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BARDO NEWS: April celebrations of poetry and poets, a shared heritage that knows no borders

Quatrain on Heavenly Mtn.
Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain

Reprinted from The Bardo Group blog…

Both Canada and the United States celebrate April as national poetry month. Since Bardo is an international effort, we will celebrate the month as an international event. Poetry is a shared heritage that knows no borders.

Among the blog posts we’ll publish during this month is a piece by Blaga Todorova (Between the Shadows and the Soul) on the Bulgarian poet and former Bulgarian Vice President, Blaga Dimitrova. Included in our line-up is a memorable poem by New York’s first lady, wife of Mayor Bill De Blasio, Chirlane McCray. There will be a piece on writing poetry by English poet, Myra Schneider (Myra Schneider’s Poetry Website), and an article on the Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran. Corina Ravenscraft (Dragon’s Dreams) will start us off on April 1 with some ideas for celebrating with family and friends.

While we don’t plan to post poems and/or essays on poetry every day, we’ll do so quite a bit. Also, along with the Academy of American Poets, we’ll celebrate A Poem in Your Pocket on Thursday, April 24, when everyone is invited to share a poem and/or a piece about a favored poet no matter the poet’s time or place. Mister Linky will go up and you can link in your own work or share a URL to work you admire. Or, if you prefer, you can share a poem or comment on a poet in the comment section of that day’s post. Mister Linky will open at 12:01 a.m. on the 24th.

This evening we kick-off poetry month – a day-and-a-half early, yes! – with award-winning Canadian slam poet and writer, Shane Koyczan, who first came to the wider world’s attention with his poem We Ae More at the 2010 Olympics opening ceremony in Vancouver. This video begins with Death Be Not Proud by British poet John Donne (1572-1631) and moves into Shane’s performance of one of his early poems, Move Pen Move.

CELEBRATE INTERNATIONAL POETRY MONTH WITH US

“Poets are the unacknowled legislators of the world.” Percy B. Shelley (1792-1822), English Romantic poet, In Defense of Poetry

And don’t forget to join us on Wednesday, April 23, for Victoria Slotto’s Writers’ Fourth Wednesday prompt. Mister Linky will go up for sharing your work at 12:01 a.m. P.S.T. on the 23rd.

♥

Join us on our Facebook page, THE BARDO GROUP

Illustration ~ Fan with quatrain poem attributed to Emperor Gaozong of Song (1107-1187), the tenth Chinese emperor of the Song Dynasty, part of the John B. Elliott Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. The photograph is by Neutrality and generously released into the public domain.

– The Bardo Group

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Calling all writers and poets …

Tomorrow Writers’ Fourth Wednesday Challenge resumes for 2014 on The Bardo Group. It is hosted by writer, poet and novelist, Victoria C. Slotto. You are all invited to join the fun. The prompt will go up at 7:00 p.m. PST and will stay open for seventy-two hours for you to share your work. Victoria and I will visit and comment. I hope to see you there and hope also you will visit and comment on the work of other participants as well.

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The Voice of the Poet, an audio series from Random House

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“To hear a poem spoken in the voice of the person who wrote it is not only to witness the rising of words off the page and into the air, but to experience an aural reenactment of exactly what the poet must have heard, if only internally, during the act of composition. “ Billy Collins (b. 1941), U.S. Poet Laureate

The Voice of the Poet series was developed in 2005 by Random House. We only just discovered it and since I am enamoured of Auden’s work and am focusing on him right now, we picked up that one. However, this audio series includes other notable poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and a collection of five women poets: Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Louise Bogan and Muriel Ruckeyser.  Each set  includes a CD of poetry readings collected from a variety of sources and occasions and a small book with the texts of the poems and a brief commentary by J.D. McClatchy, a poet, literary critic and an editor of the Yale Review. I completely enjoyed the Auden collection, recommend it if you are an Auden fan, and am moving on to get whatever others in the series can still be found.  I would have written something else for today, but I just couldn’t pull myself away from this. It’s the sort of thing you enjoy and value if poetry – or a specific poet – is central in your life.

* * * *

“Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.”

The day would not be complete without a poem. Here’s Funeral Blues, one of Auden’s more well-known poems  . . .

Video uploaded to YouTube by Reifgar

. . . and thus we begin another week . . .

♥

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The Weather of Words

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

books“I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance–what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody’s mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity.

“Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they’ll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be.

“We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?” The Weather of Words: Poetic Inventions by Mark Strand (b. 1934, Canada), American poet and essayist, Poet Laureate Consult in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1990-1991), Pulitzer Prize (1999) for Blizzard of One,  Gold Medal in Poetry (2009), American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A little something provocative this Sunday.

. . . and thus we begin another week . . .

♥

Photo credit ~ SlowKing via Wikipedia and under the CC BY-NC