Friday, June 17, 2005

Nolo Lingua on Craft

My in-house postmodernist virtual poet would like to speak:
Craft is an 18th century term that began its slow death with the contagion called the industrial revolution. In our 21st century McWorld, there is no longer such a thing except in boutiques and garage workshops. In a world of mass images there’s only marketing. It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s how you sell it. And how proliferate you can make it.

Poets don’t write poems in this world. They create representations of words into icons of books, organize themselves into communities of marketing teams, and sell their likenesses to that coveted 18-25 age demographic. There aren’t any poets any longer; there’s only the images of poets and the logos of their work. Poetry is dead. Long live the poets!

~Nolo Lingua 2005

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who said that? Who's Nolo Lingua?

I would say that craft and poetry are thriving, just less conspicuously than McWorld.

Anonymous said...

I forgot, you come in many guises, Mr. Lingua.

Unknown said...

Blogs are craft, so are podcasts, mashups, free open-source software projects, good restaurant cooking, farmers' markets, independent musicians, and many other things. McWorld may be the Big Spike, but craft is the Long Tail. What is gone, perhaps, is craft as an easy and common ticket to lucrative full-time employment.