Behind the scenes at The BeZine we’re working to pull together the wealth of insight and artistry shared for 100,000 Poets (and friends) for Change into a commemorative page, the content of which will also be archived at Stanford University, Stanford, California. Thank you to all who contributed, read, commented, shared links and supported this worthwhile effort at The BeZine blog as a virtual event or in one of some 500 cities around the world.
While the big event is over for this year, the goals are ongoing as this video indicates. The work for Peace, Sustainability and Social Justice is a never-ending journey. So the question each one of us asks ourselves is what next? What action can I take? What small part of the big project can I take on? It is, after all, up to each of us to “be the change.”
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Hand of Fire, Hand of Creation by Moshe Dekel (age 5)
Reblogged from: The BeZine blog, 26 September 2015. This is our mission for our 100TPC event, which is still open to submission from you. Much appreciation to Michael Dickel for this and for MCing the day …
Welcome to the 5th year of 100,000 Poets (Musicians, Artists, Mimes…) for Change, and the 2015 edition of The BeZine Online 100TPC Event!If you’ve done this before and you know the score, skip to the comments or Mister Linky at the bottom of the post and begin. If you are wondering, hey, what are you folks up to then check out some serious non-fiction here:
Our mission here today as poets, writers, artists, photographers, musicians and friends is a sort-of fission for change—a burning with and expression of the desire for peace, environmental and economic sustainability, social justice, inclusion, equity and opportunity for all. We seek through our art to do a bit of old-fashioned consciousness raising, to stimulate thought and action leading to the kind of change that is sustainable, compassionate and just, and to engage in the important theme of the issues facing humanity today—but all with a goal to alleviate suffering and foster peace. We don’t want to just “talk about it,” we want words, art and music that help us take action in some way for positive change wherever we are in our lives, in our world.
We see a complex inter-woven relationship between peace, sustainability, and social justice. We all recognize that when people are marginalized and disenfranchised, when they are effectively barred from opportunities for education and viable employment, when they can’t feed themselves or their families or are used as slave labor, there will inevitably be a backlash, and we’re seeing that now in violent conflicts, wars and dislocation. Climatologists have also linked climate change, with its severe weather changes and recent droughts, to the rise violence in the world, and even contributing to inequities in areas – like Syria – where a severe drought destabilized food production and the economy, contributing to the unrest that led to the civil war, according to one study.
Jerusalem in an unprecedented dust storm that engulfed much of the Mideast, linked by one climate scientist to the Syrian civil war and ISIS conflict
There are too many people living on the streets and in refugee camps, too many whose lives are at subsistence level, too many children who die before the age of five (as many as four a minute dying from hunger, according to one reliable study—more info), too many youth walking through life with no education, no jobs and no hope. It can’t end well…
Syrian refugee camp photo: The Telegraph
More than anything, our mission is a call to action, a call to work in your own communities where ever you are in the world, and to focus on the pressing local issues that contribute to conflict, injustice, and unsustainable economic and environmental practices. The kind of change we need may well have to be from the ground up, all of us working together to create peaceful, sustainable and just cultures that nurture the best in all the peoples of this world.
Poverty and homelessness are evergreen issues historically, but issues also embedded in social and political complexity. They benefit the rich, whose economic system keeps most of the rest of us as, at best, “wage slaves,” and all too many of us in poverty, without enough to provide for basic needs or housing (including the “working poor,” who hold low-paying jobs while CEOs are paid record-breaking salaries and bonuses in the global capitalist system). We are united in our cries against the structures of injustice, where the rich act as demigods and demagogues. We have to ask of what use will all their riches be in the face of this inconceivable suffering and the inevitable backlash from the marginalized and disenfranchised. We need fairness, not greed.
So, with this mission in mind, and with the complexity of the interrelationships of social justice, sustainability and peace as a framework, we focus on hunger and poverty, two basic issues and major threads in the system of inequality and injustice that need addressing throughout the world.
We look forward to what you have to share, whether the form is poetry, essay, fiction, art, photography, documentary, music, or hybrids of any of these—and we want to engage in an ongoing conversation through your comments on all of the above as you not only share your own work here today but visit and enjoy the work of others, supporting one another with your “likes” and comments, starting or entering into dialogues with writers, artists and musicians throughout the world and online viewers, readers, listeners.
Think globally, act locally, form community.
—Michael Dickel, Jerusalem (with G. Jamie Dedes, California, USA)
DIRECTIONS FOR PARTICIPATION
Share links to your relevant work or that of others in a comment The BeZine blog post HEREor by using Mister Linky below. To use Mister Linky, just click on the graphic. (Note: If you are sharing someone else’s work, please use your name in Mister Linky, so we can credit you as the contributor—we will give the author / artist name in the comments, from the link when we post the link in a comment.)
You may leave your links or works in the comment section of The BeZine post HERE. If you are sharing the work of another poet or artist, however, please only use a link and not the work itself.
In addition to sharing, we encourage you to visit others and make connections and conversation. To visit the links, click on Mister Linky (the Mister Linky graphic above) and then on the links you see there. (Some Mister Linky-links can be viewed in the comments section after we re-post them.)
28 September 2015 note: In addition to what you’ll find through Mister Linky, you’ll see that there are many many pieces in the comments section or links to them. We haven’t tallied everything yet, but we think we’re approaching 75 or 80 works. J.D.
Thank you!
All links will be collected into a dedicated Page here at The BeZine and also archived at 100TPC.
Thank you for your participation. Let the conversation begin …
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed … “ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Note: I wrote this piece on December 13, 2011 after I learned of the first 100,000 Poets for Change. Seemed appropriate to pull it out, dust it off and share it once again since our theme for this year is “poverty.”
The quote above is from Eisenhower’s speech, A Chance for Peace, delivered in 1953 three months after he took office and on the occasion of the death of Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union (1941 to 1953). The “just peace” that the world hoped for in 1945 at the end of World War II had not materialized. While the Korean War was coming to a close, the Cold War-era military conflicts in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) were slowly escalating. The United States would have advisory troops in Vietnam in 1954. The armed conflict in that region of the world would continue long past Eisenhower’s administration with U.S. involvement escalating in the 1960s and continuing until the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Since the end of the Second World War and the Korean War, violent conflict continues unabated with thirteen wars (defined as 1,000 or more deaths per year) currently, including the War in Afghanistan and the Yemeni and Syrian uprisings of 2011. Smaller scale conflicts resulting in fewer than 1,000 deaths per year have been rife and in 2011 include the Sudan-SPLM-N conflict, the Yemeni al-Qaeda crackdown, and the 2011 clashes in Southern Sudan. (And now in 2015, we have to add among the world’s many current conflicts the war in Syria, which is displacing more people than any war since WWII. According to an recent and comprehensive article, How Syrians Are Dying (worth your attention) in The New York Times, 200,000 have been killed over the past four-and-a-half years.)
Genocides didn’t end either. We’ve had eight genocides since the Holocaust of WWII, including that which is ongoing in Palestine. The number of rebel groups is now over one-hundred, which probably errs on the light side. Conflicts rise from economic and social instability and what amounts to vigilante “justice,” most of which could be addressed if our governments invested in butter, not guns; if they included rather than marginalized; if they listened and responded rather than disenfranchised.
Even in 1953, Eisenhower pointed out that war isn’t sustainable:
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
If governments don’t recognize that Earth and her people cannot be sustained by war, many of their citizens do. One modern peaceful protest for a sustainable world is of interest to all of us who read, write, and love both poetry and peace. It is 100 Thousand Poets for Change, which held its first world-wide rally on September 24, 2011 with 700 events in 550 cities representing 95 participating countries united to support peaceful environmental, social, and political change.
Poets, writers, artists, musicians, and photographers the world over demonstrated in solidarity. The next global event is scheduled for September 29, 2012. Throughout the year small, local events are delivered at a various venues. By invitation, 100 Thousand Poets for Change was at the Sharjah (an Arab Emirate) International Book Fair, which ran through November 27. Mujeeb Jaihoon reports,
“From time immemorial, poetry has built better bridges between people than those with bricks and stones. And these bridges do not get old or obsolete…” (Change Is Born in the Womb of Poetry)
In A Chance for Peace Eisenhower pointed out,
“No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.”
We do hunger, individually and collectively. Perhaps our chance for peace starts with you and me. Poem on …
… and join us this year at The BeZine blog on 26 September 2015 and add your voice to ours for our (yours and mine) 100TPC, poets and friends virtual event for a peaceful, sustainable and just world.
For the past five years, September has been the month of 100,000 Poets for Change (100TPC). All over the world, poets (musicians, artists, and, yes, mimes) have organized events on or near a Saturday in September each of those years, this year, on the 26th. For this, the fifth anniversary of 100TPC, there are over 500 events scheduled throughout the world. The readers of, contributors to and publishers of The BeZine have participated with a virtual event in the past and will again this year on the 26th.
Meanwhile, The BeZine’s theme for September also supports the 100TPC call for peace, sustainability, and social justice, with our focus on poverty in general and homelessness in particular. This focus relates to social justice in an obvious way. Yet, how could we speak of sustainability without social justice? If we still have poverty and homelessness, what is sustained other than inequality? And, without social justice could there be peace? For that matter, could peace be sustained without both justice and environmental plus economic sustainability? Our choice is not to put one of these three above the other, but to recognize that all of these three important themes, necessary areas of change interrelate in complex ways. So we chose one aspect to focus on, and in so doing, this issue clearly points to all three themes through the lens of poverty.
We open by featuring three incredibly powerful poems by Sylvia Merjanian, Refugee, Second Chance, and Collateral Damage. Refugee and Collateral Damage come from her collection, Rumor (Cold River Press—proceeds go to help Syrian refugees). Second Chance debuts here. These poems show the relationship of war to poverty, oppression, and sexual abuse. In reading these, one senses the immense personal costs of war, especially to women and children. They provide an important window into the staggering worldwide refugee crisis, currently the largest human migration since World War II. Refugees are homeless in so many ways, even when they have a house to live in. And, the world seems to conspire to keep them destitute.
That war directly and indirectly causes poverty does not surprise. You might not know, until you read James Cowles’ essay, The Roots of Institutionalized Poverty, that something called The Compromise of 1877, which ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, provided the political and economic structures of poverty that continued strong through the Civil Rights Era and, in many ways, still exist today. Certainly we know that poverty is not new in the United States, and neither is homelessness. In this issue you will hear music of the Depression Era that sounds too familiar today. The first time I personally participated in an editorial and writing publication related to homelessness was in 1989, for the University of Minnesota student paper, the Minnesota Daily. We produced a special finals’ week issue, title Ivory Tower, dedicated to the theme.
Poverty and homelessness are evergreen issues historically, but issues also embedded in social and political complexity. They benefit the rich, whose economic system keeps most of the rest of us as, at best, “wage slaves,” and all too many of us in poverty, without enough to provide for basic needs or housing (including the “working poor,” who hold low-paying jobs while CEOs are paid record-breaking salaries and bonuses). Our second feature, Jamie Dedes’ poem, Some Kind of Hell to Pay, cries out against the structures of injustice, where the rich act as demigods and demagogues, and it asks of what use will all their riches be in the Hell realm of the inevitable backlash from the marginalized and disenfranchised.
photo credit: Sharon Frye
The poems, prose, photo essay, and art in the rest of the September BeZine will ask you to feel, to see with empathy, to hope defiantly, and always to resist the status quo. The writers often look beyond the borders of the U.S. or Western Europe to see the injustices of a world-wide economic system of war, greed and injustice that makes it difficult to live outside of its oppressive realities—and for those pushed out, choices do not sustain their lives, their dreams, or their spirits.
Yet, people live, they dream, and they hope with spirit—often in defiance, sometimes by dying (see John Anstie’s As if and Sharon Frye’s Jacob’s Ladder in this issue), sometimes by living despite all of the forces lined up against their lives. Victoria C. Slotto’s Homeless Man tells of a “destitute” man whose story reveals that he may in fact have the most rich life of any of us. Always, there is more than what we see.
Read these words. Think about the change that could help to heal creation as Michael Yost’s poem Who Am I to Judge and Michael Watson’s essay The Realm of the Unimaginable speak to. Remember the admonition to think globally but act locally. And, most of all, imagine.
Then, join us on 26 September 2015, on our blog. Add your own thoughts, your own poems, your own essays. Join in our virtual, worldwide 100TPC event from wherever you live. We will post a page with instructions on our blog on the 26th. The posts will go up live. And, after the 26th, we will organize and archive the event (see the 2013 and 2014 pages in the tabs at the top of the page).
—Michael Dickel, Jerusalem
My poem from the 1989 Minnesota Daily Ivory Tower
Soil
i The plow cuts, disk or chisel? How much of what lies below to bring up leave exposed to dry in the wind? What residue of last years’ crop to leave upon the soil, cover over to rot, return to the fertile land?
What fetish draws me along this furrow? Street and curb meet here.Step up or down into slime. Dust, trash tossed around and dropped by the blind wind. What fate ties strings to which embedded hooks, Pulls my flesh forward forever forward towards the street?
The Spring fete begins, seeds in muck anticipating dilettante dance of the chosen few. Weed out the hungry whose appetite starves wind-pressed grain shafts; water the rows of the obedient who face slick harvest, brittleness in the searing sun and death with Winter.
I move, farmer in these city streets, man among the chaff, I offer to fetch my elegant plow-tongue, to stop the wind, describe the deep earth and the rotted residue, the dry grasses and newspaper blown by, salvaged for shelter by the quick grasp of an old hand, pulled on top of gray hair to keep rain out.
ii I would pull the plow, but a voice from under the newspaper covers my shoes in mud and mire.
What d’you know ’bout all this? He spit
from mown rye-stubble fields, fetid earthen face Cracked crumbled creased
Caressed once, long ago
All you see’s a bum. Fuck you, you son of a whore.
At home I do not wash the dirt from me,
I scrape it off, place it in a box with a key I open my belly and
secure the box within, sated.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 