[via Marrty]

Deadline October 1, 2010.
For the follow-up to My Diva, the Lambda-nominated essay anthology.
Looking for poems (1-2 pages in length) that explore the relationship between strong female icons and gay men.
Looking for all kinds of DIVAS: singers, actresses, comics, chefs, politicians, writers, visual artists, athletes, scientists, fashion models … Broadway, Opera, Country, fictional, religious, and mythic figures … Already have many standards but would love to see women like Bea Arthur, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Jackie O., Dolly Parton, even characters like Miss Piggy. But open to ideas. Please send poem and a 2-3 sentence bio by October 1, 2010 to Michael Montlack at mikemont17 [at] hotmail.com with “DIVA POETRY ANTHOLOGY” in subject line.

The events and lineup for the Dodge Poetry Festival is being announced. So far: Kathleen Graber, Penny Harter, Rachel Hadas, Santee Frazier, Rita Dove, Kwame Dawes Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Michael Cirelli, Mark Strand and Rigoberto González.
Oct. 7-10th they’re back!
For those keeping track, it was announced to be a victim of its own popularity and was to either end, or regroup and come back much smaller. Run by a charitable foundation with the byline of “a society more humane: a world more livable”, it aims to connect and educate people, among other things, on the power of the word.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is neither an academic symposium nor a writing conference. Through a wide range of poetry readings, storytelling sessions, and musical performances, participants are invited to spend four days immersed in our most ancient arts.

With 2 dozen poets and some events seating 50 and others up to 2700 people, it’s nothing small scale. The regular sessions they have before have been reinstated much the same. (yay!)

Poets on Poetry sessions in which individual Festival Poets discuss their own relationship to poetry by presenting and discussing poems (by others and by themselves) which are important to them.
Conversations: On the Life of the Poet bring together two to four poets to talk with each other and the audience about their lives and their art.
Other Conversations with panels of Festival Poets have included such topics as “The Mysterious Life Within Translation,” “Poetry and Jazz,” “Poetry and the Dignity of the Ordinary,” and “Going Public with Private Feelings,” among many others.
The Festival offers the public the chance to talk with accomplished poets in Conversations on Craft, which include discussions of work patterns and work habits as well as specific matters of poetic craft.

Now I want to watch the lineup develop, and maybe wrangle a route to a road trip. Who’s in?

A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock (Dark Scribe Press, 2010) is edited Christopher Conlon. The anthology is due to release this fall. It will contain poems by two local writers: Deborah-Anne Tunney and Frances Boyle.

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.