LET ME BE PERFECTLY CLEAR

I DID NOT HEAR ABOUT ANY OF THESE POETS 

 WHOM I NOW SAY  DOMINATE THE WORLD OF POETRY IN ALL THE  YEARS THAT I WAS 

studying English Literature. from college to Master's program to Doctoral study. They were simply not part of the canon of poetry
in American education.
  
WHY?  I don't know,
MAYBE   because they did not write  originally in English? MAYBE  Because they were Progressive and endorsed  reform and revolution? 
MAYBE  Because they were not from England or America?
MAYBE  Because many of them are people of color?

You pick which one-- but  I have had to learn about them when I wanted to understand the development of poetry.

WHY did I want to understand the DEVELOPMENT  OF ---POETRY?
By then I was myself teaching poetry and since childhood I had been trying to write POETRY.
 The one Poet and only poet from my list that I did  know about  was Patrick Pearse.
  I knew him not as a poet but as a  person who lead the Easter Rising in Dublin and was executed  for his efforts. 

WHY THE PRIMACY OF LOVE?
It is beautifully expressed in the aria  in Puccinni's TOSCA
"Visi d'arte, visi d'amore --I lived for art, I lived for love."
What greater epitaph can anyone have?

The blessing that brought awareness of the wealth of international poetry into my life  was my  friendship and now  48 year long marriage to a brilliant man  from India--Yashdip Bains,
He brought not only the great gifts of his intellect and his political acumen  into our marriage, but also his several volume OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY and his beloved IBM EXECUTIVE  typewriter.
Beyond all these gifts, he brought his love and  expertise in international travel.
The first year that we met, both of us teaching at Rhode Island College, he learned that I was  Irish and with a great interest in Irish drama. He urged me to go to see Ireland and offered to help with the arrangements for the summer months. Sure enough--  friends of his found a flat to sublet in Rathmines and I went to Dublin with my son  Joey and Yash went to London  for his annual pilgrimage to the lodestar of the British Museum Library.

 So that was my first journey out of the country. But it would not be  my last. It was a great privilege to be in other places and to learn the ways other cultures survive and thrive. We married the next year and after I completed my Doctoral dissertation on  Bernard Shaw, our little family departed for Amritsar in Punjab, India.  There, we were stationed at GURU NANAK DEV UNIVERSITY  where Yashdip was Head of the English Department, and I was  the only American in town.  I met and saw so many new and  exotic people and places. And I soon saw that I was strange and exotic to them too,

Because I am a person who talks to others  I was a little abashed when I did not know even the names of poets that my new Indian friends knew and admired. I tell you all this not to boast of my travels but to say that without them I probably would have stayed pretty ignorant. 

SO when I put forward my list of POETS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD  and  you do not know their names or work--please do not be abashed. I am not trying to show off. No, I am showing you and asking you to come in under the BIG TENT of World Poetry.  

AND I hope that you will take my advice and  open yourselves to reading and maybe even practicing new forms from other countries.
Like most immigrants, they will enrich our literature not harm it.

They will add to the rich tapestry of American  poetry -- new colors, new threads, new patterns, new  voices. 

They will raise our sense of what we have in common and thus promote the BROTHERHOOD OF ALL MANKIND.



 

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.