Poetry is not Luxury

watch https://youtu.be/cxGxtEyMp4U

Respond to each of the following prompts by (1) copying a passage from “Poetry is not a Luxury” (2) highlighting or bolding key terms/ terms that stand out to you, and (3) responding to that passage. The passage should be 1-4 sentences and your response to EACH prompt should be a paragraph.

Prompt:

Passage:

“Through narrative the souvenir substitutes a context of perpetual consumption for its context of origin. It represents not the lived experience of its maker but the “secondhand” experience of its possessor/ owner. Like the collection, it always displays the romance of contraband, for its scandal is its removal from its “natural” location. Yet it is only by means of its material relation to that location that it acquires its value. In this is the tradition of “first-day covers” for stamps and the disappointment we feel in receiving a postcard from the sender’s home rather than from the depicted sight. The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia. The souvenir generates a narrative which reaches only “behind,” spiraling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward the future.”(Stewart 249).

Response:

Highlighted phrases are the writer’s “key words and phrases,” some of which I don’t understand—what’s a “material relation”? I believe that a souvenir’s “context of origin” is the place where you picked it up. This might be saying that souvenir is not the “real” experience of being there, but it’s the “secondhand” experience, and I get that it is tied to a place (“location”). So a souvenir from a baseball game is connected to the team and so then the field.

What does “material relation” to the field mean? What about “speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing”?

Why would a souvenir talk to the place it comes from would be a literal translation; why is the souvenir connected so deeply to that place?

Reassembled: a souvenir talks about (to?) where it comes from by using words that show it’s wanted?