While doing research for my “Recombinatory Poem for Bushwick” stencil project, I came across a variety of webpages and sites discussing and displaying graffiti art, and observed some interesting rhetorical tendencies.  Several guides to stenciling and painting, such as this one, offer an editorial stance on the raison d’etre behind painting in the first place, and this is often pseudo-politically / economically motivated.  I quote “Idiot the Wise:”

Authentic Human communication is constantly drowned beneath the deafening racket of an inhumane and insane multinational corporate system. This system dominates our collective reality.

This is a pretty pervasive sentiment among more intellectually-inclined writers (to use the vernacular), as it orbits around the idea that graffiti art gives a voice to the voiceless and is a subversive means of signification, and perhaps gives significance to those who perceive themselves to be insignificant.  The jury’s still out on whether or not this idea has any grounding or merit.

Comprehensive Graffiti Glossary

“Recombinatory Poem for Bushwick” is a series of four stencils that I have tagged around Bushwick that are each a line from a poem, and can be read in any order by the day-to-day resident, worker or flâneur.  The poem reads, in one of 16 possible forms:

Our hearts lie
Where streets beat
Like broken drums
Our lies repeat

A Google-Maps-is-the-best shows the positions of the four lines.