Poetry Project Newsletter Editor Kay Gabriel Discusses NYC's Abolition Park and 'the relation between poetry and the street'

Kay Gabriel, in her introduction to the Summer 2020 Poetry Project Newsletter, reflects on four weeks of "uprising, movement and rebellion" across New York City, which, "in addition to several more monumental shifts, [has] revivified once again the question of the relation between poetry and the street, between what’s going on and the forms of thought and language that can make it perceptible in its totality." More, from her Editor's Note: 

I’m patterning this claim on something Fred Moten says, which Zaina Alsous quotes in her interview in this issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter. Moten suggests that poetry and theory are both “forms of description”; Alsous adds that “the point of poetry and theory are to give us new language that intervenes.” If poetry is a form of description, that doesn’t mean it’s anchored to the world as it empirically, miserably exists. I’d extrapolate: a poetry that “intervenes” would have to be one that willfully insists on the necessity of saying something for the first time, in a language that the present may not even be able to recognize.

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