Call For Poems of Protest

I wrote written before about protestpoems.org, and we used it as a prompt on Poets Online.

They have a new editor - Richard Pierce-Saunderson. He sent out their projected publication dates for the first half of 2009 and included these submission guidelines.

We’re not looking for partisan propaganda. We’re not looking for party-political mouthings. We’re not looking for sentimental depictions of what you see on the TV. We’re not looking for rhyming greetings card verses.

We want you to champion, not yourselves, but human rights; the rights of those who don’t have the freedom to write and speak as we do. Rage. Celebrate. Mourn. Demand. Scream. Dance.

Formal complaints are especially exciting. There’s something wonderfully subversive about a villanelle that attacks a government deliberately making the same mistake over and over again.

If you need to be inspired, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then check out any objective newsfeed or news site.

Paste your poems (a maximum of 3 one-page poems), into the body of an email and send to write@protestpoems.org. If necessary, you can email a single .doc or .rtf file containing all the poems you are submitting.

Include a brief bio.

We will accept poems previously published on paper, as long as you hold the copyright. We will not accept poems which are already (or have previously been) published online (including blogs). We will publish a poet only once a year.

If your poem deals with a specific call for action, or commemorates a specific person, please let us know.

Publication dates for the first half of 2009 are :

14 Feb
28 Feb
14 Mar
28 Mar
11 Apr
25 Apr
09 May
23 May
06 Jun
20 Jun

I'm really looking forward to reading your submissions, and want us to be able to publish high-quality, edgy material.

Hoping for peace in a violent world,

Richard

Consider a submission...

Poetry from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

I realized today that I had first heard about a collection of poetry written by Guantanamo Bay detainees last summer on an NPR program.

The piece featured attorney Marc Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, and edited Poetry from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, and Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee whose poetry is featured in the collection. Begg was held in Guantanamo for nearly three years, and was released in January 2005 with no charges made against him.

You can listen to the segment online.


"Poetry, art of the human voice, helps turn us toward what we should
or must not ignore. Speaking as they can across barriers actual and
figurative, translated into our American tongue, these voices in
confinement implicitly call us to our principles and to our humanity.
They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy-but
attention. Attention to them is urgent for us."-Robert Pinsky

"Poems from Guantanamo brings to light figures of concrete, individual
humanity,against the fabric of cruelty woven by the 'war on terror.'
The poems and poets' biographies reveal one dimension of this
officially obscured narrative, from the perspective of the sufferers;
the legal and literary essays provide the context which has
produced--under atrocious circumstances--a poetics of human
dignity."-Adrienne Rich

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Poems of Protest

I'm still thinking about the issues addressed in my last post and it had me thinking about a line from a W.H. Auden poem that is frequently quoted out of context. It's the line, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

It's often taken to be a negative comment on the effect, or lack thereof, of poetry on the world. Does poetry matter? Knowing Auden, you would have to wonder if that's what he really meant.

Another case like that would be these three lines from William Butler Yeats:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right.

Actually, both poets had a political side. W.H. Auden went to Spain and supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and Yeats supported Ireland in the uprising against British colonial power. He even served as a Senator for the newly-formed Republic of Ireland.

Here's that line from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" with a bit more context:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Just three days after Auden arrived in New York in early 1939, news came that W. B. Yeats had died. Yeats was 73; Auden was 31. He quickly wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

It's not a protest poem in the traditional sense at all. So why is it in his post?

Read the complete poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and you'll see that it has two ideas in it. It starts with unrhymed verse paragraphs that suggest that poets can't do much more than create a way of being remembered. The second section is in stricter form and argues that poetry is more powerful than time or death. There's an unresolved feeling to the poem as to which is true. Perhaps, Auden wasn't completely sure. I'm not sure myself.

Our April prompt is poems of protest. They might be poems against the war or following a prompt from ProtestPoems.org or in protest of what is happening in Tibet or Darfur or any number of world situations. But Poets Online is not a political website. So, your submissions can also be poems of protest against more abstract or personal concerns.

If you feel the need for writing prompts with more meaning, sign up for monthly poetry prompts at ProtestPoems.org and visit the Poets Against the War site. Post a comment below and let us know about other sites that encourage action-poetry.

Back in February 2003, First Lady Laura Bush canceled her symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" because she learned that some of the poets on her guest list refused to attend in protest against the impending war. A spokesperson for her said that t it would be "inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." As a reaction to that non-event, the Poets Against the War movement was born. Since then, the group's volunteer editors has reviewed more than 22,000 poems.

And just last month, we crossed the 5 year mark for the war in Iraq. Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A poetry collection was published in August 2007 that gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Poems from Guantánamo has poems by 17 detainees, most of whom are still being held there. The poems may not be poetry of the highest quality, but they are a powerful use of poetry, and they make something happen.


Further Reading
There's an extended discussion online about this in "Conversing With the World: The Poet in Society" by Rachel Galvin.

Prompt Action: Protest Poems

I am continuously delighted by the contacts that I make from around the world by doing poetsonline.org and this blog. One such contact inspired me to use the protest poem as a writing prompt for the site in April. It was an email I received from Ren Katherine Powell, the founding editor of Babel Fruit.

Ren is a native Californian, now living on the southwest coast of Norway and has "seriously invested in wool socks." She is a member of the Norwegian Writers' Union and Norwegian PEN's Women Writers Committee representative. She helped to establish the International Cities of Refuge and worked as the project coordinator. She is a dramatist, poet and translator currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. Her performance work has been staged in the US, Canada and Norway. She has two volumes of poetry and nine books of translations to her credit. (More about her on her website and her blog, Sidestepping Real.)

Here's my initial contact from her:

I hoped that you would consider adding two links to your links page. I am the founding editor of Babel Fruit online journal: http://www.babelfruit.org/. We publish award-winning writers of prose and poetry.

We also have an associated project called ProtestPoems.org. It is a writing prompt/protest letter project. Writers do writing exercises anyway. We provide a specific theme and do the grunt work of putting them in the mail. We post the compilations on the website, and all poems contributed to ProtestPoems are considered for Babel Fruit.

Babel Fruit is an independent initiative first established in cooperation with the International Cities of Refuge. Each issue of Babel Fruit presents a previously persecuted or exiled writer.

Poets Online has been offering a monthly poetry prompt for about a decade. But if you feel the need for writing prompts that have more impact, try the monthly poetry prompts at ProtestPoems.org. They have asked for "poems to fight censorship, satire against those who silence satire, acrostic poems to spell out support of free speech." All poems are sent along with the protest letters, and all poems are also considered for publication in Babel Fruit.

How's this for an editorial policy: "These unedited compilations are serious protest actions - an ode to your ant farm will not be included unless the writer wrote about, lived in or liberated an ant farm."