Creativity is non-acceptance, wonder, rebellion
I love Nye's poetry because of the rich way it brings a new perspective to everyday things and the little things in life, while not shying away from the world's big horrors. Her first poem here is a great example of questioning the smallest things (and making them beautiful through that new way of seeing),... Continue Reading →
“Estados Unidos: el país donde la libertad es una estatua.” (“United States: the country where liberty is a statue”) –Nicanor Parra Nicanor Parra, often described as an "anti-poet", died on Tuesday aged 103. Parra was a Chilean artist and poet who rejected the formalisms of poetry and abstract, inaccessible, wankiness. He was direct, blunt, unafraid,... Continue Reading →
I like how her poems etch out a determined resistance using nature-based and human metaphors that link the personal with the political. Dreamwood In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when... Continue Reading →
Like cream in guitars Like jealousy stains Like the things that calm down hurricanes Like impotent roses Like wrinkles in the sun and goosebumps on the moon Like dreaming elephants and crying tigers Like trains without rails Like bottled meat and smurfed love Like the sound of him painting colourful skeletons Like the colour of... Continue Reading →
land his approach to love he said was that of a farmer most love like hunters and like hunters most kill what they desire he tills soil through toes nose in the wet earth he waits prays to the gods and slowly harvests ever thankful the missing the way loss seeps into neck hollows and... Continue Reading →
Warsan Shire's poems are angry and they argue and rage and weep. As fighting poems should. A British poet, born to Somali parents in Kenya, Shire's poems have been read at rallies, and in homes and not-so-homes. She writes about people who are made invisible in society - often refugees, migrants, and other marginalised groups.... Continue Reading →
Trump called the people here rapists. White people in the US think it's legit that Mexican migrants work there for less, doing the hardest work, with no rights. You know the story, but do you hear about the resistance to the narrative, to the demonisation and discrimination? Does the media tell you what Mexicans, and... Continue Reading →
Last year, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman called his poems "fuel for terror attacks". By that, he meant that Darwish stood up for Palestinians, weaving his and their dignity into his detailed and visually arresting poems. Below, is one of the poems that enraged Lieberman so, ID card. Write it down! I’m an Arab My... Continue Reading →
This poem, originally posted on RedWedge, is a creative, cutting look at US Black confidence and desire amidst struggle by Crystal Stella Becerril i. black on black on Black on Timbs; an interruption – no, an intervention. a reminder to the Columbus-ing ass fuckboys (and girls) that they still here. reminder to the survivors, the... Continue Reading →
I dreamt I saw an eye, a pretty eye, In your hands, Glittering, wet and sickening; Like a dull onyx set in a crown of thorns, I did not know you were dead when you dropped it in my lap. what horrors of human sacrifice Have you seen, executioner? What agonies of tortured men Who... Continue Reading →
I painted (in Spanish) "Poetry is like bread, for everyone" on my wall above my desk. It's a quote from Dalton - and its something I passionately believe in. Poetry, literature, art, stories, journalism, should be by everyone, for everyone. But what if you just can't get into poetry, either reading it or writing it?... Continue Reading →
The first night They approach And pick a flower from our garden And we don’t say anything. The second night, No longer hiding, they Stomp on the flowers, kill our dog, And we don’t say anything. Until one day The weakest of them Enters our house alone Robs us of light, and, Knowing our fear,... Continue Reading →
It's good to write for money, It's the only way to go, Forget starving in the attic. Who can afford attic anyhow? Let me prostitute my talents -be a martyr for the arts - 'Cause without the lovely greenbacks I'll just be another tart … Hawking rhythm up at King's Cross, Flogging poems and rhymes... Continue Reading →
From the just published collection of poems Ina Kwana, by Uma Samari
The Joys of Motherhood - FreeQuency "...who will see criminal before child... I can't take it for granted that they won't kill my son... there's something about being Black in America that has made motherhood sound like mourning ..." Used - Shelby Birch "He called me a queen and I blushed, but it wasn't because... Continue Reading →
Sometimes minds come together and make new things in a conversation. Sometimes different people's poems and stories meet, shake hands, and unseen magic lingers among the warmth... Here are some excerpts from the poems of a mate and a luchadora, from her books No God but Ghosts and Monsters and other Silent Creatures ... April in... Continue Reading →
Languages on their own can be tools of power or resistance... Shailja Patel's "Dreaming in Gujarati": (excerpts) I am six in a playground of white children Darkie, sing us an Indian song! Eight in a roomful of elders all mock my broken Gujarati English girl! Through the years I watch Gujarati swell the swaggering egos of... Continue Reading →
By Australian activist and health care worker, Susan Austin: Veteran The sunken couch cradles him. He grips the remote (friend). The baby, the pot plant, her gloss lipstick all study him. Doctors riddle him with diagnoses but it is war that goes on interviewing him each night. He asks alcohol to counsel him but all each... Continue Reading →
... in unreachable corners and it feels like the conservatives run the world (because they do) and life is reduced to a constant struggle to keep your head above the water and not drown...there's poems like this that don't solve it all by any means but do help you step back a bit, and breathe:... Continue Reading →
resistance words 