A BUCKET FULL OF POETS--REVISED

PAWTUCKET  GALWAY KINNELL POETRY FESTIVAL 


This year the PAWTUCKET ARTS FESTIVAL now in its 20th year will include a POETRY  FESTIVAL.  It is taking over the name of GALWAY KINNELL a great poet from Pawtucket and will skip the poetry contest this year and instead seek to build the community of poets in Pawtucket  with a series of readings and workshops.
As a former winner  --honorary mention 2 years ago-- I was asked to be part of the planning and program.

So I will be  offering a poetry workshop.  I thought of several possible topics, but  thought that they were more academic.
Because my main concept of poetry is that it is a large tent and is an all-inclusive  type of writing.  As I have said before every time  we  sing along  words to a song we are reciting a poem. 

I started with the idea of  POETRY AROUND THE WORLD to introduce poets from different  cultures and traditions. Then I wanted to be more specific and I wanted a poetry writing aspect to  the workshop. So I  narrowed my  Workshop to POETS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD.
Here is a revised draft of my proposal. I dropped down from 10 to 6 poets. 

POETRY AROUND THE WORLD: POETS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Percy Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Today we will acknowledge some of the most famous poets who brought about change from countries all over the world.

They used their poetry to bear witness to their time and place, That is one of the primary possibilities of all writing. Something as personal as a diary or a blog still bears witness as an affirmation of being: it says I was here and this is what I noticed.

Expanding this act of witness to the social and political spheres of life, poetry becomes a powerful weapon not of mass destruction but of mass instruction and mass inspiration.

SIX POETS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Lu Xun (say Lu Shun)---China

Neruda---Chile

Brecht—Germany

Nazim Hikmet--Turkey

Faiz Ali Faiz—Pakistan

Patrick Pearse – leader of a rising of poets in –Ireland

WORKSHOP ACTIVITY

We will read and discuss one poem by each of these poets. Then  in the  poetry writing section of the workshop  and using news paper stories and photos from the past two months as prompts, we will each take up the task of bearing witness and write a new poem about what is going on in our world today.