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?”

sole’s mud still wet —
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”

Finally figured out the new version of WP enough to find the widget to put the link to recent comments in the sidebar. Check out those links by Jim on history of flarf.
I added three words per poem by greg betts to the sidebar but if you didn’t notice, now you have. He’s shuffling donated words and phrases into an aggregate sort of themed poem. Interesting results.
Also, Raise it has a post on The value of the open mic. Speaking of which, mid-summer’s Tree is nearly upon us and there’s an all-open mic night on the 13th.

In his post, the joy of revision, Robert Peake talks about looking at a poem’s elemental structure and intentions, and about the benefits of workshops for aesthetic calibration:

it is through input from other self-aware readers that poets can often develop most quickly, learning through feedback how their decisions affect a receptive other. Through both giving and receiving input on poems, the poet also increasingly learns to act as this receptive other for herself in composing and writing her own poems. This is why workshop groups can provide a powerful boost to the development of any writer, and especially poets.
Yet, due to the subjective nature of poetry, and the inevitable realities of interpersonal dynamics, workshop groups can tend toward consensus, which favors the safety of the known, and therefore tends toward mediocrity. However, by focusing on the poet’s specific decisions, and the effect of those decisions upon a receptive, intelligent reader, the poet can be given useful feedback. This feedback is not so much on what a reader may or may not have liked, but is instead about what is and is not working in relation to the poet’s intent

Check out the entirely of this second untitled poem of By Anna Akhmatova translated by Jane Kenyon… “one memory lies inside me./ I cannot and will not fight against it:/ it is joy and it is pain.// It seems to me that anyone who looks into/ my eyes will notice it immediately”.
It came to my attention via John Baker who interviewed me in 2007 for his ask-author project on how we thought about the process of Creating a text.
In other online poetry finds, this by a local writer who speaks of parenting, expectations of kids and compassionately of parent’s intents: Between the Lines. Woody will be one of the readers at Blog Out Loud live event tomorrow.

Christine de Pizan in The Book of the City of Ladies mentions the story of how Plato died with a book by Sappho under his pillow. Funny to think of who read and was familiar with which people in history.
In the 1400s, de Pizan, also spoke of Proba the Roman (section I.29.1) who knew all of Vergil’s poems (of 70 BCE) by heart and realized she could shuffle them to retell the story of Old and New testaments in a sort of plunder verse.
She recontextualized Vergil’s words so dexterously, as to keep his voice and tone, that he seemed “both a prophet and evangelist” retelling the scriptures.

she would run thru the Eclogue, then the Georgics, and the Aeneid […] in one part she would take several entire verses unchanged and in another borrow small snatches of verse, and through marvelous craftsmanship and conceptual subtlety, she was able to construct entire lines of orderly verse. She would put small pieces together, coupling and joining them, all the while respecting the metrical rules, art and measure in the individual feet, as well as i n the conjoining of verses[…]
This most noble lady wished that this said work, drawn up and composed through her labour, be called the Cento

Cento means patchwork as well as one hundred. A later work of verse, she also entitled Cento, but because it was 100 lines.
Christine de Pizan said Boccaccio related how this woman poet Proba was exceptional. This one work, which others might spend a lifetime on, was for her one of many.