"check Science: whose interest does it serve?"
Revolutionary Letter #63 by Diane di Prima
As an impulsive book-buyer, I’ve been growing my poetry collection recently. I never got it as a student, potentially because my high school teacher insisted that all poems had “homoerotic undertones” which my uncracked egg of a brain couldn’t quite fathom. But, I recently started to enjoy giving into the rhythm and emotional range of poetry.
One day at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, I picked up Diane di Prima’s “The Poetry Deal” published 3 years after her tenure as San Francisco’s poet laureate. Given the bookstore’s history in the Beat Movement, I took my usual approach to approaching a new genre: peruse the shelves for a female poet. When reading “The Poetry Deal,” I became so enthralled by the works from her Revolutionary Letters series that I bought the collection during my next visit.
The central question of whose interest science serves, posed by di Prima in “Revolutionary Letter #63”, resonated as an emergent theme in the few months I’ve worked on QSL. I thought I’d share the poem with you as well as reshare some relevant pieces to spark further thought on this theme.
Revolutionary Letter #63
check Science: whose interest does it serve? whose need to perpetrate mechanical dead (exploitable universe) instead of living cosmos?whose dream those hierarchies: planets & stars blindly obeying fixed laws, as they desire us, too, to stay in place whose interest to postulate man’s recent blind “descent” from “unthinking” animals our pitiable geocentric isolation: lone voice in the starswhat point in this cosmology but to drain hope of contact or change oppressing us w/ “reason”
this is gorgeous... omfg