Page 74 of 91

Posted on

In Conversation: Poet/Musician Graffiti Bleu & Michael Rothenberg, cofounder of the global peace initiative, 100,000 Poets for Change

810919_RJ8dSr1y

You can listen to the two-hour podcast HERE. Recommended! This post is meant as an alert and also to share my two cents.

As I write, it’s just a few hours after listening to Just My Thoughts with Graffiti Bleu on BlogTalk Radio. The show started with an exploration of What does the revolution look like? with Graffiti Blue, Michael Rothenberg, and the show’s panel and callers comprised of poets involved in 100,000 Poets for Change (100TPC).

Harkening back to Gil Scott-Heron and his poem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,  part of the discussion was on technology and social networking and their roles in fostering peace, social justice and sustainability. When Heron wrote his poem in 1971, the means to formulate and distribute information and opinion were dominated by mainstream media and corporate interest, which were not in sympathy with the revolution Heron envisioned. Those interests are still dominant and still lack sympathy, but there’s something of a balance occurring – however imperfect – now that we plain folk have access to the tools of technology and social networking. Without social networking, we wouldn’t have 100TPC, which can happily be said to have gone viral since Michael Rothenberg put out a call on Facebook for poets to join in a global peace effort back in 2010. While each of us in the “100,000” has a relatively small “audience” together we touch many, many minds and hearts. We do have an agenda, but it doesn’t foment strife. We’re not in anyone’s pocket. That’s clean power. It’s power to …

On a personal level, one benefit of technology is that people who are homebound – as I sometimes am – can take part in change-making initiatives more actively than simply writing letters-to-the-editor or to our legislators, which is not to say we should give that up. I started a virtual 100TPC via The BeZine and with The Bardo Group Beguines so that disabled people and people who do not live near a 100TPC event would have the opportunity to have their say, to lend their support. Our 2015 commemorative page is HERE.

We need to do more than “talk.”  Agreed. And I think that one of things 100TPC gives us is hope … huge hope from seeing that there are people in every nook-and-cranny of the world who share our values and priorities. This helps us to keep on keeping on with our local grassroots initiatives as well as our broader advocacy. This serves to sustain our faith and commitment.

Ultimately for me, 100TPC is about breaking down barriers, crossing boarders. It leads the way in our evolutionary journey toward a sustainable peace. In the documentary film Ten Questions for the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama says “we need more festivals.”  In other words, if we get to know people, if we break bread with them or share a bowl of rice, we are less likely to think of them as “other.”  It will be more difficult to turn around the next day and do harm.  100TPC is our festival. Once we’ve shared hearts, souls and stories through poetry, how can we marginalize anyone? How can we abandon or abuse?

Can the revolution be bloodless? The question is really “will it be?” I don’t think so. I don’t think revolutions are by their very nature “bloodless.” The psychopaths will always be with us and until we stop marginalizing people and leaving them desperate and vulnerable to tyrants, we’ll never have bloodless reform. We’ll never achieve a sustainable peace. Peace is a state that takes awareness and awareness takes growth, which is an evolutionary process.  That doesn’t mean we should give up. It means that as poets we should continue to bear witness, to touch hearts, to raise consciousness and to nurture the process of growth. As poet Michael Dickel said in an interview on this site HERE: “. . . it may not be ours to see the work completed, but that does not free us from the responsibility to do the work.”

© 2016, words, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; photograph courtesy of Graffiti Bleu and Michael Rothenberg.

Posted on

Just fun today: Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky read by Benedict Cumberbatch

If you are viewing this from Facebook or email, you’ll have to link trough to listen to the video.

800px-Jabberwocky-1Jabberwocky

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

– Lewis Carroll

by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson),photograph,2 June 1857
Lewis Carroll selfie photograph,2 June 1857

61KpHS-4AqL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), the pen name of Oxford mathematician, logician, photographer and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is famous the world over for his fantastic classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, Jabberwocky, and Sylvie and Bruno.

Ruth Jewell (A Quite Walk), a core team member of The Bardo Group Beguines found this delightful reading of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem read beautifully by actor Benedict Cumberbatch. The poem is from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), which is the sequel to Alice in Wonderland (1865). The illustration is from the book and was done by Sir John Tenniel.

 

Posted on

LOVE and TIME … Parents, an anthology of poems by women writers

51cKCP2xbLL._SX314_BO1,204,203,200_When I noted that Second Light Network of Women Poets (SLN) had produced an anthology of poems about parents, I thought it a wonderful idea. It became the inspiration for the The BeZine’s January theme, Parents and Parenting, and I had to buy a copy.

Parents, an anthology of poems by women writers (Enitharmon, 2000) turns out to be a wonderful collection, moving me to laughter and tears, celebration and remorse through memories that explore the range of experience from loving and nurturing to appalling or abusive. Given the theme, you might expect to find some of the 170 or so poems  to be saccharine or manipulative, but none are. This is, I’m sure, as much a testimony to the taste and discretion of editor/poets Myra Schneider and Dilys Wood as it is to the skill and sensibility of the featured poets.

Particularly touching were the poems that harken back to parents who were refugees during World War II or parents who died during that period. I found these especially poignant partly because many of the elders around me when I was young were refugees from that war and partly because today we have even more people migrating to escape dangerous environments. I can’t help but wonder what poetry will have to say when the children of this diaspora come of age.

About parents as a theme for the collection, U.A. Fanthorpe wrote in the preface:

“I suppose many people, if asked what is the greatest theme of poetry, would say Love, or Time.  It seems clear to me, faced with this fine anthology, that the right answer is Parents.  For parents combine love and time, and in a very striking, difficult way.  The love is often embarrassed, undeclared, too late – tangled in some way.  And the time is reversed; the parent is the child, the child the parent, by the process of time.  So it certainly is here, where the older women see elderly parents as their children, remember the energy and passion of parents who were younger then they are now; or recall their younger, brusque or uncomprehending selves. The originality of the theme with the special insights of women, who are often more vulnerable to their parents than their brothers are, and also less able to escape, adds to the particular qualities of this anthology.”

Both thumbs up on yet another fine collection from the women of SLN.  At this writing Amazon US and UK have one or two new copies and both sites have used copies available.

The January issue of The BeZine will be available on the 15th and, thanks to the generosity of the editors and publisher of the anthology, will include two poems from Parents, an anthology of poems by women writers.

© 2016, review, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

 

Posted on

Order Life in Sonnets and Sestinas

51L4xDyFbtL._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.” Sylvia Plath, “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”