DECADE 2001-2011

INTRODUCTION

Hi I finally got around to posting this, it’s been hanging around for a while. I hope you’ll forgive my errors, any feedback will be well received.

So friends…which events seem important to you? Which would you choose to define any given period of time? How do you make sense of them, what conditions nurtured them, which human interventions and which natural disasters led to the events you pick?

If we are to make sense and meaning of history, and sanity–a risky endeavour in these times of global Internet but one which any poet worth the name might pursue–then a ‘poem including history‘ of the last decade seems a good place to start to me. (after writing this introduction I learned that Mark Zukenburg and facebook plan to release a ‘timeline’ application that allows for a similar chronological study of events. However History also moves in cycles, and non-chronological spirals, it is of my opinion.

The launch of Wikipedia in February of 2001 has impacted this writing a great deal due to the simple list of some events deemed worthy of inclusion by the Wikipedia commons group, that are made available for all to see and make sense of at your own risk. The risk seems to me to be somewhat reduced when attention is paid to the subjective nature of perception, and to methods such as ‘operational language used by some-but-not-all scientists and ‘E-prime’ and its variants, used by some-but-not-all linguists.

When put Into chronological order it becomes increasingly difficult for me to avoid drawing conclusions based on the ordering, one thing leads to another, or so it seems to a linear oriented mind set. The question remains: which ‘events’ should become pivotal ones and which shall be relegated to the footnotes or relegated all together? How did the author or protagonist come to choose such events based on which values and principle, what ordering system, what right knowledge? How many are justified by later events and how many need revision, considering, let’s say; the Wikileaks exposures of the period 2007-2010, or the News Corp. phone hacking racket?

Silent But Dudley: Black Country Blues

by Mr Steven James Pratt

Link: http://a.co/7KhqHcL

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