"The [French poetry] we read as new today looks more like the European poetry of 100 years ago than that of either 150 or 50 years ago, a fact based in a revitalized sense of poetry’s potential political role, or at least its obligation to try for one. While honoring Mallarmé’s dictum to give 'a purer meaning to the language of the tribe,' it more closely parallels a cultural project that began a little later, in the work of the early avant-garde writers at the turn of the previous century who used poetry and performance to register social resistance and to demand a different relationship between art and daily life." Cole Swensen • Aufgabe

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