a poetry only the enemy could understand

“A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means. […]
The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t. But then again, you are right to worry that I’m making a fetish of the riot form.“Non-violence is key to my moral views”, you say. “I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill”, you say. […] The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime. But then again, I can only say that because there haven’t been any damn riots. Seriously, if we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere. Think about this.The city gets hotter and deeper as the pressure soars.”

~ Sean Bonney, from ‘LETTER ON RIOTS AND DOUBT, Friday, August 05, 2011’, in All This Burning Earth, 2016