{"id":10777,"date":"2010-08-03T07:48:01","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T14:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10777"},"modified":"2010-08-03T07:48:01","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T14:48:01","slug":"three-poems-up-on-poets-for-living-waters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10777","title":{"rendered":"Three Poems Up on Poets For Living Waters"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am late publicizing the fact that three of my poems<\/a>, “Like This,” “Free Radicals” and “Empty Rhetoric,” were published on Poets for Living Waters<\/a>. Here is “Free Radicals:”<\/p>\n

Rowboats on the pond:
\nrandom particles
\ndancing to laws
\nthey couldn\u2019t name
\neven if the god
\nthat doesn\u2019t exist
\ndescended this moment
\nand himself commanded
\nthem to speak<\/p>\n

\u2014and our son, sleeping,
\nnestles further back
\nin his stroller, animals,
\nno doubt, tracking with him
\nthrough his dreams
\nthe mud of the day
\nwe\u2019ve just lived;
\nand when he wakes
\nhe\u2019ll read the story
\nback to us,
\nthe narrative components
\nbouncing off each other
\nlike these vessels
\nwould do on the water
\nif all at once their pilots slept<\/p>\n

\u2014which, if we\u2019re honest about it,
\nis how we got here,
\nbumped and bonded,
\nreleased from our rage
\ninto this hope, this boy,
\nthis: his own life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Submission guidelines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a statement if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, corrected for the spacing errors that appear on the site:<\/p>\n

Tikkun olam<\/em>, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider our\u00adselves obligated to perform. In one strand of Jewish mystical tradition, tikkun olam<\/em> means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of him\u00adself [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane, though no less significant level, tikkun olam<\/em> is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam<\/em>. As Sam Hamill has written, \u201cThe first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,\u201d and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], \u201cAll wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.\u201d Finding my way through language to a finished poem is the act of finding that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry\u2019s response to disasters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encompass all three of those possibilities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Poets for Living Waters mission statement<\/a> is also worth reading:<\/p>\n

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9\/11 as a turn away from the disaster\u2019s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.<\/p>\n

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.<\/p>\n

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am late publicizing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Radicals” and “Empty Rhetoric,” were published on Poets for Living Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:” Rowboats on the pond: random particles dancing to laws they couldn\u2019t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-issues","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}