World Poetry day(21-03-2012)

Every year on 21st March UNESCO celebrate their World Poetry Day.
UNESCO is the “United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization” – an agency of the United Nations that promotes education and communication and the arts
The decision to proclaim 21 March as World Poetry Day was adopted during the UNESCO’s 30th session held in Paris in 1999.

According to UNESCO, the main objective of World Poetry Day is to “support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard within their communities”.

What do people do?

Many people around the world celebrate World Poetry Day on or around March 21 each year. Government agencies, educators, community groups and individuals get involved in promoting or participating in the day. World Poetry Day is an opportunity for children to be introduced to poetry in classrooms. It is a time when classrooms are busy with lessons related to poetry, in which students examine poets and learn about different types of poetry.

Poets may be invited to read and share their work to audiences at book stores, cafes, universities and schools. Awards and other forms or recognition are made to honour poets and their work. Exhibitions and poetry evenings are also be held to showcase the work of various poets on or around March 21 to coincide with World Poetry Day.

From their site:

Moreover, this Day is meant to support poetry, return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, promote teaching poetry, restore a dialogue between poetry and the other arts such as theatre, dance, music, painting and so on, support small publishers and create an attractive image of poetry in the media so that the art of poetry will no longer be considered an out-dated form of art.
Today is World Poetry day, which has the aim of promoting  the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world.

One of the aims of  The Parrish Lantern,  is to get more poetry out there, to promote poetry & poets, although this may appear to be a worthwhile, head-held-high culture-buff, kind of gesture, it’s not, to be honest it’s far more basic than that. The simple fact is, I love poetry, nay adore the stuff, would happily meander down the street spouting the stuff  - Don’t try it! appreciation is often expressed by placing one in a locked room. So to get round that slight obstacle here on The Parrish Lantern, we promote events such as World Poetry Day, by taking a journey around the world via its poets

Lapse – Nii Ayikwei Parkes (Ghana)

The Greyhound is late. I’ve been fast
asleep too long to know why, but the man
beside me – Chinese – tells me what time it is.

He turns to the back-lit maze of his phone, taps
a geometry of buttons, gets lost in an exchange
about auditions and lost opportunities. I look

across the aisle: the big guy with the Yankees
cap has struck up a dialogue with the Polish
woman beside him. Her dark eyebrows arch –

an eager pair – in synch under her blond hail; I can
tell she’s open; so is he, but he’s fearful, hasn’t
yet learnt the curved asymmetry of lust. There is

already a lapse between her keenness, his lean
and the speed of his initiative. Somebody should
tell him that if the lapse grows any longer

the door of chance will close – snap in
his face. It’s already too late. The bus is
drifting into Harlem, Connecticut a distant memory:

I hear him say excuse me, he calls his Mom. A pink
rose blooms on the woman’s cheek, she looks
outside. I hang my head, exhale, and close

my eyes. The man beside me snaps his phone shut.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a Ghanaian editor, socio-cultural commentator poet and author of the acclaimed hybrid literary novel,Tail of the Blue Bird (Random House), which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and translated into Dutch and German. A 2007 recipient of Ghana’s national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, he has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and delivered lectures and talks on poetry and creative writing at universities internationally. Nii Ayikwei holds an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck (University of London) and serves on the boards of the Poetry Book Society, the Arvon Foundation and the Caine Prize. As a poet he has published several pamphlets and his latest books of poetry The Makings of You (Peepal Tree Press). was described in the Guardian as, “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language”

Living with Ezra - Kristine Ong Muslim (Philippines)

And this one guy lingered long after the crowd had dispersed. He bent down and inspected the remains of the fallen Humpty Dumpty.

The eggshells littered the pavement directly below the wall. The yolk, once a glistening yellow sun, was now a splotch of yellow mixed with dust.

And this one guy half-wanted to glue Humpty Dumpty back together, half-wanted to just stand back and admire the carnage.

 

Kristine Ong Muslim has authored many chapbooks, including Night Fish (Elevated Books, 2011), Insomnia (Medulla Publishing, 2012), Smaller Than Most  (Philistine Press, 2011). Forthcoming books include the full-length poetry collection Grim Series (Popcorn Press) and several print chapbooks.

Her short fiction and poetry have been published in hundreds of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Bellevue Literary Review, Boston Review,Contrary Magazine, Hobart, Existere, Narrative Magazine, Southword,Sou'wester, The Pedestal Magazine, Turnrow, and Verse Daily.

She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web 2011, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award. Her work also has garnered several Honourable Mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Her online home is http://kristinemuslim.weebly.com

 

 

BASHÕ - Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)

1
Old man among the reeds mistrust of the poet.
He is on his way to the North he is making a book with his eyes.
He is writing himself upon the water he has lost his master.
Love only in things cut out of clouds and winds.
This his calling to visit his friends take leave.
Under fluttering breezes to gather skulls and lips.
Always the eye’s kiss translated into the words’ drive.
Seventeen the sacred number in which coming-forth is ordained.
To digest the past frozen stony as a butterfly.
Polished fossils in a marble tide.
Here passed by the poet on his journey to the North.
Here passed by the poet finally forever.
2
We know poetic poetry the common dangers
of moonstruckness, bel canto. Embalsamed air, that is all,
unless you turn it into pebbles that flash and hurt.
You, old master, polish the pebbles
that you fling to bring down a thrush.
Out of the world you cut an image that bears your name.
Seventeen pebbles for arrows a school of deathly singers.
See by the waterside the track of the poet
on his way to the innermost snowland. See how the water erases it
how the man with the hat inscribes it again
preserves water and footprint, capturing the movement that has passed,
so that what vanished is still there as something that vanished.
3
Nowhere in this universe have I a fixed dwelling
he wrote on his cypress hat. Death took off his hat,
as should be. The sense has remained.
Only in his poems could he dwell.
Just a little while and you will see the cherry blossoms of Yoshino.
Leave your sandals under the tree, lay your brushes aside.
Wrap your stick in your hat, build up the water in lines.
The light is yours, night too.
A while longer the cypress hat and you too will see them,
the snows of Yoshino, the ice cap of Sado,
the island that takes ship to Soren over gravestone waves.
4
The poet is a milling through him the landscape is turned into words.
Yet he thinks just like you and his eyes see the same.
The sun coming to grief in the mouth of the horse.
The outermost temple of Ise the beach of Narumi.
He travels under the sail of grief he steers toward his mission.
His jaws grind flowers into verses foot by foot.
The bookkeeping of the universe as the universe daily presents itself.
In the North he knows himself for a heap of old clothes.
If he is where he will never again be you read his poems:
he peeled cucumbers and mad-apples he paints his life
I too was tempted by the wind that blows the clouds.

Cees Nooteboom (born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom) born 1933, has won numerous literary awards and international renown as an author of novels, novellas and travel books, but likes to think of himself as a poet first. As a poet, he made his début in 1956 with a collection entitled De doden zoeken een huis (The Dead Seek a Home). He never joined any literary circle or group, but remained a loner who felt at home in many rooms of 'the house of poetry' & yet still has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Natures - Gloria Posada (Columbia)

To breathe or to evaporate
to take root or to go somewhere else
Surface is skin or plumage
Departure is flight or path

In the being
horizons are renovated
languages name worlds

The past is the echo of oblivion
Love finds silence
bodies feel the cold

Thought seeks answers
Closeness as distance
gaze as desire
Stars or cells
Blood interior inaccessible

Gloria Posada was born in Colombia in 1967, Since the late 1980s, Gloria Posada has devoted herself to an enquiry into nature and the world, which manifests itself sometimes in words and sometimes in images or shapes. In her quest, poetry and plastic arts have had a parallel development, which occasionally involves installations, sound art or interventions of public space.In 1992 she won the National Young Poetry Award of the Colombian Institute of Culture with her book Oficio divino (Divine Office).  In 1991 she won second prize in the Carlos Castro Saavedra National Poetry Award, and in 1990 she was shortlisted for the Eduardo Cote Lamus National Poetry Award with Vosotras (You Women). Naturalezas (Natures) won a Honourable Mention in the Casa de las Américas Hispano-American Poetry Award (Havana, Cuba) in 2002. These prize-winning collections were later published. In 2002, she also won the Individual Creation Scholarship of the Colombian Ministry of Culture for her Lugares (Places) project. In 2004, she was granted the Colombia-Mexico artistic residence and the FONCA/CONALCULTA award of Mexico.

Common Knowledge - Yi Sha (China)

on the street
in a towering summer heat-wave

a young girl hops
with her hands over her ears

her behaviour is a little odd
there is something beautiful about her

oddness and a so-called beauty
this gives people

the feelings they want
but they pay no attention

to the cause and the source
of her actions

but I know
I have mastered such common knowledge
as a boy

on the way home from the swimming pool
the same movements

would help me get rid of
any last remaining water in my eyes or ears

hotly it would trickle away
and I would then be able to hear the surrounding world again

just like the young girl here before me
I’m sure she’s feeling pretty good right now

hopping with her hands over her ears on the street in a towering summer heat-wave

such common knowledge as this
has helped me find a way into a poetry of essentials

 

Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China’s university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an assistant professor at the Xi’an International Studies University. In 1988 he published a mimeographed first collection, Lonely Street, but found an official publisher for his next collection, Starve the Poets! (1994).Starve the Poets! (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is his first English publication outside China.

Question Time – G.Moon (uk)

Electrodes connect,
jerks the flesh membrane
fire pulses the cells
own route, then
shuts down. Water
Shocks, cools, revitalizes
Puts hope on the backburner
then envelopes the body's
lifeline, cracked naked
the line roots and worms.
A path becomes impulse
all thought gives way to.

Gary Moon is too young to be personal friends of the Beatles/Stones etc. although that hasn’t stopped him humming their tunes badly, when he thought he was alone. He has been writing what he terms word puzzles for as long as his memory can recall. he is not particularly fond of the word Poet, preferring to refer to himself as a Word-botherer or if feeling especially pretentious Wort-Schmied, because of the combination of word & smith relating in his mind to a worker ethic through the idea of a blacksmith toiling at some furnace. A couple of glasses of whisky normally calms him down enough to return to earth. He has been published once & came somewhere in an online poetry comp.

Airwaves - Nuala Ní Chonchúir (Ireland)

You say I am more
canal than river.

Today, unlike myself, I concur.
Even I can be agreeable
on the right occasion.
And what an occasion:

I have old – wampum beads,
a silver peacock – new,
borrowed – wrist-slung pearls,
Airwaves, unchewed – blue.
On Avenue of the Strongest
we swap rings.
On Avenue of the Americas
we eat our fill.
We stroll Fifth to Madison Square.

Here we sit in our
newly minted marriage
in the evening heat.

Today I am more
river than canal.

 

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway county. Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009)) was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize. Her second short story collection To The World of Men, Welcome has just been re-issued by Arlen House in an expanded paperback edition.The Juno Charm, her third full poetry collection, was launched in November. Nuala's newest short story collection Mother America appears from New Island in 2012.