American Jahiliyya
It is a shame poetry has passed out of fashion. Our relationship with art has become so direct, pixel to dopamine, that the layers of human emotion between creator and consumer disappear. Yet poetry was the original TikTok: short enough to enjoy and ignore, but capable of compressing an entire perception into a few words. Language is our oldest compression algorithm, and I appreciate anyone who applies it earnestly.
Today, poetry is perceived as belonging to the erudite, a reputation that keeps it outside the popular realm. Dune: Exposures offers a neat rebuttal. Josh Brolin acted a poet to become one, writing about his coworkers, mornings in the desert, and illusion nested inside reality inside illusion. Greig Fraser’s photographs provide the visible world, but Brolin’s words restore the experience of perceiving it.
Of course Wadi Rum is plainly a place to write poetry. Still, landscape alone does not produce sincerity, and Brolin deserves credit for risking it. Everybody has an inner poet. I learned something and enjoyed something by finding his.