The Form Our Curiosity Takes: A Pedagogy of Conversations

CS: The political is inherent in every choice we make every day, even the small ones. To choose to be a writer, particularly of poetry, is a political act in the sense that it is to choose to make a particular kind of cultural investment and an investment in language that is fundamentally different from that that most people are making. This investment recognizes language as one of the principal determining elements of our lives; to choose to write is to choose to engage directly with that.

Language is the base material of the polis; therefore, to act upon it is to act politically.

To speak more specifically about my own approach, I look at history as a political construction and a site of political potential. Through historical parallels, I think it’s possible to present both the horror and the grandeur of the human project (it’s not just about we who are living today—it’s about all of history; there’s no such thing as the past; it’s all still with us). We have inherited all prior conflicts and still need to resolve them. Our present moment rightly puts an emphasis on forms of non-human life and their potential futures, and the terrible degree to which we now control them.

The political can never be separated from the social, nor, as is increasingly generally recognized, from the environmental and the commercial. In Such Rich Hour I hoped, through echoes and refractions, to point to choices that we’re making today that went equally badly 17