“Easy does it” … even as we mourn the people we love and are saddened by some of the ways of the world.
I’m thinking of all the people I lost last year. It reminds me of a custom in some places – Japan, China, Korea – to write death poems because so often I wish I had a little handwritten note to treasure among the memories, something emblematic of each cherished being. It’s a downside to the computer age. Our boxes of notes and letters have grown quite lean.
My impression is that the death poems tradition was mostly honored among Buddhist monks and Japanese Samurai. The three classic forms were haiku, waka and kanshi. The gentle death poem that follows is a famous one by Yaitsu, but thus far I have been unable to find much information about him.
paradise ~
i see flowers
from the cottage where i lie
– Yiatsu
Eternal memory. Eternal memory. Grant to your servants, O Lord, blessed repose and eternal memory.
In the spirit of caritas/chesed/حنان ناشئ عن الحب/metta…Love!
most especially for those lights: Brian, Lesley and Ralph … and always ,though they died years ago, for Mom, Daddy, Terry, Chris, Aunt Yvonne, Aunt Julie, Kirby, Sidto and all the other family and our friends who have been released by Time into Eternity.
Rev. Ben Meyers, minister of the Unitarian Universalists of San Mateo (UUSM), announced today that UUSM members will stand in solidarity for peace, sustainability and social justice on Inauguration Day, January 20th. He invited the greater Peninsula community to join in a peaceful protest from noon – 1 p.m. along the El Camino Real (ECR) from San Francisco to San Jose. “If you too are concerned about the rhetoric and proposed policies of the incoming administration,” Rev. Meyers said, “you are encouraged to come out and show that as a community we will stand our ground and fight for tolerance, decency, economic justice and democracy in our country.”
Protesters are invited to come individually or in groups and to carry their organization’s banner or signs indicating their primary concerns. “Be direct,” counsels Rev. Meyers,
“but PLEASE, no hateful or violent language. Don’t block driveways, doorways, street crossings or traffic. We will gather at noon and disperse peacefully and promptly at 1 p.m.” Further details at ECR Protest. There’s a Group page set up so that you can meet-up with others near you. Ask to join or message Jamie’s personal FB G J Dedes.
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THE POETRY PROJECT is a non-judgmental venue for women to express their personal stories and observations through poetry to promote social change. MORE Rolling submissions. Guidelines HERE.
GRIS-GRISis an online journal of literature, culture and the arts published twice a year. The editors invite submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Open all year for submissions. There is a two dollar processing fee for online submissions or you may mail your work in. Details HERE.
VINE LEAVES LITERARY JOURNALseeks vignettes only (their focus – i.e. “something that can be written on a vine leaf”), which may be poetry, prose or script. Photographs and art submissions are also welcome. This journal is published biannually online and the deadline or the fall issue is February 28, 2017. The dates on the submission page are from 2015, but I think someone has just neglected to update the page. There is a submission fee. Guidelines are HERE. Note this 19th issue will be their last and the editors have annunced that it is to be published as a coffee table book. There is also a book publishing arm.
IN BETWEEN HANGOVER, We Are the Underground is an online (blog-type) publication that seeks “well crafted poems. 6 Max to inbetweenhangovers@yahoo.com No previously published and no simultaneous submissions. Include photo and SHORT bio. Expect a timely response. Work published on a rolling basis.” Link to site HERE.
SOCIAL JUSTICE POETRY, original poems promoting social justice is blog-type site. Submission guidelines HERE.
THE BeZINE, Be Inspired, Be Creative, Be Peace, Be is the publication of an arts collective created to foster proximity and understanding through a shared love of the arts and humanities and all things spirited and to make – however modest – a contribution toward personal healing and deference for the diverse ways people try to make moral, spiritual and intellectual sense of a world in which illness, violence, despair, loneliness and death are as prevalent as hope, friendship, reason and birth. The theme for January is “Resist” and submissions are accepted up to and including the 10th of the month. The range of forms include: poetry, short fiction, essays, creative nonfiction, videos (i.e.music, spoken word) art and anything that may be included in an online publication. Please read the Intro/Mission Statement and Submission Guidelines and check out the latest issue before submitting. Submission should be sent to bardogroup@gmail.com
ROOM, Literature, Art and Feminism Since 1975publishes original work for women “including trans persons, gender-variant and two-spirit women, and women of non-binary sexual orientations. It publishes short stories, poems, creative nonfiction and art. The deadline for the upcoming issue is January 31 and the theme is “Migration.” Details HERE.
PLENTITUDE, your queer literary magazineseeks “literary fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, and novel excerpts at this time” or online publication. Details HERE.
THE MALAHAT REVIEW Essential Poetry * Fiction * Creative Nonfiction is a Canadian literary journal published quarterly that featurse both Canadian and international writers, established and emerging. Submission guidelines HERE.
ARC POETRY has published for thirty years and invites submissions from both established and emerging writers. Unsolicited poetry submissions are accepted until May 31, 2017. Details HERE.
CONTESTS
Opportunity Knocks
WARE POETS OPEN POETRY COMPETITION: Prizes: £600 (1st), £300 (2nd), £150 (3rd), & the Ware Sonnet Prize £150 Fees: £4/1, £12/4 + £3 thereafter for each poem in the same submission For previously unpublished poems that have not been awarded a prize in any other competition. Details and Entry Form
ROOM, Literature, Art, and Feminism Since 1975 holds several contests each year. Two have upcoming deadlines: Short forms by January 15 and creative nonfiction by March 8. Fiction and poetry will open on April 15 and art sometime in September. So watch the site if you’re interested in any of these. Details HERE.
PLENTITUDE, your queer literary magazine announce their first “Cornucopia Literary Prize for fiction, which is open for submissions until February 15, 2017. The prize is for the best work of fiction by a LGBTTQI writer. The editors welcome submissions from writers of any nationality. Details HERE.
ARC POETRY Annual Poet of the Year Contest is open until February 1, 2017 and submissions are welcome from Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Details HERE.
EVENT
MARCH 2017 (U.S.) Poetry Organizations from Across the U.S. Join Together to Form Historic Coalition & Launch March 2017 Programs on Migration. “Twenty nonprofit poetry organizations from across the United States have formed a historic coalition dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds … As its first public offering, throughout the month of March 2017, Poetry Coalition members will present multiple programs on the theme: Because We Come From Everything: Poetry & Migration, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, Borderbus.” MORE
NEWS
BILL MOYERS shares Starting with Black a poem by Jim Haba, poet and founding director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival. The poem “encapsulates 2016” and the “urgent political and moral crisis that we currently face. HERE
ANTHONY CRONIN, Irish poet, novelist, biographer, cultural commentator, died. HERE
A FEW QUESTIONS ON POETRY, Critic’s Take, Daniel Halpern The New York Times HERE
PATERSON .. new movie about a poet and the myth of the solitary artist, Richard Brody, The New Yorker HERE
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, a poet (Joseph Hutchison) squeezes the presidential election into a clown car, Mary Jo Brooks, PBS
SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS
Submit your event, book launch and other announcements at least fourteen days in advance to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Publication is subject to editorial discretion.
EFFECTIVE DECEMBER 11, 2016 Posts on this web/zine include links to The Poet by Day store (The WordPlay Shop, an Amazon Affiliate), a natural extension in support of this site’s mission to champion poets and writers and to broaden and continue to offer resources and inspiration, including information on opportunities for writers. [Jamie Dedes is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.]
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This essay was originally published in the December 2016 issue of The BeZine. It is by Reena Prasad (Butterflies of Time – A Canvas of Poetry) and with her permission I share it here today. It is simply not to be missed. I can’t think of anything better with which to start 2017. Over the years, I have not seen another poet work with quite the same passion, consistancy or intelligence at her craft. She is diligent not only in the creative process but in getting her work out to publishers. I am pleased to be able to feature her essay here and her poetry in The BeZine. Enjoy! Reena’s bio is below the essay. J.D.
Poetry finds you when you are broken, insists on taking you into its fold, puts your pieces together and then you never leave.
It struck me when I was standing at the doorway of my home one July that the sunshine over the mussaenda was a rare shade of rose-gold and that the leaves under it were a luminous green. The street noises seemed to recede as if the stage had been taken over by some other troupe and sure enough, there was a sudden onset of activity. An excited squirrel ran up and down the guava tree, a few babblers screamed and the jackfruit tree came to life with bird cries. All because there was a long rat snake slithering leisurely across the sunlit ground. There had been stray tears on my cheek and I was a dam on the verge of a collapse but then the other world swung in and took over from me.
I was privy to nature’s poetry slam. I wanted nothing to capture it, not a camera, or a laptop nor pen and paper. A poem followed by several others swung its legs over the cacophony of humdrum routines and marched into me settling deep into waiting trenches filling me up with purpose and with immense joy. While steadily ploughing up the driest top soil and turning it over to the elements to ravage, it was changing me.
I remembered Stanley Kunitz’s translation of Akhmatova’s lines . . .
“No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.”
Writing a poem is akin to exercising. To begin is difficult at times because it is easier to wallow in conceptual dramas and imaginary hammocks than to sit in one place and write or type. Think about the singular joy of munching on peanuts and reading fitness magazines on the couch compared to going running on a cold day.
Mussaenda Frondosa
Some poems are difficult to birth even while being exhilarating with senses functioning at heightened awareness and making one sore with the intensity of thought . Once begun, every thought zooms into the present; nature, politics and emotions collide, collaborate and confound the notions of what constitutes poetry. The end comes when the experience has gone through like a sword and untwisted all the overlapping images to give one’s vision a clarity that is brighter than the sunbathed green leaves of the mussaenda.
Winner of the T.S Elliot award 2012 Poet John Burnside said,“Poetry reminds us that lakes and mountains are more than items on a spreadsheet; when a dictatorship imprisons and tortures its citizens, people write poems because the rhythms of poetry and the way it uses language to celebrate and to honour, rather than to denigrate and abuse, is akin to the rhythms and attentiveness of justice.” Central to this attentiveness is the key ingredient of poetry, the metaphor, which Hannah Arendt defined as “the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about”. It’s that power to bring things together, to unify experience as “the music of what happens”, that the best poetry achieves.”
It also unifies the people reading it and the poets who write it because we search for affirmation, for reassurance that our feelings and experiences are shared by someone else somewhere and that we aren’t all alone though our pursuit of the game is almost always solitary.
While the visualized poem changes a lot after being handed over to language, the thing that is most changed at the end of the writing is me. I feel kindly and tolerant to all forms of obstacles and injustices that were hindering the poem till then, feeling mostly gratitude for the crash course on changing perception. If there is more indecision, more poems might be written.
As David Biespiel says”You become a poet when you navigate your poem’s labyrinths of mutability, not to a point of stasis, but to a point where your discoveries blossom into ecstasy, intoxication, even beatitude — or, to downplay that bit of grandiosity, into clarity, insight, judgment, understanding, private vision.”
And believe me language plays a mighty role here – give it all the vocabulary and range you can and the poem rushes through like a thing on fire. Don’t let anyone tell you that language doesn’t matter. It does. It does. It does. You wouldn’t want to be subjected to an operation if your doctor uses an rusty, blunt knife he found while swimming in the ocean. It is the same thing with poetry. Hone your weapons before you go to war. Because after that poem is written, you are healed of whatever ailed you. The better your poem, the better you feel. I have no complaints about life as long as I can write because there somewhere between the thought and the written word, lies my wetland, my wildlife reserve, my sanctuary.
Leaving you with Amiri Baraka’s lines from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . .
“Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog. Or the broad edged silly music the wind Makes when I run for a bus…
REENA PRASAD is a poet from India, currently living in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). She is the co-editor with Dr. A.V. Koshy of The Significant Anthology (2015). She writes poems looking in awe at the world from the seventeenth floor of a high rise in the Arabian desert. Her poems have been published in several anthologies and journals including The Copperfield Review, First Literary Review-East, Angle Journal, Poetry Quarterly, York Literary Review, Lakeview International Journal, Duane’s PoeTree, and Mad Swirl. She is the Destiny Poets UK’s, Poet of the Year for 2014. More recently her poem was adjudged second in the World Union Of Poet’s poetry competition, 2016.
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