POETRY powers human spirit—Wazir Gul Anis

 Holding on when there is nothing in you Except the
WILL that says ‘Hold on!’

Re-reporting, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

Wazir Gul Anis is a poet, politician and father living in a troubled land. He was interviewed on Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s “The State We’re In” last week. The theme: “Mightier than the Sword.”

In Afghanistan, the program revealed, Wazir Gul Anis “is a civic leader who has a deep love for classical Persian poetry. Poetry helped Wazir Gul Anis cope with the Soviet invasion, the Taliban’s takeover, and getting warring clans to reconcile” in his country. He connects “Poetry and peacemaking,” poetry and the human spirit. 

At the end of his segment on The State We're In, he recited a poem that he said pulled him through his darkest hours, when his son was kidnapped. This poem, “If” by Rudyard Kipling, brings back my own memories and touches my sensibility. 

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist who was born in India (the Bombay Presidency of British India, December 30, 1865) and grew up in England. 

IF you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all … doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

…Being lied about not deal in lies,

Or being hated, not give way to hating,

Poetry mightier than sword

And yet do not look too good or talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

…Think and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

…Watch things broken you gave your life to,

And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

Lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

Music mightier than sword

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And … hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

…Walk with Kings – and not lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds… of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and all therein…

Sources and notes

“Mightier than the Sword,” The State We’re In, June 9 2012, http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioshow/mightier-sword

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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We celebrate courageous activist, poet, essayist, teacher — Adrienne Rich

L-R: Writers
Audre Lorde
Meridel Le Sueur
Adrienne Rich
(Austin Texas, 1980)

Her words and work our celebration

Compiled and edited 
by Carolyn Bennett

“There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill / and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows / near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted / who disappeared into those shadows.

“I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled / this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, / our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own ways of making people disappear.

“I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods / meeting the unmarked strip of light— / ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: / I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

Adrienne Rich

“And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you / anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it's necessary / to talk about trees” [What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich]

She chronicled her journey in poetry and prose. A “critical optimist” … she called herself,

formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War … [who]  became an American Skeptic — not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history — but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world.

Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing.

Writer and teacher Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929- March 27, 2012) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and lived in Santa Cruz, California (USA). On her courageous, activist journey, Adrienne Rich refused in 1997 to accept the National Medal of Arts in protest of the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and other policies concerning the arts and literature set out by the William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton government. Her words —

“‘I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House,’” Rich is reported saying, “‘because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.… [Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.’” 

Through readings of her poetry and other activities during the 2000s, Adrienne Rich stood among anti-war activists protesting the then-“threat’ of U.S. war on Iraq. A panel of judges awarding her the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry applauded Rich’s  “‘honesty, at once ferocious, humane; her deep learning and her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves.’”

MIGHTIER THAN SWORD

We celebrate this outstanding intellectual, writer, activist who leaves a seven-decades legacy in work and words.

Sources and notes

‘What Kind of Times Are These’ © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. Source: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181516

Some of Adrienne Rich’s writings:

Nonfiction books

On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose (1966–1978, 1979)

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (1979–1985, 1986 including essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’)

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001)

Poetry and Commitment: An Essay (2007)

A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997–2008, 2009

 Poetry collections

The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970 (1971)

Diving into the Wreck (1973)  

The Dream of a Common Language ( 1978)

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far: Poems 1978-1981 (1982, (reprint 1993)

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991)

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995 (1995)

The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000-2004 (2004)

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006 (2007)

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich

‘What Kind of Times Are These’ © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. Source: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181516

Adrienne Rich — Career (a 2012 update)

• Poet and writer, Conductor of workshop YM-YWHA Poetry Center, New York, NY, 1966-67;
• Visiting lecturer, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, 1967-69;
• Adjunct professor in writing division, Columbia University, Graduate School of the Arts, New York, NY, 1967-69;
• City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, lecturer in SEEK English program, 1968-70, instructor in creative writing program, 1970-71, assistant professor of English, 1971-72, and 1974-75;
• Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative Literature, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 1972-73;
• Lucy Martin Donnelly fellow, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 1975;
• Professor of English, Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 1976-78; A. D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1982-85;
• Clark Lecturer and distinguished visiting professor, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, 1983, 1984;
• Visiting professor, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, 1984-96;
• Burgess Lecturer, Pacific Oaks College, Pasadena, CA, 1986;
• Professor of English and feminist studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1986-92;
• Marjorie Kovler visiting fellow, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1989;
• National Director, The National Writers’ Voice Project, 1992 — Member of advisory board, Boston Woman's Fund, National Writers Union, Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and New Jewish Agenda. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich

Adrienne Rich 1929–2012, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich

Image at Wikipedia: L-R: Writers Audre Lorde, Meridel Le Sueur, Adrienne Rich (Austin Texas, 1980)

Pen and paper image: http://bookofhov.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/pen.paper_in6a.jpg

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy