How low can you go?

In high school English class I thought I understood poetry: cleverly hiding what you really mean.
Now, instead, what I want is art that that offers meaning with blunt clarity.
What changed was my understanding of metaphor.
Without any metaphor we have just the facts of the world, which are as blunt as you can get. But on their own these everyday facts just stream by without giving us pause. The performance at PNCA by Stan’s Cafe takes the most boring kinds of facts, population statistics, and makes people notice and care.
They pull this off using the simplest devices; open-ended combinations of facts, and rice. This performance is a successful experiment in pushing the level of metaphor as low as it can go. The result is a point where ordinary life and metaphor are at their most potent.
posted by Publicwondering