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The BeZine, 15 July 2015, Vol. 1, Issue 9, Table of Contents with links … Theme: Imagination and The Critical Spirit

15 July 2015

The inspiration for this month’s theme is a quotation we think is Oscar Wilde’s.  That hasn’t been confirmed to everyone’s satisfaction, but it did grab our interest generating a bit of Facebook discussion and a few flying emails.

“The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”
Oscar Wilde

Three of our stars – Priscilla Galasso, Liliana Negoi and Corina Ravenscraft – have explored the theme in their essays.  They have a few thin threads in common but they each also have a unique view.  Read and join the conversation.  Does imagination imitate and critical spirit create?  If so, why and how?  If not ??? … Share your thoughts in the comments section below each essay.

We are thigh-deep in 100,000 Poets (and writers, artists, photographers, musicians and friends) for Change [100TPC]. In this issue we feature Michael Dickel’s article and photographs, Salerno, il mio amore about the first world conference on the future of 100TPC, which was held in Salerno, Italy just this past June.  Michael, an American-Israeli  Reform Jew, has organized two 100TPC events in Israel and is working on one scheduled for October this year.  Michael is also the lead person on The BeZine for our virtual event this September, which involves reader participation.

Not all of us are professional photographers but thanks to our smart phones many of us have become avocational photographers and will appreciate Seattle-based Rev. Terri Stewart’s thoughts in her two-part feature, Sacred Space and Photography.

Our poetry collection this month includes Algerian poet and Renaissance woman Imen Benyoub’s Elements, which will charm you and you might be surprised by some of the elements she includes.  You’ll be made to think, chuckle wryly and sigh as you read Michael Dickel’s My Free Poetry Book (a poem). Joe Hesch and Lily Negoi delight as always with their singular work. (Lily’s work, by the way, can be read in her native Romanian as well as in English at curcubee în alb şi negru.)And hang onto your seats for a good laugh with Naomi Shihab Nye’s When Did You Stop Being a Poet (One Boy Told Me).

Los Angeles-based Simone Frame MA CCC-SLP, RP is a new guest writer here with her feature Clarity Is Just Above Your Problems. Simone is the founder of Healing Life Insights. Welcome, Simone!

Opsimaths, Polymaths and Poets is an update including poems on Second Light Network of Women Poets (UK based but not restricted to the UK) and on ARTEMISpoetry.  Second Light partnered with The BeZine for interNational Poetry Month in April.  Three poems are included in the feature and – as I often say – the network is for women but the poetry is for everyone.

Liliana Negoi’s The Closer God and Naomi Baltuck’s The Seed of Creativity will do your hearts good.

Enjoy the reading, learning and inspiration, be the peace, and visit us again. Please support our efforts with your comments and “likes.” You and your ideals and ideas are valued.

On behalf of Beguine Again and The Bardo Group and in the spirit of peace and community,
Jamie Dedes

TABLE OF CONTENTS WITH LINKS

Special Feature:
The First World Conference on the Future of 100TPC

Salerno, il mio amore, Michael Dickel

THEME:

IMAGINATION and THE CRITICAL SPIRIT

Tomb of Oscar Wilde designed by Sir Jacob Epstein
Tomb of Oscar Wilde designed by Sir Jacob Epstein

The tomb of Oscar Wilde in Division 89 of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. 

“The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”
Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde and “The Critical Spirit”, Priscilla Galasso
God Particles, Liliana Negoi
What if?, Corina Ravenscraft

Photostory

The Seeds of Creativity, Naomi Baltuck

GENERAL INTEREST

Sacred Space and Photography

Sacred Space and Photography: Light, Terri Stewart
Sacred Space and Photography: Shadow, Terri Stewart

Poetry

Elements, Imen Benyoub
The Taste of Baklava, Jamie Dedes
The Transformation of Things, Jamie Dedes
My Free Poetry Book (a poem), Michael Dickel
Dust to Dust, Joseph Hesch
bladed, Liliana Negoi
When Did You Stop Being a Poet, Naomi Shihab Nye

Feature Articles/Essays

Opsimaths, Polymaths and Poets, Jamie Dedes
Clarity Is Just Above Your Problems, Simone Frame
The Closer God, Liliana Negoi

BIOS WITH LINKS TO OTHER WORKS BY OUR CORE TEAM AND GUEST WRITERS

FOR UPDATES AND INSPIRATION “LIKE” OUR FACEBOOK PAGE, THE BARDO GROUP/BEGUINE AGAIN

MISSION STATEMENT

Back Issues Archive
October/November 2014, First Issue
December 2014, Preparation
January 2015, The Divine Feminine
February 2015, Abundance/Lack of Abundance
March 2015, Renewal
April 2015, interNational Poetry Month
May 2015, Storytelling
June 2015, Diversity

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Roses and Homilies

file000592821988after Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

January is on the wane
leaving behind early dark and champagne hopes
for the genus Rosa. Wild or tame, they’re lovely.

Garden roses need pruning, solicitous cultivation ~
Layer shorter under taller, drape on trellises
and over pergolas, the promise of color and fragrance,
climbers retelling their stories in ballet up stone walls,
an heirloom lace of tea roses, a voluptuous panorama
rhymed with shrubs and rock roses in poetic repetition.
Feminine pulchritude: their majesties in royal reds
or sometimes subdued in pink or purple gentility,
a cadmium-yellow civil sensibility, their haute couture.

Is it the thorned rose we love or the way it mirrors us
in our own beauty and flaw and our flow into decrepitude?
They remind of our mortality with blooms, ebbs, and bows
to fate, a noble death to rise again in season, after Lazarus.
Divinely fulsome, the genus Rosa, sun-lighted, reflexed ~
And January? January is ever on the wane.

© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Photo courtesy of morgueFile

Portrait by Fray Miguel de Herrera (1700-1789)
Portrait by Fray Miguel de Herrera (1700-1789)

The work that was the jumping off point for my poem is a poem by the Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1551-1695), who lived during the time when what is now Mexico was a part of the Spanish empire. Sor Juana was an ambitious writer, self-taught, and a Baroque poet. She belonged to the Order of St. Jerome. I am enamored of her work and find her life interesting. She was brilliant, independent and nonconforming.

Sort Juana was hungry for learning and was self-educated. From childhood, she set her own demanding educational goals. Unfortunately, the parochial male authority could not put the power of her mind together with her femininity. She suffered for that.

These three famous quotes of hers are telling:

“I don’t study to know more, but to ignore less.”

“One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”

“…for there seemed to be no cause for a head to be adorned with hair and naked of learning…”

For those who might be interested, here is her poem Rosa in Spanish and in English:

Rosa divina que en gentil cultura
eres, con tu fragrante sutileza,
magisterio purpureo en la belleza,
enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.
Amago de la humana arquitectura,
ejemplo de la vana gentileza,
en cuyo ser unió naturaleza
la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.
¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,
soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas,
y luego desmayada y encogida
de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,
con que con docta muerte y necia vida,
viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!

Rose, heaven’s flower versed in grace,
from your subtle censers you dispense
on beauty, scarlet homilies,
snowy lessons in loveliness.
Frail emblem of our human framing,
prophetess of cultivation’s ruin,
in whose chambers nature beds
the cradle’s joys in sepulchral gloom.
So haughty in your youth, presumptuous bloom,
so archly death’s approaches you disdained.
Yet even as blossoms soon fade and fray
to the tattered copes of our noon’s collapse –
so through life’s low masquerades and death’s high craft,
your living veils all your dying unmasks.

– Juana Inés de la Cruz

Illustration and poem in the public domain. Source of translation unknown.

this post is excerpted from the June issue of

THE BeZine

do visit and explore the work of some gifted people

the theme this month is diversity/inclusion

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The BeZine, June 2015, Vol. 1, Issue 8, Table of Contents with Links

June 15, 2015

 DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

The evolution will be poemed, painted, photographed, documented, blogged, set to music and told in story.

The evolution will be delivered by a rainbow of human beings, everyday sort of folk ….  

The evolution will not be televised.

There are people for whom the arts exists almost exclusively as an aid to social change, to political discourse– not as some sort of didacticism – but as a discussion, a wake up call, a way of approaching some truth, finding some meaning, encouraging resolution. Many of us here number among them. All of us hope for kind, just and rational social change.

We write and dream about an inclusive appreciation of diversity that will promote a world without war, a world that respects all sentient life, all humans no matter their race or national origin, religion or lack thereof, economic or social status, mental or physical disability, age or sex, or sexual preference or gender orientation. We dream of a humanity that recognizes itself as an element of the natural environment not something apart from and over it.

We may be inspired by personal experience like Colin Stewart – our youngest ever contributor – who bravely articulates his experience of being bullied and marginalized in school in No Child Is Safe. Michael Watson, a therapist, a Native American shaman and a polio victim brings us  Still Here: Meditations on Disabilism and Lara/Trace Writes About Residential Schools, those schools established ” to save the person by removing the Indian.”

For some people the impetus is the direct experience of war, which is the ultimate expression of hate and exclusion. Silva Merjanian gifts us with an essay this month, As with any war …  Silva grew up in a war-torn Beirut. And, new to us is Michael Dickel, an American-Israeli who offers three poems from his new book War Surrounds Us.

Priscilla Galasso, whose appreciation for nature has birthed so many wonderful essays here, askes us to consider the diversity in nature, worthy of nurture and celebration not for ourselves but for its very isness in her essay Diversity and Car(ry)ing Capacity — Spiritual Lessons from Nature. 

The love of our children is a sure motivation to write about and work for respect and inclusion. We see this in Naomi Baltuck’s touching Mine (yours, ours), the second of our two lead features.

The muse is inspired by empathy and ideals, observation and proximity. Terri Stewart gives us one of our lead pieces this month, a moving poem, Created to Be Included. Sharon Frye shows a tender understanding of a Vietnamese refugee in her poem At Model Nails. This is the first time Sharon’s work is included here, but her poetry has found a home in many other publications including The Galway Review, The Portuguese journal, “O Equador das Coisas,” Mad Swirl, and The Blue Max Review (Ireland).

Sometimes the lives and work of  people who lived at other times and/or other places resonates for us. Roses and Their Homilies is an homage to Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the stellar poet of 17th Century New Spain. The clerical authority of her day simply could not put  her intellect together with her womanhood. Tragically for her and for us, this caused her to give up her writing five years before her death.

Each month the core team picks a theme.  We don’t dictate the slant.  We give everyone free rein. It’s always a surprise to see how the theme is addressed, who will hammer the theme dead on and who will address it obliquely. This month, when all the work was read, sorted and organized, most of us chose to “celebrate” diversity by illustrating just how slow and insufficient are the reforms and just how resistant humanity can be to inclusion. There is some deeply passionate work here.

I can’t help but think that the justice so many of us seek is rooted in transforming values. Hence, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Perhaps it is most evident in our blogosphere and social networking, in the heart-born prose and poems of simple folk like you and me with nary a politician or corporatist among us.

Perhaps the true evolution – the one that will foster permanent transformation – is a bottom-up thing, more likely to be blogged than broadcast, rising from homespun poetry and outsider art – sometimes rudimentary and awkward, but always quiet and true and slow like a secret whispered from one person to the next. It is something stewing even as we write, paint, make music, read and encourage one another. There is bone and muscle in what we do. Individually we have small “audiences.” Collectively we speak to enormous and geographically diverse populations.

I think I hear keyboards clicking and bare feet marching. Or perhaps poetic fancy has caught my spirit tonight and all is dream …I hope not. Write on … Read on … and be the peace …

So let some impact from my words echo resonance 
lend impulse to the bright looming dawn

Dennis Brutus (1924-2009), South African poet, journalist, activist and educator

In the spirit of peace, love and community,
Jamie Dedes

TABLE OF CONTENTS WITH LINKS

Diversity/Inclusion

Lead Features

Created To Be Included, Terri Stewart
Mine (yours, ours), Naomi Baltuck

LGBT

Darkness,  Colin Jon david Stewart
No Child Is Safe, Terri Stewart and Colin Jon david Stewart

Nature

Diversity and Car(ry)ing Capacity, Priscilla Galasso
Putting the “Action” in Activism, Corina Ravenscraft
The Clearest Way to the Universe, James Cowles

Native American

Lara/Trace Writes About Residential Schools, Michael Watson

Disabled

Still Here: Writing Against Disablism, Michael Watson

Refugee

At Model Nails, Sharon Frye

War/Conflict

Again, Michael Dickel
Musical Meditations, Michael Dickel
The Roses, Michael Dickel
As with any war …, Silva Merjanian
Borrowed Sugar, Silva Merjanian

Women

Roses and Their Homilies, Jamie Dedes

General Interest

Essay

British Bulldogs, Great Speeches … and poetry, John Anstie

Poetry

Rooftop Icarus, Joeseph Hesch
Prelude, Voice Aquiver, Sharon Frye
Growth Ring, Sharon Frye
Time Lapse, Liliana Negoi
for us, Liliana Negoi
dancing toward infinity, Jamie Dedes

Photo Stories

An Open Book, Naomi Baltuck
If Not for His Wife, Naomi Baltuck

OUR FABULOUS HEADER PHOTOGRAPH THIS MONTH IS THE WORK OF TERRI STEWART UNDER CC (BY-NC) LICENSE.

BIOS WITH LINKS TO OTHER WORKS BY OUR CORE TEAM AND GUEST WRITERS

FOR UPDATES AND INSPIRATION “LIKE” OUR FACEBOOK PAGE, THE BARDO GROUP/BEGUINE AGAIN

MISSION STATEMENT

Back Issues Archive
October/November 2014, First Issue
December 2014, Preparation
January 2015, The Divine Feminine
February 2015, Abundance/Lack of Abundance
March 2015, Renewal
April 2015, interNational Poetry Month
May 2015, Storytelling

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We are celebrating diversity … and inclusion …

AT THE BeZINE OUR THEME FOR JUNE IS DIVERSITY and we are celebrating – we are celebrating diversity in all its manifestations: sexual/gender orientation, race, religion, culture, national origin … even nature. What we are truly celebrating is respect – as inclusion – as a big step toward peace, understanding, justice … even environmental stewardship. The June issue of The BeZine is in process and will publish on June 15th. Please join us then. It’s an exciting issue. You won’t be disappointed. Meanwhile, we bring you this feature from the U.S. Library of Congress. 

Warmly,
Jamie

Originally published on The Bardo Group/Beguine Again blog, June 13, 2015.

This flag celebrates LGBT pride. Photo courtesy of Ludovic Bertron under CC BY 2.0 license.
This flag celebrates LGBT pride. Photo courtesy of Ludovic Bertron under CC BY 2.0 license.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. The Stonewall riots were a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBT Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

In 1994, a coalition of education-based organizations in the United States designated October as LGBT History Month. In 1995, a resolution passed by the General Assembly of the National Education Association included LGBT History Month within a list of commemorative months.

LGBT History Month  is also celebrated with annual month-long observances of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history, along with the history of the gay rights and related civil rights movements. National Coming Out Day (October 11), as well as the first “March on Washington” in 1979, are commemorated in the LGBT community during LGBT History Month.

.
Executive and Legislative Documents
The Law Library of Congress has compiled guides to commemorative observations, including a comprehensive inventory of the Public Laws, Presidential Proclamations and congressional resolutions related to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month Pride.

– The United States Library of Congress