Poetry readings in 117 cities for Peace of Colombia

By World Poetry Movement

At least 200 poetry readings and art activities will be held between next 9 and 21 May in 117 cities from 63 countries as an expression of solidarity with the peace talks between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), being carried out in Havana, Cuba, from poets and member organizations of the World Poetry Movement (WPM) and Word in the World.

Over 850 poets, artists, intellectuals and scientists from 139 nations signed a statement supporting this global campaign, which began last February, created from the efforts of world poetry to help solve some of the deepest humanitarian crises of our time, war, the deterioration of the lives of people and nature, and the material and cultural poverty of millions of human beings.   READ MORE

Forces of World Poetry for
1.000 Years of Peace in Colombia

850 poets, artists and intellectuals from 139 countries, summoned by the World Poetry Movement (www.wpm2011.org), have signed a statement encouraging peace talks in Colombia and suggesting a ceasefire necessary, while supporting the call for a poetic action overall between 9 and 21 May, which has been endorsed by poets organizations in 63 countries: http://www.wpm2011.org/es/node/269.

Among the signatories are the Nobel Peace Prize Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and 24 scientists, environmentalists and human rights defenders, laureates with Alternative Nobel Prize.   READ MORE

728 Poets from World for Peace
in Colombia (EFE. In Spanish)

Forces of World Poetry for Peace in Colombia

Ars poetica on myth and utopia

By Marra PL. Lanot

Ever since childhood, I have been attracted by myth, by stories made up in fiction, by fables, by mythology, drama, opera, and poetry. With the power of words, I am transformed into an elf, an angel, a cat or a dog, a flower, anything and anywhere my imagination stretches.

Then, as an adolescent in my highschool and college years, I began entering a world different from ours. Words sort of empowered me to dream, to seek, and to believe in a utopia, which I thought was probable.  READ MORE

The Poem: A Model of
Reality, a Model of Possibility

By Ingrid Fichtner

There are voices, there is language. There are lullabies, there are nursery rhymes.
There are songs. There are chants. There are prayers. There are incantations, there are invocations, adjurations.
There are fairy tales, there are legends.
There are myths or mythologies, in every culture on earth.
We grow into an imaginary world just as we grow into the real world.
We grow into poetry just as naturally as we grow into language.   READ MORE

About Poetry, About Life

By K. Satchidanandan

I cannot tell from where poetry came to me; I had hardly any poet- predecessors. Whenever I try to think about it, I hear the diverse strains of the incessant rains of my village in Kerala and recall too, the luminous lines of the Malayalam Ramayana   I had read as a schoolboy where the poet prays to  the Goddess of the Word to keep on  bringing  the apt words to his mind without a pause like the endless waves of the sea.  My mother taught me to talk to cats and crows and trees; from my pious father I learnt to communicate with gods and spirits. My insane grandmother taught me to create a parallel world in order to escape the vile ordinariness of the tiringly  humdrum everyday world; the dead taught me to be one with the soil; the wind taught me to move and shake without ever being seen and the rain trained my voice in a thousand modulations.   READ MORE

An African Scholar-Poet

By Tanure Ojaide

I see myself as a scholar-poet—each side reinforcing the other.

Traditional African poetry is composed and performed as a way of knowing through questioning of existing conditions, habits, actions, and happenings in the society towards establishing a salutary ethos. African literary aesthetics demand functionality (not art for art’s sake) and relevance (either tangible or symbolic). The poetry attempts to entertain as it endeavors to mold individuals and the entire society towards better morals, ethics, and values. I learned to write poetry by way of listening to my Urhobo people’s songs and chants and reading Western and other poets at school; two traditions that influence my writing.   READ MORE

The Irish Offshore on land
Poetry in Irish Now

By Liam Ó Muirthile

If being a poet in Irish feels like living offshore on land, that feeling of offshoreness seems to be the undercurrent of a primary call: of journeying there in order to stay here. A paradox of course, but confirmed and sustained by experience. In the world of poetry in Irish - a compass without co-ordinates - each poet marks out an individual point without making the compass whole.   

There have been and are enough poets working in Irish to box the compass - “to know and to be able to recite the points and quarter points of the magnetic compass from north through south to north again, both clockwise and anticlockwise. It is now a lost art...”   READ MORE

The Irish Language and its Literature:
a Brief Overview and some Points to Ponder

World Poetry School

A Project by the World Poetry Movement

“Full of merit, yet poetically humans
dwell upon this earth”
F. Hölderlin

In accordance with the strategic goals of the World Poetry Movement (WPM), this project answers the need for achieving the second purposed goal, written down this way: Global reach improved in the development of audiences through the calling for formative poetic actions.

To achieve this objective it is needed to coordinate, with WPM’s Education Commission, the planning, design and implementation of a World Poetry School that make it possible to articulate Poetry Schools and formative poetic projects from around the world.   READ MORE

World Poetry Movement in
response to the historical crisis

As in primitive times, a replica of which still survives in the world, and based, of course, on centuries of experience and planning, we continue to believe that the economy is the foundation of survival and human evolution on earth. Material and technological development, centuries later, has proven to be formidable. But contrary to the beginning, progress has not protected the entire human race, favoring only groups and individuals who have the power and capacity to decide on the uncertain future of all.

What has happened to natural solidarity, the poetics of origins and the intertwining of elements, replaced by callous selfishness, the cold absence of poetry in human society, and the subjugation and pillage of nature?    READ MORE

Poetry was born before poets

By Lello Voce
From Alfabeta No 15 December 2011
Translation by Susanna Maggioni

Poetry was born before poets. Poetry was born in the world, not before the world, even if it then is the first to strive to find a code to make the world understandable.

There has been poetry long before there has been any news of any poet, if it is true, as it is, that it is the oldest medium known to man for non-genetic transmission of information. And perhaps it was something like what Vico was referring to in his Scienza Nuova, when he talked of the most poetical language of the origins.

Neither can poetry do without the world; unless it wants to disappear ... Poetry was born together with the community.    READ MORE

23rd INTERNATIONAL POETRY
FESTIVAL OF MEDELLIN

For 1.000 Years of Peace in Colombia
Myth and Utopia

July 6th to 13th, 2013

La Cite ´Botanique painting of poet and
artist Werewere Liking (Cameroon)

INVITED POETS

One Kind of Voice
About my Poetry Writing

By Jidi Majia
Translated by Denis Mair

I write poems, because my birth could have happened no sooner and clearly no later than the exact day of June 23, 1961.
I write poems, because I myself am a random event.
I write poems, because my parents are both of the Nuosu ethnicity; they aredescendants of Zhyge Alu, the divine hero of the Nuosu.
I write poems, because my grandfather was especially handsome, but my grandmother was a bit ugly.
I write poems, because I live in a small city called Zhaojue, where many Nuosu people and Han people live together.   READ MORE

Three Myths

By Ilya Kaminsky

In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor’s backyard, producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line.

My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one-armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country.   READ MORE

A Message of the Myth

By Gerdur Kristny

For the past two years I have participated in poetry festivals in Indonesia, Norway, Nicaragua, India, UK, Bangladesh and Finland – just to name a few of the countries I have visited. When I published my forth book of poetry in 2010, Bloodhof, as the title of Rory McTurk's English translation goes (published by Arc 2012), I never have imagined that this book would lead me to so many different places. Bloodhoof is composed as one long poem based on an ancient Nordic myth, told in the Eddic poem Skírnismál, telling the story of how the Nordic fertility god, Freyr, fetched my namesake, Gerdur Gymisdóttir, from her far-away home as his bride.  READ MORE

Interview with Icelandic poet Gerður Kristný

Ars Poetica

By Anne Vegter

1
This morning a literary critic wrote on Facebook, “... the chaotically extensive and aimless machination of the imagination, which I shall call the open space, makes me suspect more and more that it is I who connects areas otherwise far apart...” In his explanation of this open space the critic cites the philosopher Deleuze, “…that what flows between things is desire…” I never read Deleuze’s exposition and unhindered by any contextual knowledge would be more than happy to inscribe those words on one of my walls at home. It is as if the philosopher is describing a world that I try to create with my words: “That what flows between things is desire.”  READ MORE

My Experience with Poetry

By Les Wicks

Superstition - there is this irrational fear in me when it comes to writing about writing. I worry that anything examined too much degrades in its fundamental nature. But I welcome this chance to say a few words on my approaches with a specific focus on myth and utopias. Only a few though…

A while ago I was asked to describe my spiritual beliefs, I came up with two words -generically numinous. As a poet I am continually fascinated by the wild, bright edges of human experience - the gods, supernatural beings and heavens all play at the furthest peripheries of the quotidian.   READ MORE

Vietnam: Poetry, Myth and a Utopian Vision

By Nguyen Phan Que Mai

On a foggy morning in February 2012, winter had droped a blanket of light rain and mist over a delegation of 80 international and over 100 local poets as we proceeded to Poem Mountain, Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. The road was muddy and uneven, and the wind threatened to blow us sideways. As we hung on to each other’s arms for support, we could not resist casting quick glimpses out to the bay, where hundreds of small mountains sprung up from the crystal, blue water. We had arrived at the Bay of the Descending Dragons and a UNESCO World Heritage destination, and we were on our way to open the First Asia-Pacific Poetry Festival at the foot of Poem Mountain, a site that proves that poetry and myth co-exist, and are a part of the everyday landscape of Vietnam.  READ MORE

On Myth

By Goenawan Mohamad

                                     Jackie Chan is a myth. 
                                      -- Jackie Chan.

But Jackie Chan breaths.  He walks, acts, smiles, eats, defecates, does acrobatic leaps, and most probably has sex too.  But like everybody else, especially people with a certain fame, he has a shadow.  His shadow,  in the form of Jackie Chan, sometimes larger in size,  always stands next to him, in different  colours.  He and the movie industry are partly responsible for its presence;  but actually other people, his fans or his  detractors, produce it for themselves -- to grasp the ungraspable which is Jackie Chan.    READ MORE

Symbol of coexistence and celebration of life

The 23rd annual International Poetry Festival of Medellinwill be held from 6 to 13 July 2013, a symbol of resistance possible through the virtues of the poetic word that represents and unites us, to help transformplaces of fratricidal violence into spaces for coexistence and the celebration of life.

With the participation of 60 poets from 45 countries, from the far corners of the Earth, this new version of the festival will be dedicated to the poetic experience for the re-signification of myth as memory that is foundational knowledge and of utopia as acting reality that leads to a new humanism, freed from all the mistakes that sunk us into inequality and exclusion.   READ MORE