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Speaking in Poetic Tongues: A Salute to Women Activist Poets from Womawords Literary Press

Courtesy of Levi Guzman, Unsplash

“The heart of a women is like an  ocean, thus she must be proffered a free platform to express concerns, to speak rights, to voice against wrongs, to sing experiences and more.” Mbizo Chirasha

Originally published in Cultural Weekly, this is Mbizo Chirasha’s acknowledgement of some of the activist poets featured by Womawords Literary Press, which is dedicated to giving space to the voices of women and girls. I am touched to be counted among them and to be included in Mbizo’s feature here. Womawords Literary Press is also the co-host of The BeZine‘s International Poetry Month April 2020 series of daily poetic offerings in celebration of the month beginning on April 1.  / J.D.

Speaking in poetic tongues is an homage to the evangelists of resistance and poetic prophetesses. The women poet wordslingers wielding their pen weaponry to unchain the world from the pressing yoke of stereotypes and the hard granite rock sufferance perpetuated by unrepentant moral morons.

as we stand the ground of one another’s battles
where peace would be evolutionary and
the unholy alliance of wealth and fear-mongering
might burn itself out, find its way into justice,
but here we are, once again, in thrall to the
sociopaths, they have us bloodied and bound ~
their eyes are the aged face of clockwork orange,
numb to the obscenities of maim and murder …

© Jamie Dedes

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The griot in JAMIE DEDES is dared–daring. The tone as accompanied with the hard- rock verbiage is sarcastic but riotous. Racists are jabbed by defiant swords of satire. Poetry Spaces are poetry washed into oxy-moronic fields of peace. Corrupt landlords, warlords and tyrants are roasted by flames of metaphor. Dedes irony exorcise political demons and rattles the grip of economic dare-devils. Jamie Dedes is a Lebanese-American writer and activist. In another lifetime, she was a columnist, a publicist, and an associate editor to a regional employment publication. She’s had to reinvent herself to accommodate chronic and catastrophic illness, which has her home-bound, often bed-bound. The gift in this is time for literature, her primary passion, and social justice advocacy, her primary mission.

America is a blessing; it is blessed with the gift of word evangelist. It is the land of abundant literary arts culture talent. TRACY YVONNE BREAZILE‘s double edged razor sharp cutting poesy scythes against weeds of earthly stereotypes of political barbarism. Unsparingly ,the razor sharp tip of her poetic machete slice through Africa in quest for the freedom of her earth mates “Zimbabweans,” writhing under the heavy yoke of unbridled corruption as they suffocate from toxic, choking and command politics.

I gather my confusion and stutter my truths,
As you unleash your lightning bolt into the thicket,
Crashing into the night with a raging fire,
I dance with the embers ‘till morning light,
While you devise an avalanche to extinguish the fire,
You dropped your mask and it tumbled to the ground,
In the dust of the avalanche, beneath the rubble of your pedestal,
I will leave you there to mind your mazes,

© Tracy Yvonne Breazile

TRACY YVONNE BREAZILE is a Mentor in Residence of the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign Projects–Brave Voices Poetry Journal, Word Guerrillas Café and WOMAWORDS Literary Press.

I hear the poetic giggles echoing from beyond century hills reverberating foothills of Kirinyaga Mountains. Nancy Ndeke is an African prophetess, her to poetic tongues echo the foothills of Kirinyaga mountain, her writings are pregnant with African emotion and spiritual resonance. She writes of her kindred, WOMEN with a bold spirit and an aura of sisterly stubbornness. Her pen jives on page leaves like a rock rabbit dancing to earthly acoustics of wind, tree branches and discordant village songs. Ndeke’s poetry is the tenor of deep but soft flowing river, the rhythm abound is undeniably scintillating. You need a calabash of fresh spring water to wash down the poetry dinner of realism, metaphor and satire.

……………Is less of the individual, and
More of the community, meeting as equals,
At the intersection of connectedness
The hubris,
That rules empires with iron tanks and nuclear weapons
The feel good notion,
That sets colors apart in racism,
Are months that blow evil dust on the arena of life’s rainbow
There is no joy whatsoever
In fear, in anger
With greed, with bigotry,
Peace flees,

© Nancy Ndeke

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NANCY NDEKE is a Poet of international acclaim. Her writings and poetry are featured in several collections, anthologies and publications around the globe including the American magazine Wild Fire, Save Africa Anthology, world Federation of Poets in MEXICO.

 

 

The Armenian spirit HOKIS returns the echo with indomitable metaphoric incantations. Here poetry walks confidently in the spirit land. Hokis is the Founder and Senior Editor of Headline Poetry and Art Magazine. She believes in supporting a range of voices at various stages of their craft for this is the most impactful design of grassroots revolutions. She envisions Headline as a platform that exemplifies the beliefs that all poetry is political and reflection is essential to effectively reshape conversations and culture—for writers and readers alike.

the let loose moments
of garbled wrappers and stenched bottles
drizzled over our bedside table
like syrup on empty caloried
memories.

© Hokis

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Again, We walk through the holy sands of Cape Verde to harvest voices of souls dead and walking. GLORIA SOPHIA is a deep, versatile and powerful Cape Verde-an poet with three published books and some more contributions in a number of anthologies. The poet is a creative began. She cultivates her creativity with determination and the required zeal. It is very critical to give poets, like Sofia creative spaces suitable platforms for purposes of growing them into literary stardom.

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Sun explodes in the sky
Burning the moon
Destroying the eternal blue
Germinates in my womb
Star packed with music It hurts everything
Swollen mother
Wrapped stomach
Blushing breasts
My undulating body

© Gloria Sophia

Nordic Europe have its on share of poetic prophets. Wisdom is not sold but served in cafes, restaurants, galleries and bookshops. DOLORES MEDEN is a versatile and a genius poet who mastered the power of art and the versatility that is found languages. She writes her poetry and translates them herself. She infuses her writings with visual artist’s drawings to bring about to the reader historical references of art, humanity and just life. ALLUSION is one great element of literature and most reader respect reference, history and currency

To read is resistance
to stupidity
to ignorance
to the unhealthy
relationships
you once
escaped from.

© Dolores Menden

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Meden was born in Sweden by Croatian parents and have lived there all her life. A graduate of Bachelor of Arts in History of Religion. She also studied some languages, mostly Slovene and Chinese.

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The sun rises from the East and its rays bathe the world. The earth becomes beautiful and creative abundance is gathered to heal the world. MIROSLAVA PANAYOTIVA is one great poet of national and international repute in Bulgaria .Her themes are diverse from nature to confessional poetry, her style unique and her diction versatile. Her verses carry scintillating rhythm.

In the grass of the night,
in the sleeping mystery,
in the expiring pencil
to the blue notebook,
I outline the sunset

© Miroslava Panyotova

MIROSLAVA PANAYOTOVA graduated from the Plovdiv University majoring in Bulgarian philology. Her whole lot of poems, stories, tales, aphorisms, essays, criticisms, translations, articles and interviews in periodicals and collections.

© 2020, introductory text, Mbizo Chirasha; poets poems and photographs are under their own copyright.

Womawords Literary Press is a complex of efforts, the heart-child initiated and curated by Zimbabwean poet activist in exile Mbizo Chirasha (Mbizo, The Black Poet).  You can read an interview of Mbizo on Womawords and the opportunities offered there to women HERE.

Jamie Dedes:

Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic expression, and human rights.

Poetry rocks the world!

FEEL THE BERN

For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice

The Poet by Day officially endorses Bernie Sanders for President.

The New New Deal

“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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Poet Susannah Hart Selected UK’s Prestigious National Poetry Competition Winner

1935. Children playing cards in front yard in slum area near Union Station. Photographer: Carl Mydans / courtesy of the NY Public Library

“‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy was a poem that slowly got under our skin and into the bloodstream. It takes on big subjects, cunningly manipulating the impersonal and toneless phrasing of bureaucracy as the poem’s speaker tries to come to terms with evil. This daring poem, literally breath-taking in its execution, is in the form of a single sentence – so perfectly engineered the reader barely notices it. But nonetheless we feel the powerful effect, as it keeps our attention pinned to the poem’s terrible reality without release.” Maurice Riordan

Susannah Hart has been chosen as the winner of the prestigious National Poetry Competition, with her poem Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy.

Judges Mona Arshi, Helen Mort and Maurice Riordan selected the winning poem from 16,659 poems entered into the competition from 6,979 poets in 87 countries, including entries from every EU member state. All of the poems were read anonymously by the judges.

Told in a single long sentence that intensifies the momentum and the sense of building desperation, Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy uses the dispassionate language of bureaucracy and policy to counterbalance the cruelty and descriptions of acts of violence in the poem.

Judge Maurice Riordan said of the poem: “Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy was a poem that slowly got under our skin and into the bloodstream. It takes on big subjects, cunningly manipulating the impersonal and toneless phrasing of bureaucracy as the poem’s speaker tries to come to terms with evil. This daring poem, literally breath-taking in its execution, is in the form of a single sentence – so perfectly engineered the reader barely notices it. But nonetheless we feel the powerful effect, as it keeps our attention pinned to the poem’s terrible reality without release.”

Susannah Hart’s win follows on from her acclaimed debut collection, Out of True, which won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018. Susannah’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London.

Susannah said of the win: “It’s a mixture of disbelief and delight. I’m genuinely astonished that I’ve won. I enter the competition almost every year and have been longlisted a couple of times, but you never enter expecting to actually win. I feel very honoured to join the list of winners. For personal reasons, it’s also great to have this particular poem recognised. I’ve been a primary school governor for many years and I think this is the only poem that has arisen directly from that experience, so it feels very special to have that part of my life acknowledged. I remember telling my governor colleagues that I had written a poem about the Safeguarding policy and I think they thought I was joking.”

About the poem, Susannah said: “The poem’s original draft came quite quickly. I did in fact go for a walk after reading the policy, feeling very upset by what it contained – what it needed to contain – and I found myself thinking about ‘all the horrible things that someone somewhere is always doing to someone else’. And then when I looked at the draft of the poem I realised I could make more of the bureaucratic language that was already in there, so I looked again at the wording of the policy and lifted some more phrases from it.”

Since it began in 1978 the National Poetry Competition has been an important milestone in the careers of many of today’s leading poets, with previous winners including Helen Dunmore, Ruth Padel, Philip Gross, Carol Ann Duffy, Jo Shapcott and Tony Harrison.

Internationally praised and recognised, the National Poetry Competition continues to see an increase in entries year-on- year (2019 saw an 18 per cent increase in poems and a 17 per cent increase in entrants compared with 2018). Awarding a total of £9,400 prize money annually, the competition recognises individual poems previously unpublished, in an anonymised judging process. The judges only discover the identity of the winner after making their final decision.

Nine other winners were also named in the National Poetry Competition, including Ann Pelletier-Topping for her poem Granddaughter Moves In (Second Prize, £2,000), Natalie Linh Bolderston for Middle Name with Diacritics (Third Prize, £1,000) and seven commended poets (£200 each): Joe Dunthorne for Due to a series of ill judgements on my part; Charlotte Knight for MOONDADDY; Mark Pajak for Reset; Rosie Shepperd for Letter from Kermanshah; Louisa Adjoa Parker for Kindness; Cheryl Moskowitz for Hotel Grief; and Gerald Smith for Where Dedushka Comes From. All the winning poems will be published on The Poetry Society’s website. The top three poems are also published in the Spring 2020 issue of the leading poetry magazine, The Poetry Review.

First Prize for Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy

SUSANNA HART‘s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. She has won several prizes for her work and her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018. Susannah is on the board of Magma. She works as a freelance copywriter and is a long-serving governor at her local primary school. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.

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Poetry by Susannah Hart:

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS FOR YOU:

The next National Poetry Competition opens in May. Entry forms will be available online HERE. The closing date is 31st October 2020.

Jamie Dedes:

Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic expression, and human rights.

Poetry rocks the world!

FEEL THE BERN

For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice

The Poet by Day officially endorses Bernie Sanders for President.

The New New Deal

“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton