Twentieth Century Pleasures
HDV, 11:02

“Poems quoted in Robert Hass's essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures are read alongside his commentary on them, to men and women who suffer varying degrees of mental disability. The piece investigates the space between the two extremes of intellectual capacity, becoming a meditation on the exacting demands of high culture. By emphasizing the distance between audience and material, the intellectual becomes the true center of the piece’s critical interests. The work takes a surprising turn with the intervention of Vahid, a man with a developmental disability who overtakes the reading and launches into his own free-associative torrent of language. This forceful and unexpected poetic intervention opens the possibility of abridging the gap through creative responses that are not bound by academic reverence.” — Julio Chavezmontes