In Prophetic Voice Now: Crafting Space for Visionary Thinking and Practice, Rich Murphy dives deeply into a robust analysis of the state of poetry, the arts by implication, and culture in the United States. Moreover, he calls for prophetic voices to propose a new narrative for stabilizing global culture and explores how poetry, as well as the arts and humanities generally, might craft a narrative that will lead us from the current brink and navigate the interrelated transitions of the Anthropocene, post-industrial Capitalism, and post-humanism. Murphy draws on a wealth of writers and thinkers such as, Northrop Frye, John Ashbery, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ted Kooser, Jorie Graham, Arthur Vogelsang, Jacques Derrida, Yuval Noah Harari, Slavoj Zizek, Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Spender, Paul Valery, Giorgio Agamben, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, Bob Perelman, Hugh Kenner, William Empson, Allen Ginsberg, The Frankfurt School voices, in addition to modern and postmodern poets to develop nuanced poetico-philosophical meditations. Through a careful and inventive analysis of current norms and assumptions about education, the individual, creativity, voice, and space, Murphy develops a compelling prescription for the vital and necessary expression of visionary thinking and practice now.
