fw: Call for Stephen Harper poems

fwd – call for submissions
Comrade poet!
Since Parliament has been prorogued, you’re probably just sitting on your hands, bereft. But things are looking up!
You are invited to submit a poem for consideration for a new anthology to be published by Mansfield Press just in time for the reconvening of Parliament on March 3.
The collection is titled Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. We’re looking for poems of up to 75 lines: your tender musings on Stephen Harper.
We have to move fast. The deadline is midnight on Tuesday, January 19. Payment for your contribution is one copy of the anthology. It’s gonna look good and it’s gonna be full of good poems.
The editors of Rogue Stimulus are Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell and Toronto/Cobourg poet Stuart Ross. Denis De Klerck, publisher of Toronto literary house Mansfield Press, is oiling up the machinery for quick action, to ensure the anthology’s timely release.
Please email your poem (preferably as a Word attachment) to:
harper@mansfieldpress.net
We look forward to hearing from you.
Stephen and Stuart
—
P.S. I add, what angle? what position and response to take to this government? Satire? Unheeded it loses the points of the teeth.
What’s the role of emotion and poetry in the comments section is discussed at John Pass’ blog [via Brenda]

“The only lasting emotion, the one that stays true for all time for everyone, is grief, and tragedy remains art’s bedrock. Larkin is great not for his despondency and despair but for the tragic chords he rings from them. […]Anger alone, in its linear, fervently directional focus, is incapable of this breadth.[…]the practice of poetry, like any art, moves the practitioner quickly past the easy moral certainties that anger asserts. And anger is not communicative, is destructive of relationship, of metaphor.” – John Pass

Also from the comments, a link to a speech on the war in Afghanistan where Jaribu Hill says, there’s a protest fatigue of the perpetual war, but war is red herring from poverty, inequity, health care.

“We can’t now go into peekaboo mode.” […] “We all want to paint flowers and trees but we have to deal with the bombs that are still coming.” –Jaribu Hill, Exec. Dir. of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights speaking on the panel

Where does the mandate descend from? As for any dialogue, we need first to ready self. If not in that position of steadiness, what can be gained? At whose feet, delineated issues? What’s an effective word? Who needs to articulate what, how and where?