the crisis in our minds: what has happened to the natural world is happening to us, she contends, and it’s happening on the same soon-to-be-irreparable scale. She sees “little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought”; both are endangered by “the logic of capitalist productivity.” She believes that, by constantly disclosing our needs and desires to tech companies that sift through our selfhood in search of profit opportunities, we are neglecting, even losing, our mysterious, murky depths—the parts of us that don’t serve an ulterior purpose but exist merely to exist. The “best, most alive parts” of ourselves are being “paved over by a ruthless logic of use.”

Odell brings up a famous redwood in Oakland called Old Survivor, which is estimated to be almost five hundred years old. Unlike all the other trees of its kind in the area, it was never cut down, because it was runty and twisted and situated on a rocky slope; it appeared unprofitable to loggers. The tree, she writes, is an image of “resistance-in-place,” of something that has escaped capitalist appropriation. As Odell sees it, the only way forward is to be like Old Survivor. We have to be able to do nothing—to merely bear witness, to stay in place, to create shelter for one another—to endure.

Legislators might succeed in granting citizens more control over the data that they generate by using the Internet, but social-media companies will, presumably, continue to treat their users like little countries that can be strip-mined to make other people rich.

These days, and in no small part because of the atomization engendered by social media, it can feel that every last thing has been privatized and individualized.

Odell, who uses Twitter, and believes that “total renunciation” of such a culturally central medium would be, for her, both a moral and a pragmatic mistake, recognizes that this is a time “when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing.”

More and more of us cannot afford to step away. Practicing digital minimalism may be akin to getting a personal trainer or developing a Transcendental Meditation practice—a rarefied form of self-improvement.

he hours per day that I had spent converting my experience into something of professional and financial value were now empty, and I was cognizant of how little time I had spent caring for the people and things around me. I began thinking about my selfhood as a meadow of wildflowers that had been paved over by the Internet. I started frantically buying houseplants.

It occurred to me that two of the most straightforwardly beloved digital technologies—podcasts and group texts—push against the attention economy’s worst characteristics. Podcasts often demand sustained listening, across hours and weeks, to a few human voices. Group texts are effectively the last noncommercialized social spaces on many millennials’ phones.

[rainynightdream]

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

It is funny how some specific poems keep coming back into our lives...

[marimuntanya]

Women by May Swenson | Poetry Foundation

Women Or they

Women by May Swenson (visual poem)