A 100 Thousand Poets for Change poster by volunteer designer Odysseas Milios (info@ijustdesign.gr)

What will you be doing this Saturday, September 24, 2011? How about taking part in what’s billed as the biggest poetry event in history?

100 Thousand Poets for Change is the unifying force behind the widely diverse and decentralized endeavors to take place on September 24. Some 600 events in 450 cities and 95 countries are planned, and the numbers are growing daily. The movement is radically inclusive—the only requirement for an associated event is that it promote some kind of environmental, social, or political change “within the framework of peace and sustainability.” In the big bucket of change, the poets and others participating decide what to do. As a sampling:

• People will chalk the sidewalks with poems in Wilmington, North Carolina.
• A dance party is planned in Greece, and drum circles will beat out hope for peace in California, New Mexico, Nigeria, Jamaica, and Gambia.
• A poet will sit at a typewriter in an independent bookstore and produce poems on demand—while dressed as the Poetry Fox. (Don’t worry if you aren’t sure what a Poetry Fox looks like. My understanding is they’re exceptionally rare.)
• At least two poets are planning to read poems while flying commercially (on different flights).
• Another poet plans to read a poem to an Eastern seaboard marsh she’ll drive past on that Saturday.
• And there are literally hundreds of readings, slams, open mics, and workshops around the world.

While I’m hoping to do more on September 24, I plan at a minimum to participate in an effort to inundate with poetry the inboxes of state and local government offices in North Carolina (where I live). Poets and poetry lovers are encouraged to e-mail poems to their elected representatives. Poets Joseph Bathanti and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, North Carolina organizers of the mass e-mailing effort, explain the details:

Please use the poem’s title for the subject line, and place the poem itself in the body of the e-mail, with your name and the town you live in at the bottom of it. No additional message should be inserted. Our aim is for the poems themselves to be the message. The poem you elect to send does not have to be political, per se, though it can be argued that all poems are political. Of course the subject matter remains solely your choice. We request, however, that this action be one that underscores our dignity as poets and the integrity of our art. Our intention is not to shout at our politicians, or in any way insult them, but to present a powerful united advocacy for change—and to alert them to our constituency.

I already have my poem picked—it’s one I’ve had memorized for years, and it seems to fit the bill. (Be sure to read “7 Reasons to Memorize Some Poetry” on Jeff Cobb’s Mission to Learn blog, if you haven’t already.)

In Place of a Curse
by John Ciardi

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,
I shall forgive last the delicately wounded
who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else,
never got up again, neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.

They who are wholly broken, and they in whom
mercy is understanding, I shall embrace at once
and lead to pillows in heaven. But they who are
the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters
with extortions of a mock-helplessness,

I shall take last to love, and never wholly.
Let them all in Heaven—I abolish Hell—
but let it be read over them as they enter:
“Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing,
gave nothing, and could never receive enough.”

So what will you be doing September 24? Whether you live in North Carolina or no, whether you’re a poet or not, you can e-mail your legislators a poem. Or you can find some local happening at http://www.100TPC.org. Or you can organize your own. We’d love to hear what you plan to do—so let us know by leaving a comment.

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This post was originally published on Mission to Learn. I recommend the Mission to Learn blog, which is dedicated to lifelong learning.

On July 25, I read on Carolina Book Beat, along with the other members of Carrboro Poetica, a bi-monthly poetry critique group. Co-hosted by Audrey J. Layden and Paul Nagy co-host, Carolina Book Beat airs on WCOM, a community radio station tucked in a tiny building in downtown Carrboro.

An MP3 recording of the hour-long show is available on the Carolina Book Beat site. So please check out Sara Claytor, Phyllis Jean Green, Barbara Kenyon, Priscilla Webster-Williams, and me reading our own poems and talking about the dynamics or our critique group.

Last Tuesday I attended the Emrys Annual Meeting at the beautiful Upcountry History Museum in Greenville, SC (Who knew that Greenville has a museum row? Presumably lots of folks, just not I.) As part of the program, I read from the just unveiled How Language Is Lost, published by Emrys Press.

Jeff Cobb posted video of me reading the title poem from the chapbook on his Mission to Learn blog, and I’m including the text of the poem below.

How Language Is Lost

The Abipón had a word for
everything, even the invisible
amphitrichous spirits that
swam the Argentine Gran Chaco.

Wrestling, riding, raiding the Spanish for horses—
tributes to unseen gods (rabbit-like, prone to disappearing)—
gave way to farming, kneeling in naves.
Their own shamans couldn’t shape-shift anymore,
forgot the prophesied destruction—a vast yellow snake
swallowing rivers, trees whole—and crouched silently in the dust
as a clerk counted them like animals, like cattle,
sent his report back to court: 5,000 in 1750.

When King Carlos expelled the Jesuits in 1768,
half the Abipón had died of small pox.
The cleavage between this life and the old was complete.

Fifty years later, when a shriveled woman
with spiraled palm leaves in her pierced ears
and blue tattoos around her elbows lies on a straw mat
in a hut corner in Resistancia,
————————————————the younger woman—no relation—
cooking over a smoky fire and soothing a baby to sleep
does not understand her dying words,
her articulation of the world to come,
the world lost.

–Celisa Steele

Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival

Yesterday I attended the third annual Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival. It was a wonderful afternoon and evening of poetry, Turkish music, Turkish food, and comraderie. The event showed that North Carolina poetry is thriving–and being enriched by poetry from beyond its borders.

I attended last year for the first time, as one of ten winners in the poetry competition (for my poem “How Language Is Lost,” which has become the title poem of my first chapbook due out next month from Emrys Press). I had such a wonderful time last year, and Mehmet Öztürk, Buket Aydemir, Birgül Tuzlalı, and the other organizers do such a wonderful job that I couldn’t miss this year.

Highlights for me from the festival include:

• Learning more about contemporary Turkish poetry and hearing some fabulous examples, particularly the concept of eda, from Murat Memet-Nejat, editor of Eda: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry
• Getting absolutely energized by the work of Kane Smego, CJ Suitt, and Jake Jacoby, three Sacrificial Poets–my first taste of slam poetry, I’m chagrinned to admit
• Beautiful Turkish music in original arrangements performed by the Serami/Aydemir/Öztürk trio (guitar, violin, and cello)
• Readings by Dorianne Laux and John Balaban

I’ll conclude with the Hikmet poem that opened yesterday’s festival. It appears in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. (Mutlu Konuk was the featured speaker at last year’s Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival.)

The Cucumber

The snow is knee-deep in the courtyard
and still coming down hard:
it hasn’t let up all morning.
We’re in the kitchen.
On the table, on the oilcloth, spring–
on the table there’s a very tender young cucumber,

We’re sitting around the table staring at it.
It softly lights up our faces,
and the very air smells fresh.
We’re sitting around the table staring at it,
amazed

We’re as if in a dream.
On the table, on the oilcloth, hope–
on the table, beautiful days,
a cloud seeded with a green sun,
an emerald crowd impatient and on its way,
loves blooming openly–
on the table, there on the oilcloth, a very tender young cucumber,

The snow is knee-deep in the courtyard
and coming down hard.
It hasn’t let up all morning.

–Nâzım Hikmet

Thomas Lux (photo © Dorothy Alexander)

Thomas Lux read at the Craft Center in the basement of Thompson Hall on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh Wednesday night, and I was glad to be in attendance. He read mostly newer things, including “Dead Horse,” which can be read on the American Academy of Poets’ Poets.org Web site.

In preparation for Lux reading, I decided to memorize one of his poems–I like to memorize poems, and it had been a while since I added a new one to my repertoire, so his reading was a welcome push. I chose “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy.”

Although he didn’t read “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy” Wednesday, much of what he read hewed to the same aesthetic–a simplicity of style and voice, a quirky humor, and leaps that can be breathtaking in their unexpected aptness.

“Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy” begins:

For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentless they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary arachnids.

And ends:

that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

How could you not love a poem that starts with rain and spiders and ends with salvation?

The Poetry Foundation has a recording of Lux reading “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy,” as well as the full text. Give it a listen–not a bad way to kick off Poetry Month 2011.