Category: Famous Poets

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Famous Poets

FEATURED U.K TRIBUTE REPORT: Benjamin Zephaniah On Racism, Refusing An OBE & Football

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AceNewsDesk – Benjamin Zephaniah was a man of words – he was profound, prolific and never shied away from what really mattered to him.

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Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Dec.09: 2023: By Helen Bushby: Entertainment reporter: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Words flowed out of him, whether written, spoken or sung. 

“In the beginning was the word, and the word became poetry, and I discovered it and found that it was great,” he said in his autobiography, riffing on the Bible’s opening verses.

Zephaniah, who died on Thursday at the age of 65, had many missions in life – some were political and some were personal. 

But from his troubled childhood onwards, he found power in communicating:

Despite leaving school aged 13 without being able to read or write, within two years he’d made a name for himself in dub poetry – performance poetry that originated in Jamaica.

His love of creativity was clear, but he later said he “went off the rails”and was jailed for burglary in his late teens. 

In 1979, aged 22, he decided to start afresh by moving from Birmingham to London, where he “met other creative types”.

His first poetry book, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980, and was the start of a long and celebrated career.

Here he is, in his own words, on just some of the things he felt passionately about.

Poetry

“I wanted to change the image of poetry,” he told the Guardian. “I wanted to bring it to life and talk about now and what was happening to us.”

He also said: “Even doing interviews I struggle for the words, but when I’m doing poetry I have this licence.

“I can change the words, leave a bit to your imagination, I can be as raw as I want to be.

“My mum always says when I’m on stage, ‘That’s when I see my son’.”

In his poem Pencil Me In, he wrote: 

“Every pencil needs a hand,

“And every mind needs to expand,

“is me and it, in harmony.” 

Childhood and family

Zephaniah grew up with his parents and seven brothers and sisters in Birmingham.

Speaking about his father, he told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1997: “He beat me, and I can remember, obviously, some of the beatings.

“But most of all I remember him beating her [his mother]. He passed away not too long ago. 

“And it’s a real bit of a sore point in my family at the moment, because my mother ran away from him with me, leaving her other children with him. 

“So when he passed away, the other children saw him as a kind of hero, a lone man who raised all these children on his own.

“And all my memories of him was having almost like a wanted poster in my mind, a fixed picture of him. This is the face I’ve got to avoid.” 

In 2009, he told the Guardian: “It’s sad, but what has brought us more together was my cousin dying in police custody in 2002.

“It was something I used to rant on about and then – bang – it happened to us. I think my family now understand more why I talk about what I talk about.”

Zephaniah visited Chenjiagou primary school in China in 2012

Zephaniah’s relationship with his mother remained steadfast.

“I am very close to my mother and I talk to her every day,” he said.

“She has gone through so much. As a nurse she had to tend to people who were racists and she always tries to see the good in people. I am like that too. I am fascinated with why people believe what they believe.”

But a great sadness in his life was not being able to have children. “I used to find that tough,” he said. “There were lots of years of trying and tests, but now I am easy with it. That’s life. 

“I get at least 40 letters a week from children saying, ‘I love your poetry, Benjamin,’ or ‘I am reading your book.'”

Racism

“Black people are not slaves. They are human beings who were turned into slaves,” he told Lacuna Magazine.

He said his first racist attack was “was a brick in the back of the head” as a child, leaving him on the ground with blood pouring from his head. A boy hit him as he rode past on his bicycle – he was told to “go home”.

Zephaniah spoke out against racism throughout his life. 

In this extract from his 1999 poem What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us, he wrote about the murder of the 18-year-old in a racist attack by a gang of young white men in south-east London. Two men were eventually convicted in 2012. Other suspects have never been convicted.

“It is now an open secret

“Black people do not have

“Chips on their shoulders,

“They just have injustice on their backs

“And justice on their minds,

“And now we know that the road to liberty

“is as long as the road from slavery.”

Turning down an OBE

In 2003 he turned down becoming an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

“Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought,” he wrote in the Guardian.

“I get angry when I hear that word ’empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.

“It is because of this idea of empire that black people like myself don’t even know our true names or our true historical culture.”

Being a sportsman

A lifelong Aston Villa fan, he told the Guardian in 2020 that aged 62 he was still playing 11-a-side football with an under-30s team.

“They cannot believe how fast I can run,” he said. “I’m still a good sprinter and a reasonably good dribbler.”

Although he loved running and was captain of the under-13s team at county level, he told the newspaper why he stopped racing as a child. 

“We went to a race against southern European countries and on the way there they were telling me, ‘You’ll never be English.’ I was captain of the team and we won, and they gave me the flag to drape myself in and I couldn’t do it.” 

Being dyslexic

Zephaniah found out he was dyslexic aged 21, at an adult education class in London, where he learned to learn to read and write.

“I always tell people with dyslexia, especially children, that it’s not a mark of your intelligence. 

“You can be full of stories – you just have to find a way of telling them. And now we have lots of technology and teachers, professors at university that are aware of dyslexia and can help. So dyslexia shouldn’t hold you back. 

“We now know that some of the brainiest people around have or had dyslexia, including Einstein!” he told BookTrust in 2020.

The power of connection

For Zephaniah, belonging and feeling connected with other people meant everything to him. 

The trick was to find the right people, though.

“We all need gangs. We’re social animals. The key is finding the people that are doing good stuff instead of doing bad stuff,” he said.

He loved the “deep connection” he had with people attending his live shows.

“The thing that has touched me more than anything is the stories people have shared with me,” he wrote on his website.

Being nice

DMU

Zephaniah was a regular visitor to Leicester’s De Montford University, where he was given an honorary degree

Keen to challenge perceptions, he told Lacuna Magazine: “What do I do as a black man in England? I try my best to counter the stereotype.

“For those people who fear black men, I want to be the nicest guy they’ve ever met.”

Hope

He was also an optimist. 

“Well I can’t prove it, but I just believe in the triumph of good over evil. You’ve got to be hopeful,” he told the Guardian in 2020. 

“One of the things our oppressors hate is when they try to hold us down and – it’s Maya Angelou – still I rise. You try to hold me down, but I’ll keep coming back.”

Faith

Zephaniah had a spiritual side, saying: “I think religion has given God a bad name. 

“When I say ‘faith’, I’m talking about a belief, for want of a better word – I think I have a better word: a knowledge of God – that I get through meditation, which doesn’t need anybody else: doesn’t need the church, doesn’t need a priest, doesn’t need an imam, doesn’t need anything. 

“Just learn to meditate!” he told High Profiles in 2005. 

Veganism

Zephaniah performed with his band The Revolutionary Minds, at the Vegan Camp Out festival in 2021

Zephaniah was an animal rights activist and ambassador for the Vegan Society, having decided to stop eating animals aged nine. 

His poem Talking Turkeys says: 

“Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas,

“Don’t eat it, keep it alive,

“It could be yu mate, an not on your plate

“Say, Yo! Turkey I’m on your side.”

He wrote in his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, about his allotment: “A lot of organic gardening is trial and error but I love, it, even though it takes time.

“I hardly ever go to a supermarket. And I listen to Gardeners’ Question Time more than you might imagine.”

Making a difference

Zephaniah and the Revolutionary Minds performed at Womad Festival in 2017

“Don’t get disillusioned and downhearted, don’t feel overpowered and defeated. Do what you can,” he said in 2020. 

“Do the little, (or the big), things that make a difference you can see. The tangible stuff. Or take to the streets to do something for the future. Do anything. Just don’t give up. 

“Don’t let them grind you down. Rise up all ye sisters and brothers who know better. Stand firm in the downturn.”

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Famous Poets

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Publish Anthology, Bring Poetry to National Parks as part of Signature Project, “You Are Here”

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AceNewsDesk – U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Publish Anthology, Bring Poetry to National Parks as part of Signature Project, “You Are Here”

National Parks where Poetry will be Installed as Public Art
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Ada Limón’s signature project as the nation’s 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, “You Are Here,” will feature two major new initiatives: an anthology of commissioned nature poems and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.

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Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Sept.19: 2023: Library of Congress Release Date: 06 Sep 2023: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world,” Limón said. “Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature — of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”

A new anthology, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” will be published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress on April 2. It will feature original poems by 50 contemporary American poets, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss, and PEN/Voelcker Award winner Rigoberto González, who reflect on and engage with their particular local landscape. As Limón said, “With poems written for vast and inspiring vistas to poems acknowledging the green spaces that flourish even in the most urban of settings, this anthology hopes to reimagine what ‘nature poetry’ is during this urgent moment on our planet.”

“You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” an initiative with the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, will feature site-specific poetry installations in seven national parks across the country. These installations, which will transform picnic tables into works of public art, will each feature a historic American poem that connects in a meaningful way to the park and will “encourage visitors to pay deeper attention to their surroundings,” according to Limón.

Participating national parks are:

  • Cape Cod National Seashore (Massachusetts)
  • Cuyahoga Valley National Park (Ohio)
  • Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina and Tennessee)
  • Everglades National Park (Florida)
  • Mount Rainier National Park (Washington)
  • Redwood National and State Parks (California)
  • Saguaro National Park (Arizona)

Limón will travel to each of the participating parks in the summer and fall of 2024 to unveil and celebrate the new installations and support community outreach.

“In this moment when the natural world is making headlines, Ada Limón’s signature project will help us connect more personally to America’s greatest parks as well as show how the poets of our time capture the natural world in their own lives,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “It also extends our laureate’s engagement with federal agencies and literary partners, to promote poetry to the nation.”

Limón has a number of major collaborations under way to share poetry with the public. On June 1, she returned to the Library to reveal “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which she wrote for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Limón’s poem will be engraved on the spacecraft that will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The poem is part of NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign, which has gathered more than 450,000 signatures from people around the world signing on to the poem. The campaign will run through 2023.

For National Poetry Month, Limón has served as the guest editor for the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series in a first-ever series collaboration between the Academy and the Library of Congress. The Academy will also support the promotion of the “You Are Here” anthology upon publication.

Limón began her first term in September 2022 with an event at the Library of Congress.  During her term, she participated in two events hosted by the first lady of the United States for the National Student Poets Program and for the State Visit with Brigette Macron, wife of the president of France. Limón also participated in an event hosted by Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, wife of the president of Mexico, for the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico City, and she participated in a conversation with Argentine and Brazilian poets for the Library’s Palabra Archive.

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About Ada Limón

Ada Limón was born in Sonoma, California, in 1976 and is of Mexican ancestry. She is the author of six poetry collections, including “The Carrying” (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; “Bright Dead Things” (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; “Sharks in the Rivers” (2010); “Lucky Wreck” (Autumn House, 2006); and “This Big Fake World” (Pearl Editions, 2006). She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Her newest poetry collection, “The Hurting Kind,” was published as part of a three-book deal with Milkweed Editions that includes the publication of “Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems,” featuring work by major poets over the last century, followed by a volume of new and selected poems.

About the Poet Laureate Position

The Library of Congress Literary Initiatives Office is the home of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, a position that has existed since 1937 when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library. Since then, many of the nation’s most eminent poets have served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and, after the passage of Public Law 99-194 (Dec. 20, 1985), as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry — a position that the law states “is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.”

During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry. In recent years, Laureates have initiated poetry projects that broaden the audiences for poetry.

For more information on the Poet Laureate and the Literary Initiatives Office, visit loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/. Consultants in Poetry and Poets Laureate Consultants in Poetry and their terms of service can be found at loc.gov/poetry/laureate-2011-present.html. To learn more about Poet Laureate projects, visit loc.gov/poetry/laureate-projects.html.

The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov, and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.

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Media Contact: Brett Zongker, bzongker@loc.gov
Public Contact: Robert Casper, (202) 707-1308

PR 23-080
09/06/2023
ISSN 0731-3527

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Famous Poets

The Pin

“Dear me! what signifies a pin!

I’ll leave it on the floor;

My pincushion has others in, Mamma has plenty more:

A miser will I never be,” Said little heedless Emily.

So tripping on to giddy play, She left the pin behind,

For Betty’s broom to whisk away,

Or some one else to find;

She never gave a thought, indeed,

To what she might to-morrow need.

Next day a party was to ride,

To see an air-balloon!

And all the company beside Were dress’d and ready soon:

But she, poor girl, she could not stir,

For just a pin to finish her.

‘Twas vainly now, with eye and hand, She did to search begin;

There was not one­not one, the band Of her pelisse to pin!

She cut her pincushion in two,

But not a pin had slidden through!

At last, as hunting on the floor,

Over a crack she lay,

The carriage rattled to the door,

Then rattled fast away.

Poor Emily! she was not in,

For want of just­a single pin!

There’s hardly anything so small,

So trifling or so mean,

That we may never want at all,

For service unforseen:

And those who venture wilful waste,

May woeful want expect to taste. ~

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Famous Poets

Writing A Poetry

Whenever I pick up my pento write a poetrymy words and thoughtsstart flickeringlike rays in the vagabond airteasing, impelling and compellingmy heart and mindto weigh facts and factorsin an ambiguous dichotomyof seen and unseen,known and unknown,past, ahead and what isnow and immediate… Numerous meandering thoughts,pointed and causticunsettle me for a whileI wish to make themas […]

Writing A Poetry
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Famous Poets

Spotlight – The Masquerade – A Poem and Painting by Mairi @ Just Mairi

Originally posted on Just Mairi : An overload of thoughts exploding.. our weary souls; our cheerless hearts.. the shifting sand and sleight of hand.. this masquerade parade of fear I’ll never understand. Poem & Painting by Mairi Spread love; not fear 💙.

Spotlight – The Masquerade – A Poem and Painting by Mairi @ Just Mairi
💥💥
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Famous Poets

40 POEMS AT 40 by Ingrid Wilson – reviewed by Gabriela Marie Milton

40 POEMS AT 40- flyer 40 POEMS AT 40 by Ingrid Wilson – reviewed by Gabriela Marie Milton 40 POEMS AT 40 by Ingrid Wilson is the manifesto of an extremely intelligent, and talented, woman unafraid to explore her past and her inner and outer worlds. Ingrid’s poetry soars to the sky when the seasons […]

40 POEMS AT 40 by Ingrid Wilson – reviewed by Gabriela Marie Milton
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Famous Poets

My Poem You Night Included in Vita Brevis Poetry Anthology, III

Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser – Ophelia/ public domain My Poem You Night Included in Nothing Divine Dies: The Poetry of Nature (Vita Brevis Poetry Anthology, III) I learned how to read in the mint forest under a pale October moon.My eyes, blueberries mama gathered in her wicker basket.The unassuaged yearnings of a golden autumn spread under […]

My Poem You Night Included in Vita Brevis Poetry Anthology, III
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Famous Poets

My Heart is Open for You ❤

Close to my heart I want you to be Close to my heart I long for you to be Close to my heart I desire you to be Close to my heart I need for you to be… For you are an example of liberty For you are a song with a soothing melody For […]

My Heart is Open for You

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