Sentinel Poetry (Online) #44 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POETRY & GRAPHICS…since 2002 ISSN 1479-425X Editor: Amatoritsero Ede
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In the beginning there were walls. And in the beginning walls defined every being and every thing. The Berlin Wall is no more and poets lament the coming of the new dispensation. Except that the new dispensation is not new; it is here. Books are dying, poetry as we know it is limping on life support and prose is hawking her wares in obscure literary journals like a junkie in need of a fix. But the world lives, life goes on and ideas continue to rock our foundations. In the seeming irrelevance of the written word, the poet lives. I say, do not cripple your voice with silly little sentences that make sense only to the terminally drunk. I say, speak up, don’t stutter. Straighten up and lift our people’s dreams on the strong backs of your strong voices, and carry them through to the deaf myrmidons of darkness who live beyond the valley of darkness, past the hills of decadence. And sing it; sing it for a people long used to the silence of her priests. The poet lives. The poet lives in all of us.
Notes: Amatoritsero Ede, Sentinel Poetry (Online) #43: Tax and Syn /Tax http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/0606/index_files/page0002.htm
Afam Akeh, Sentinel Poetry (Online) #42: I Return to Okigbo http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/0506/index_files/page0014.htm
Stewart Brown, The Poetry Society Issue 92-2: The Pleaded Grace of Song http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr92-2/brown.htm
Dana Gioia, The Atlantic Online May 1991: Can Poetry Matter? http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr92-2/brown.htm
Bruce Wexler, Newsweek, May 6, 2003: Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care? http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com/cgi-bin/essays/guestbook.cgi
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