Phoenix New Life Poetry, Summer 2016

PHOENIX NEW LIFE POETRY
SUMMER 2016 No 61

Phoenix New Life Poetry is the voice of Phoenix Poets, an international co-operative friendship network of artists and writers worldwide, rather than a commercial literary journal and is open to all contributors.

Co-founding poets: David Allen Stringer & Dr. Emmanuel Petrakis, Members of the “Planetary Council” of “The Universal Alliance” (“Phoenix New Life Poetry” is a project of “The Universal Alliance”)

OUR VISION

“Culture” is, anthropologically and strictly speaking, a definition of the whole of the Way of Life of a Society, not only of a marginalized or sanitised and unchallenging corner called “The Arts”. Since my childhood, in the 1950’s, the “community integrity” of especially Western society, of the “extended family” and the creative, self-reliant village/ neighbourhood has progressively disintegrated with our many competing and isolated egoisms. “The New Renaissance” is about much more than a literary-artistic movement but for the overall healing and reconstruction of our societies and their planetary environment as an interactive whole.

Almost all the elements of this much needed socio-economic and cultural re-creation have emerged in the spiritual, new age, natural health, community-creation and green movements since the 1960’s & 70’s: however, poetry and the related Arts (such as Music), liberated by surrealism and rock-n’-roll, from traditional conventions in the 1950’s & 60’s, since those decades of early promise, appear to have been either neglected, ghettoised or to have become ‘stuck’ in the ‘ranting’ or cynical ‘negativity’ of knowing what one detests, but not knowing what one, more positively, values & aspires to.

In our magazine we will not react to this by seeking to ‘escape into a romantic faerie tale’, but will seek to strike a wholesome balance between ‘angry protest’ and the beauty-&-beatitude of our divine creation that many lose sight of amidst crises, poverty & suffering! Now, however, in this dawn of the promise of the New Millenium is re-emerging the inspiration for the New Renaissance movement in poetry, music and literature as currently manifest in The Partners Writing Group (based in Middlesex, England), together with our own, as above, with initial input from Shelley’s Hellas and Blake’s Albion. We, here, reach out, to the rest of the World, for your participation.

Visionary prose writings can be included, at our discretion, as extracts, in our “Reviews” section and we will, also, be able to use visionary paintings etcetera, as visual contributions to our pages via the Computer-scanner, with poetry as our priority. Thus, we welcome poems on such themes as:

Peace, Freedom, Social-&-Political Justice, Social Comment, Spiritual, Psychic & Religious Experiences, Communing With The Creator & Creation, Healing Prayers & Invocations, ‘New romantic’ Interpretations of Classical Myths & Legends (e.g. those of ‘Orpheus’ or the ‘Holy Grail’) or whatever be your own dream!

All styles are welcome. There are no set limits on the length of each poem. What matters is their motivating spirit!

Poets are invited to send in, with their work, a concise profile of themselves, their concerns or their autobiographies and, if they so wish, we can add their addresses to their work, as printed, should they seek to be contacted by sympathetic souls!

We are especially interested in News and Information about Community Projects that involve Education-for-Harmonious Living or shared Artistic Creativity. We, also, welcome free-exchanges of journals or of mutual publicity, by arrangement, with other ‘cultural periodicals’ such as feel that they share the essential spirit of our initiative. Choice poems in other languages (French or Greek) can be translated if we feel that they are of merit, otherwise poets in other languages (e.g. Russian) will, themselves, have to make their own translations of their work into English to their own satisfaction.

Postal Subscriptions Inc. p & p: U.K £14, Europe 35 Euros Beyond £30 ($50 U.S.) or equivalents*. Cheques & Money Orders payable to “The Universal Alliance”, Postal Orders to David Allen Stringer. The US $ rate has been increased to make up for changes in the $-£ exchange rate. For a single issue only, send us one quarter of the total annual subscription, as above indicated. Euros & dollars can be best paid by sending currency notes, registered mail to prevent costly bank Charges.*Due to recent increases overseas postage rates, with the abolition of “printed paper rates” by the British Post-Office!

Any profits made will go towards “The Universal Alliance” to help us with our communications and other support for our poorer brothers & sisters in Africa, Asia & elsewhere and other projects. Free copies can only be made available, otherwise, to those who undertake to copy the magazine to pass on to others, with the prior agreement of we, the editors. We wish to share our inspirations: but it must remain financially viable! Such Profits have been rare and have usually gone towards covering the cost of following issues, together with any donations that help offset the cost of FREE COPIES overseas.

Contact address: (International) David Allen Stringer, Editor, “Phoenix New Life Poetry”

New address: 19 Royd Terrace, Hebden Bridge, West Yorks HX7 7BT

Email: uni.alli@btinternet.com

Web: www.universalalliance.org.uk

Please enclose, with M.S.S. by post, as appropriate, S.A.E./I.R.C.’s or send them by email. We do not pay and do not run competitions as our purpose is not to satisfy the artistic egos of individuals, so much as to help draw together those with whom we can work creatively towards our common, cooperative ideals.

SUMMER 2016 Editorial
WE HAVE NOW RELOCATED!

This coming August, 2016, we will have been relocating from Fowey in Cornwall to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, a thriving centre for the Arts in the Pennines. This will occasion some delay in the production of the Autumn issue of our Phoenix until, everything, come September, is settled and sorted out. Our new address, after late August, is:

HX7 7BT West Yorkshire, UK

Any contributions to this coming Autumn Edition should have been sent to our old address by email by Friday 12th August 2016, as we will be going offline for a limited period, as by post, till out renewed BT and Wifi is set up at our new address, This is now done & we are back online at our new address!

All this marks for me a dramatic creativity-stimulating challenge after 50 years in Cornwall since my father took us down to live there, in my teens, and a return to the ‘land of my ancestors’ where I grew up as a child. The reason for the delay in producing this Summer issue of our Phoenix is that we have been away at the annual Hebden Bridge Arts Festival, exploring our move. Nevertheless, Cornwall will not be forgotten, as I have compiled a final collection of most of my poems inspired by Cornwall, since my late teens, Poems, Song and Prayers of from and by The River Fowey, pending when these can be published (watch this space!)

Poetry is dreaming in which are sown the seeds of action till, post the event, poetry celebrates each action the stimulates further dreaming, even as poem-dreaming both relaxes us after action and opens further possibilities and potentials for further action, to quote William Blake “He who thinks but acts not breeds pestilence”, like politicians’ promises or wordiness of Committees as a cover for inertia?

The rhyme and rhythm of poetry reflects the rhythm and rhyme of life itself, upbeat, downbeat, yin-yang-yin, the pulsation of our hearts & the Earth, Creation and Sea itself. All aspects of such rhythms are mutually necessary and complementary. Inertness in action causes the death of Creativity. Total moves precipitate the chaos of uncertainty and so stimulates our creative spark to reawaken and make new order out of the shaken kaleidoscope of such chaos, even as the artist must make new collages out of a melee of diverse images (to paraphrase the 5th century BC Greek philosopher Democritus) .

Thus poetry, true to each single individual, and thereby provocative cannot ever but be, in itself, subversive of and a threat to any old and grown rigid order.

WE HOPE THAT ANY NEW PRINTING ARRANGEMENTS DO NOT AFFECT OUR CURRENT SUBSCRIPTION RATES TOO MUCH.

This is yet to be discovered and, when we know, you will be notified of any changes in either by email, in advance, or in the forthcoming autumn issue.

(Re) born, in the year 2,000, as a reincarnation of the historic and similar journal Firebird (first created, in the North, in Manchester, in 1965), we look forward to our Phoenix re-arising its from current ashes, from a new nest in the Pennine crags, in the near future to live on as long as we mortals can draw breath!

Namaste – David Allen Stringer

DOING, BEING & COMPASSION

This is a society in which one rates, values or takes notice of others and ourselves by what they/we are doing (have done) or achieving (have achieved) in which one is perpetually sociable or available to others (or have been of some social importance. Otherwise one is deemed to be useless – or of no further usefulness, like many pensioners who are left “put out to grass” or unemployed, especially youths.

This psychology may go back to our days of primeval survival when those who could not hunt or forage were seen as no asset to the common well-being. Yet, the essence and foundation of all doing lies in the simple pulse of just being, all parts of one stream of life whence all transient life-forms and actions emerge, to merge back again. For all that, how much do we really value, for their own sake, others or ourselves for just being, whether young or old? When one does so that is what we call “friendship” or “family”, compassion and, in the ultimate manifestation, LOVE!

Buddhist teaching places the vital focus of all things on “being” and rejects the fruit of most doing as part of the rest of the transient, materialist illusion of Maya. Action has its place only in so far as it shapes & conditions one’s earthly karma – or wheel/pattern of Fate, guided by the dharma or enlightenment (in itself attainable through inward meditation and outward contemplation of being-in-creation and one only discovers fullness of being when one transcends one’s Wheel of Kharma in Dharma, when the paradise we all, at heart, desire, is envisioned as a timeless space, freed from the self-justification of doing and all we need is to just simply be, in the infinite love of our Creator, in a spirit of oneness in which we simply care for our fellow humans & animals.

This ultimate liberating Dharma can never be attained via our intellectual ‘left brain’ that, like mechano, can only construct from ‘facts’ from action, for, as truly inspired poetry from Spirit tells us, can only be glimpsed in the ‘right-hand brain’ of our intuition when we ‘switch off’ from action.

DOWNLOAD POEMS FROM HERE.