Poetry for Peace is the subject of a CBC podcast. The Nova Scotian and former poet laureate Lorri Neilsen Glen (Lost Gospels) discusses how poetry can help us build a culture of peace. She is reading as part of the peace conference: Being the Change, held in Halifax until the 10th.
She says, “I’m anti-war but not anti-soldier” and talks about how it is a role of artists to try to transcend differences and how this can bring us together. She explains that in poetry we can get to universality past the small categories. It gets us out of our heads and into our senses, into our bodies. She references the War poet and how compassion fatigue can enter our body, but how the cost of not engaging with this critical things may hold a higher cost.
As M.K. Gandhi said, “There is no road to peace. Peace is the road.” Peace isn’t the absence of overt conflict, but a frame of mind that seeks to create a space where sides can hear and speak and act. The drawing of ethical lines around “>responses to violence is complex. Peace is not inert, nor inertia. To lie down and take a beating as a martyr is not peace; that is to be sucker to bullying. What are the upper and lower reaches of minimal force? For minimal force, we ignore, we redirect then resist obliquely, then directly verbally. At what point is intervention not escalating to the greater loss than greater gain? The Sabine women at the time of Romulus realized (in the version of Christine de Pizan), “So it is that this deadly war be neither ended nor continued without our participation. No matter who id victorious, it will still be disastrous for us”. And so they laid down in the middle of the battle front, kneeling, “kinsmen, our lords and beloved husbands, for God’s sake, make peace!”
Peace isn’t denial, or refusal to engage or wussing out to the easier path. To not incite or be incited is not easier. As Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
So many years later, we are in the same place because these issues do not evolve away. New people and situations and new partly blank slates begin continually. We start again. As a lady around minute 4:30 of Love vs the G20 said, “It’ll take the rest of our lives to begin, but then what else have we got to do?”
the right shoe pulled on
anyway
I’ll leave the last words to the other OSI participant, Jane Poet, “there is so much beautiful fragility/in this strong and aging world”
Yes! Let’s!
Let’s get moving! We’ll deal with the mud.
Peace…such a state of mind- overt and not!