Spectacle, Presence and Poetry

August 19, 2026 Winter 2026

Week One

This spring was my second opportunity to be the assistant teacher for Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s Spectacle, Presence, and Poetry workshop. We had a wonderful class exploring contemporary manifestations of what French theorist Guy Debord termed “the spectacle” — the system of symbolic representation under capitalism — and reading and writing poetic forms that struggle against the spectacle and towards a revolutionary vision.

As part of our writing practice, we collated notes, reflections, and bits of language we encountered in daily life into one anonymous, living document we called our “collective consciousness.” I got permission from participants to pull a few excerpts from this document to give you a window into what we were reading and thinking about each week.

Week Two

After intros in our first session, we moved swiftly ahead to Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, and some poems Gabrielle chose to accompany it. Here are some snippets from our discussion and reflection that made their way into our collective document:

I wonder what Guy Debord’s instagram would have looked like?

If I were to use AI (which I do my best to avoid), I would ask it to create a Guy Debord duck face selfie. Everytime I get back on instagram I am left with…..

A greater feeling of illiteracy

Writing in the Marxist lineage, Debord describes a society where authentic relations are replaced by alienated labor and images which disguise the emptiness of public life. His work feels oddly contemporary today as we contend with tech monopolies producing products like Instagram and generative AI — I liked the way this participant put each of these elements in conversation.

Another snippet I loved:

Getting tired of reading and writing, only the thing is the real thing. How do I get as close to the real thing as possible if I work with words? Lol. Everything I’m reading and everyone I’m talking to these days seems to be on the same wave, so we’re all going somewhere and things are changing. Everyone understands that “nothing is like jail,” etc. etc. Need to stop worrying about if I’m writing these right and just write what’s on my mind.

This writing references Taylor Johnson’s poem “Similes,” which, as the quotation suggests, asserts that “nothing is like jail.” We read this as an example of anti-spectacular poetry, or poetry that offers a rehabilitated relationship to language and image. I like that this writer is surrounded by people who are thinking similarly.

Week Three

This week we focused on journaling and the epistolary (letter-writing) form, treating both as vehicles for increased presence in our personal and relational lives. We read work by Sean Bonney, Diane DiPrima, and George Jackson. Here’s one student’s lovely bit of writing that references Bonney:

& what if there were song birds on every corner

& the world opened up like an egg for us

to watch as its contents crawl to the sean

spectacle for your hearts

I liked the concept, implicit here, of reclaiming spectacle from the ruling class by taking lavish, disruptive action.

Week Four

In our fourth week, we read and wrote about archival sourcing and how it can influence form, leading poems to take on the qualities of quilts, puzzles, choruses, and other networks. We read texts with found language by Quenton Baker, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and M. NourbeSe Philip, as well as a lecture by Robin Coste Lewis on erasure poetry.

One student dropped this list, excerpted from/inspired by Ceballos, into the document:

banana

banana

banana

banana

banana

banana

Hlava Ceballos’s banana [ ]  features a long poem whose lines look mostly as above, but with one modifying word and a footnote for each identifying the text Hlava Ceballos used to source this instance of the word “banana,” his citations as diverse as CIA documents, recipe blogs, and plant health brochures. This addition to our collective consciousness made me think about the often hypnotic nature of erasure poetry, and how it stands on its own as a body but also unfurls towards deeper meaning, like a peeling banana.

After our fourth week, we spent our final session sharing work inspired to various degrees by our time together and the authors cited above. Thanks for following along!