Malala Yousafzai tribute at 'Word-Dreamer':& a call for a Canadian Malala Anthology

Dear poet-friends,

as you know I was asked to be a co-editor for a special FutureCycle Press Anthology for Malala Yousafzai and have sent out many invitations to friends and colleagues to send submissions. However, I've been rather unceremoniously removed from that position when it became clear to the publisher(s) that I was being too pro-Canadian in my selection of poems and generally too tough as editor, especially in regards to submissions from Americans. It was only until I first posted my own little tribute to Malala here and Joseph Hutchison his afterwards that FutureCycle, inspired by our posts, developed the idea of a special Anthology edition.

I'm calling out to Canadian publishers to perhaps pick up the impetus I started at 'Word-Dreamer' and begin our own Anthology. I'd be more than happy to share editing duties. In the meantime I'll continue to celebrate Malala here and ask that you please send to me at 'Word-Dreamer' any poetry that the recent shooting by the Taliban of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year old blogger and women's education rights activist in Pakistan, may have recently inspired you to write. I will post all submissions as they are given to me at cdidiodato@yahoo.ca or cdidiodato@gmail.com. Any format & style (provided they be respectful) will be accepted.

Let's celebrate here the exemplary courage and dignity of this remarkable young person.

Thank you!
__________________________


1) Malala--
  walking hand in hand,
   a steep staircase

Conrad DiDiodato

 

2) The Harrows of Halloween
 

This night of black-leaf key

opens the old door between worlds,

the dead I knew flit through, cast no shadows

on the moist opened earth,

the dead I did not know this orbit

come costumed through

grimace at my puzzled witness,

for in this ancient valley

dead-sight is granted

to the fay-touched few.

They affirm connection

the helix thread of everything

since the singularity of creation.

The earth is old

her children seek forbidden revelation

unhallowed Halloween a harrowing.
 

Katherine L. Gordon

October 31st. 2012.

3) Malala

Malala, your name sounds like a song
but it means grief-stricken in Urdu,
language of poets. You are named
after a poet, a warrior woman and
you have so lived up to your name.

The courage it takes to cross borders
defined by others, courage to uphold
freedom to read, learn, speak­ to be
the fully human that is all our birthright.

“Every girl in Swat is Malala. We will
educate ourselves. We will win. They
can't defeat us,” states her classmate.

Now it’s our turn to take up the call,
education for every child for which
women and girls today rally across
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan lands.

Malala, Malala. I hear the ululation
of lament and of celebration for her.
Can you hear what she’s crying? You
can join her common cause. But
how fares the girl in her hospital bed?

That beautiful face blasted. Her voice
silenced, her eyes shut. Hang on, girl,
hang on. There’s work to be done and we
desperately need such spirit among us.
 

Her father cries when Malala falls that all
Pakistan stands up. And now she too can
stand, what will Pakistan do? March on...

Grief is no time for emotion. Let sky open
and open to more sky. Light, we call for
light to dispel the darkest oppression. Her
name on a million lips in many tongues.

Malala, Malala, Malala. Hear the ululation

and respond.

Penn Kemp


4) Ed Baker's haiga tribute to Malala entitled "Sudden Sharp Pain" (click on image to enlarge):

5) Speaking Out
 

Raising the voice to speak against injustice 

puts the speaker on a path of collision

from those who vehemently oppose their ideas.

One young blogger, Malala, dared to do so

Speaking out about life in the Swat Valley

the need for girls to be educated

Pakistan and the world has taken note

of the attempted murder of this girl 

yet where was the outcry when many Malalas

Ayeshas, Ahmads and Bilals were killed by drones?

Who spoke up for them on the world stage?

People like you and me, living out their lives

their existence snuffed  out by unpiloted drones

hope of their families, cut down where they stood.

Injustice is a blight upon humankind

those who perpetrate it will be judged harshly

in the history books of future generations.

People who want harmony and peace

mothers, fathers, sons and daughters

young and old, let us work together

to eradicate injustices.
 

©Wilma Seville2012

6) Malala's Beads

Midway up the mountain,

on the day the bullets struck,

a flock of patterned Chukars,

the Partridge of Pakistan,

stood in feathered silence

as though they knew

your voice was stifled,

and the Sage

who sensed their stillness

strung your words

on mala beads,

said she learned

what lasts forever

when a thousand pairs of wings

filled the sky with sudden flight,

blessing schoolgirls with their shadows

beneath a streaming, soaring sun.

Andreas Gripp

The new 'realism' as expounded by Felix

"the alliterative platitude world-weary
  coming to mind"
                                                 (Frank Samperi, The Expulsion)


It's too anthroporeal, says the chic Roi, with
  glee,
that a void absurd judgementally human thing
  as 'me' shall fly-

or  the being-er, thought or rather a type of
  theory rooted deep in
   guys who try

to always stretch or rejig ugly brunal worlds of
   their choosing

Oh! Bachelard, elard........

At any or over my dead dream, explanandum
  sensual we may be, a relief from
  le  Maître -

as every smiley Po saith, superidealist-

at best a red momenta in
                       a
                         fallible
                                 frog
                                       eye

   
                            (we'll always be)
 

Cid Corman: "Sun Rock Man"

Cid Corman

Sun Rock Man, of all the many books of poetries, is the work that is the most closely of a piece with Cid Corman's "complete abode" poetics. The unembellished language of observation in which Corman excels can fuse easily with the "poverty undisguised, unmitigated" of Matera (capital city of the province of Matera in southern Italy). As how couldn't it? The poetry is a work of meridional heat and sun, of ancient rock and village customs: the accustomed materials of the poet with some one hundred poetry publications to his name. And there isn't just the outline of Corman's poetical landscape but the balzante of eye and language rhythms , the very teeming of "place" with its own distinctive "livingdying".

To feel as Corman does the "rain rot/rock" ("THE TUFA") of this "inland region between the Ionian sea and the Adriatic" (more particularly "where the/valleys/cross/winds//thrash and/the sun/pales/weeds") is certainly a distinctive type of poetry writing. But it's important to feel how Corman feels the place & keeps to the forefront the exquisitely alluring mystery of the "rock" whereon sun and (wo)man trudge together. Observations begin and end with the "paleolithic" and must range beyond the senses into a sort of collective psyche from which the poet who can only see will be necessarily excluded. His rhythms--and they are superb!-- succeed in quieting the terrors of cultural aloneness, and this only for the sake of preserving the dignities of his temporary Matera home. The poetry's in the details of oppressive heat and the intractability of "carved rock" everywhere, perilous "pits/under the piles of hay" ("the barn") and empty temples to the sun and yet the result is always a deepening friendship, a confraternity perhaps or certainly unfeigned sympathy with the lifecycles of a place Corman has grown to love.

Place grows into love and from love can arise, among other things, the effortless motion of rock-dwellers who avoid and yet self-create in the sun, getting easily out of and into the commonplaces of "sun/on sun" and "stone on/stone" because they are peculiarly born to it :

to get
out of the sun
these rocks
blatant rocks

kids hop-
ping hot cobbles
flip coins
under carts

of sun
whose leadpoles un-
harnessed
hail the sun

women
ages of old
cramped black
mend shadows

men and
mules and sun creep
down to
the bottom

a sun
on sun on sun
stone on
stone on stone

bottom
building for them
a dry
common well (from NO WAY)

Familiarity with language and customs (and Corman knew both very well) discloses the outside and deep interior thrum of village life, as does a poet's own sympathetic heart. Corman never wrote what he didn't love. "I do not know them. I love them./How can I not?" (I Contadini) Nor did he write anything that he didn't thoroughly see as it was, in life as in his own poetry.The buckled and black-vested old people ("The Old Men") soiled in the life of Matera, the "carter/cursing his horse" (reading Vico) or the man on the "jogging mule" (The Geographer), children who "irk each other" (the porch) because of the heat or the sidewalk artist copying the saint of Murillo in chalk (the sidewalk)--if any of these are to be accessed only through the usual literary sensoria, it's little more than ornate traveller's reportage. Corman also had to be 'there' and move with it.

Matera, if anything could personify it, can be a type of  Friday night ritual (Serra Venerdi) or a scene of men working in the hills (The labors), a walk through almond groves (The Almond Trees), a visit to the town square ( The Stars at Piazza Pascoli): it can be not just these but, in fact, any one of a number of myths or remembered collectivities, provided only that the town always form a backdrop to a narrative as ancient as its rock, cruel as the hodiernal heat. Rock, sun and (wo)man--and a town's personages vary as much as "La Signorina", "Professor Nitti" and even the cave-dweller counseling Corman in spices-- are a poetry's constants here. Even in death (certainly an "occasion") the town pauses for only a moment:

when one man dies
all go

the town dies a
moment

at attention
head bared

the procession
goes on

one studies not
to breathe

or breathe with the
earth's breath

sharing a plot
of grass

returning to
seeming

perhaps less than
ever

There's a quiet dignity to rock whose presence is both maternal and ontic, culling Matera itself  from 'madre' (mother)  and 'terra' (earth), the ground of life in both of those uniquely literal senses. Shall we call it a drama as well? As see in the name "La Calamita" both the forces of a cafe ("The place to be seen") and  a sense of the irreality of life outside it: or the even more remarkable reenactment of "I Promessi Sposi"in a sunlit square. The square, cave-home ("prehistoric slum/from whence they come") and parched valley are each not a stage so much as a proscenium where action is more than viewing and tragically less than direct engagement in the forces that shape & wither. Or is the whole essentially operatic: with the usual accompaniments of "Marta Marta" or squealings of an "idiot-daughter" or festival musicians dressed in "navy-blue"?

The town is continually prey to the double 'mother'/'earth' movements, which it is the poet's duty to record. Sun Rock Man is this durable drama and song wrenched out of rock, erupting into the occasional form of the carnevalesque (Luna Park) or religio-bacchanalian (La Bruna). They live by the one inescapable force--call it poverty, piazza, the interminable "landscape of stone"--that, like it not, makes them cling to each other. The religious import of "Rock"--because Italy is a deeply pious nation--is not just stone cold tabernacle to a collective psyche that has nowhere to go but "over and over/the same ground" (the monologue): it's essentially the hope of a return to an abyssal dark night that will be a little more bearable the next day :

People and night, night
and people. To get
out. To get together.

They walk under the
arched white posts under
laced lights as if married.

They pass the skulls carved
on the shoals of the
Church of Purgatory.

They pace to the bleat
of the old bland or
wait at the edge. For what?

For whatever it
is. They want the sound,
of it, the deafening,

and then they go on
over and over
the same ground, half-embraced

for fear of nowhere
to go and nothing
to find whey they get there. ("the monologue")

Corman who both knew and loved Italian people and their literature--among the many he'd promoted or published in Origin were Nobel poet Eugenio Montale, novelist Ignazio Silone and philosopher Giorgio Agamben--also knew because he himself would embrace self-exile as a literary vocation. Matera and Kyoto have produced similar poetries for knowing Cid Corman. I've never known a writer (certainly as evident in his letters) more estranged from his native home: born, it seems, to the poetics of i forestieri. Sun Rock Man is a distinctive type of "livingdying" he'd heard in the quarries and caves, marketplaces and Aragon churches. Whether it's the peculiarly moldy rock of Matera and "white-moustached" souls of its backlands, Corman's is a work that could anthologize any peoples and places. He had the genius and heart for it.

Raymond Souster: in memoriam

"His ashes should be carried up Yonge St. by elephants"
                                                            (Joe Fiorito,Toronto Star)


Poet-editor James Deahl has just alerted us to the passing of a great Canadian poet, Raymond Souster. Below is the text of James's announcement. I've reflected on Souster's poetry here. Deahl's own introduction to Souster's book of verse Big Smoke Blues can be read here.

Thank you, James!
________________________________-

Canada lost one of its greatest poets yesterday. Here is the bio note I wrote for The Ambassador not very long ago.

Raymond Souster was born in Toronto during 1921 and has been a leading member of the Great Generation for the past 70 years. Souster won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1964 (for The Colour of the Times), was presented with Canada’s Centennial Medal in 1967, won the City of Toronto Book award in 1979 (for Hanging In), and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995. He was a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets and served as LCP President from 1967 to 1971. He is the author of well over 70 books, largely of poetry, most recently Easy Does It and Never Counting the Cost.

 

Souster served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. In the 1950s, he edited first Contact and later Combustion, the foremost Canadian poetry magazines of their day. He also ran Contact Press for 15 years (1952 – 1967), which published many of Canada’s most important contemporary poets. Souster lives in Toronto with his wife Rosalia.

Or you can check Ray on Google. In my short bio I only hit some (but certainly not all) of the highlights. The bio on Google has not been updates since 2006, so it does not mention Ray’s most recent 13 books. You read correctly, 13 new books in 6 years. And a 14^th book was almost completed.

Below are two of the last poems Raymond Souster wrote. One is a love poem (Ray never stopped writing love poems) and the other is one of his best Christian poems.

Silver Creek

 

She has become

the magical silver creek

of his boyhood’s hot

summer afternoon,

meandering lazily

beneath a leafy canopy

through which

the mottled sunshine

faintly shines.

Now in his imagination

he cups both hands

and dips them in

her gently murmuring stream,

getting at least

one thirsty sip

of her life-renewing water

with the certainty

that her wondrous presence

will never happen again

in his lifetime.

 

Good Friday

 

While 4,700

advance pool election stations

are being readied across

the length and breadth

of this fair land,

Roman soldiers

are tying the wrists

and nailing the feet

of our Jesus Christ,

and while children

are hunting excitedly

through the grass

for chocolate-covered eggs

of Easter,

His thirst-driven cries

are being cruelly answered

by those same soldiers

raising on a pole

to His lips

a cloth soaked in vinegar,

and while Earth Day celebrations

occurring at the same time

find many people

planting much needed trees,

the tortured head

of the Son of God

sinks down

and with a last moan of pain

is released from this world.

Fraternally,

. . . James

Felix

(for Felix Baumgartner)


It's worth--as, i.e. in hearts--the Wains
  and circles, star-blossoms,
in time to grow into this Nietzschean

Twinscrewing worlds & my smallness, like this--
  it's done at last!
or in this Kampflatz of a life

falling like something vatic, & bursting
  across the eye

To be told everything's reducible to fear of error
  even up at the top--

god! let us begin

Malala Yousufzai: a verse tribute

Education activist Malala Yousufzai

 A fourteen-year old blogger and outspoken activist for women's education rights was shot, as she was coming home from school, by the Taliban in Pakistan recently. See article here. I celebrate a young woman's courage, dignity and idealism.

I see Malala in the faces of all my young students.


Malala--
  walking arm in arm,
    deep stairway