Another year goes by, and this wisdom is as timeless as ever.
08.03.2026 13:11
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Another year goes by, and this wisdom is as timeless as ever.
Perhaps for a future edition of The Book Bag blog, @paulwritespoems.bsky.social
Book covers of poetry collections by Dermot Murphy: In the Quiet Light, The Drift of Memory, and Not Yet Ash.
On World Book Day it feels like a fitting moment to launch my author website. The site is intended as a place where the current collections can sit together and where readers who are interested can explore them more easily. dermotmurphyauthor.com
‘No flags fly over this battlefield,
only logos,
empires built on zeros and ones’
An elegiac poem that questions what is at stake when societies become dictated by greed and the machine, written by Dermot Murphy @fiftywords.bsky.social.
Well done, Dermot. Beautiful collections.
Lines from the frontline: the poet soldiers defending Ukraine. Not since the first world war has there been anything approaching the quality and quantity of work by poets who are also combatants. theconversation.com/lines-from-t...
Apropos of everything, this is a beautiful account to follow from a kind and luminous person. Wishing safety, peace, mercy, grace...
Despite Ice on the Roads, the Peace Monks continue their walk north, this morning.
www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/v...
So very pleased to have a cherita in this powerful Renee Nicole Good anthology. Special thanks to #FinHall for curating this quickly-done collection. All proceeds to benefit Renee's family. More details forthcoming. #poetry
"On 20 September, the official gazette El Peruano published the decision to authorise rights for nature, this time for Lake Titicaca, following a campaign by women from the Peruvian Altiplano to protect the lake..."
goddesses! via Illa Liendo Tagle
perusupportgroup.org.uk/2025/11/wome...
To all who read, commented, & shared the poems in this series, & to the poets who contributed to a new project without knowing exactly how it might unfold: thank you. The 12th poem is now posted in the archive, this account is a resource for articles, & there may also be an essay or two in the fall.
Thank you to @poetryofwitness.bsky.social for sharing my #poem "Emerging from the Penumbra" first published by @chaossectionpoetry.bsky.social #PoetryOfResistance
I would love someone to write a poetry book about Jayaben Desai and the women of Grunwick. I would read that book in a heartbeat. We need their courage and their voices more than ever.
French-Tunisian-Moroccan journalist & filmmaker Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us' is vital and rousing documentary which examines the troubled situation in Sudan from ground level, while nodding to country’s rich literary history. Poetry recitations have never been this... riotous. #SudanRememberUs
Armed with October: Thawra and Poetry, from Khartoum to Toronto
Here, Khaldah Salih and Fathima Cader interweave a translation of “October Al Akhdar” with their reflections on the lessons that historic and ongoing struggle in Sudan provide for liberation struggles everywhere.
'Who writes the elegy
when the future dies unseen?'
And for the protection of all lives including immigrants, as it was inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
‘No flags fly over this battlefield,
only logos,
empires built on zeros and ones’
An elegiac poem that questions what is at stake when societies become dictated by greed and the machine, written by Dermot Murphy @fiftywords.bsky.social.
Calling for freedom from fear and coercion, and for the safety and security of lives under threat, a poem of dissent that continues to resonate in the U.S. and beyond by @merrildsmith.bsky.social.
Reading the book, 'Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,' edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché
Cover of the book 'The Witness of poetry' by Czeslaw Milosz
Visiting w/ family tonight to escape my apt a bit. Recognizing the incongruity of reading these in a situation far removed from extremity, but excerpts now posted for 'Against Forgetting' (full intro: tinyurl.com/2skuc2tw). Recommend the audio for Milosz' book, as it's based on his 1981-82 lectures.
I fell beside him; his body turned over, already taut as a string about to snap. Shot in the back of the neck. That's how you too will end, I whispered to myself; just lie quietly. Patience now flowers into death. Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me. On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth. This verse describes the death of his fellow prisoner Miklós Lorsi, a violinist, & remains the only trace of his dying. Miklós Radnót's poems evade easy categories.... not merely personal, nor are they, strictly speaking, political. What is one to make of the first lines of "Forced March"? The man who, having collapsed, rises, takes steps, is insane; he'll move an ankle, a knee, an errant mass of pain, & take to the road again... The poem becomes an apostrophe to a fellow marcher so it is not only a record of experience but exhortation & plea against despair. It is not a cry for sympathy but a call for strength. The hope that the poem relies on, however, is not "political," not a celebration of solidarity in the name of a class or common enemy. It opposes the dream of future satisfaction to the reality of current pain. One could argue it uses the promise of personal happiness against a politically induced misery, but it does so in a spirit of communality. We know the atrocities in the last 100 years. Such monstrous acts have come to seem almost normal. It becomes easier to forget than remember; this forgetfulness becomes our defense against remembering: a rejection of unnecessary sentimentality, a hardheaded acceptance. Modernity, as 20th-C German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno argued, is marked by a superstious worship of oppressive force & concomitant reliance on oblivion. Such forgetfulness is willful & isolating: it drives wedges between the individual & collective fate to which he or she is forced to submit...How do these poems remind us? Holocaust survivor Paul Celan's "Todesfugue" warns us the poem will not represent the world "directly."
If religion can provide a countersolidarity to the enforced communalism of the Stalinist era, it can also lend meaning to desperate experiences. The death of the son in Akhmatova's poem becomes a form of crucifixion: the apparent meaninglessness of terror is transfigured when it is mapped onto the story of Christ's Passion. Furthermore, it transforms that story by giving a special place to the Virgin Mary. Akhmatova's poem enters into a discreet dialogue w/ Christianity, a mutually informing interchange of meaning & pathos that indicates an enduring place for the explanatory possibility of religion: its ability to speak about us & to include us. In countries where religion has been more firmly institutionalized, more central to the workings of the state, its conventions could provide an ironic counterpoint to the official version of extreme events. Wilfred Owen, himself killed in WWI, writes an anthem, a hymn of national praise & victory, for "doomed youth." Bells rung for the newly dead, prayers, candles: all the ritual accounterments of mourning have been superseded by realities of modern warfare: No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Not any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells The dead are mourned not by human song, but by the cacophony of new technologies & armaments. The comforts of religion seem to have no place in this poem. They only remind us of the lack of comfort of the present. Religion in an age of atrocity, as Owen's anthem indicates, can itself bear a heavy responsibility for suffering. For Owen, the difficulty arises from the marriage of religion and the state, of the belligerent and nationalistic aspect of the very notion of the anthem itself. For other writers, religious qualms arise from the sheer prevalence of evil in this century, from the assault on theodicy that genocide, torture, & imposed misery present. This is perhaps most evident in the writings of Jewish poets, like Paul Celan...
Irony, paradox, & surrealism, for all the interpretive difficulties they present, might well be the answer & restatement of Adorno's oft quoted & difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno wrote this just after World War II, & his indictment extends to all forms of art. Art, Adorno felt, rested on the social inequities & objectifying tendencies that made Fascism not only possible but inevitable. Auschwitz, then, was contiguous with all the ornaments of Western art, for it stood as the culmination of culture where culture turned into its opposite. While the language of the everyday might appeal to Hikmet and Radnóti, it may not present an adequate language for witness in situations where the quotidian has been appropriated by oppressive powers. The colonization of language by the state renders that language inaccessible to a poetry that wants to register its protest against such depredations. The accepted languages of art might not be adequate either, for the sphere of art is frequently the first to be at-tacked: Hitler banished the work of the expressionists & celebrated Wagner. Socialist realism displaced all other forms of aesthetic expression under Stalinism. The ultimate example of the cross-fertilization of culture& barbarity took place at Auschwitz, where Jews were forced to play chamber music for their executioners. Art in such a world carries with it a dangerous complicity which it can neither refute nor ignore. Adorno did not wish to banish art from an ideal republic. He wanted art to become conscious of the sins it had to suffer & withstand. A better expression of his understanding of the task of poetry comes in an aphorism from his book Minima Moralia: .. there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, &...holding fast to the possibility of what is better. In such a world poetry will yearn after truth through indirection...will speak...in wounded words...
For decades, American literary criticism has sought to oppose "man" & "society," individual against communal, alterity against universality. Perhaps we can learn from the practice of the poets in this anthology that these are not oppositions based on mutual exclusion but are rather dialectical complementaries. Extremity is born of the simplifying desire to split these dyads into separate parts. It is the product of the drive to expunge one category in the name of another, to sacrifice the individual on the altar of the communal or vice versa. The poetry of witness is itself born in dialectical opposition to the extremity that has made such witness necessary. In the process, it restores the dynamic structure of dialectics. Because the poetry of witness marks a resistance to false attempts at unification, it will take many forms. It will be impassioned or ironic. It will speak in the language of the common man or in an esoteric language of paradox or literary privilege. It will curse & it will bless; it will blaspheme or ignore the holy. Its protest might rest on an odd grammatical inversion, on a heady peroration to an audience, or on a bizarre flight of fancy. It can be partisan in a limited sense but more often...speaks for..."the party of humanity"... I am guided in this by Hannah Arendt's meditation on the self-justifications of collaboration with oppression, on the claim that the resistance of the single individual does not count in the face of the annihilating superiority of totalitarian regimes which make all resistance disappear into "holes of oblivion": The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect & there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story....the lesson of such stories is simple & w/in everyone's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most will comply but some will not..." Resistance to terror...makes the world habitable...
"In such a world, poetry will yearn after truth through indirection—will speak, in the terms Jabès used to describe Celan, in wounded words."
Excerpts from Intro to 'Against Forgetting: 20th-Century Poetry of Witness,' ed. by Carolyn Forché (W.W. Norton, 1993)
Full text here: tinyurl.com/2skuc2tw
“I often think back to the secure time of my childhood. I grew up with the scents of jasmine and geranium in my garden. I have planted those things here to try to recreate a sense of home.”
It's really true. Such strong poems, too.
This poem has origins in #PoemsAbout #Waxtears from @thebrokenspine.co.uk
