Phoenix New Life Poetry Winter 2014

WINTER 2014-15 No 55

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”

Flat 5, Cobbs Well House, Place Rd. Fowey, Cornwall PL23 1DR U.K. Tel: (00 44) (0) 1726 833334 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.

WINTER 2014-14 Editorial

Winter, with its cold, stormy darkness closes in. Hallowe’en, (“all hallow’s day” when the veil between the living and the departed, disembodied souls) had swept through, at the end of what was the old Celtic Cycle of the year, the “grim-reaper” and brought dying and death in both Nature and Humanity. The Summer indulgence of manifest rainbow-coloured flesh has been stripped back to its skeletal structures, even as in fallen leaves, shrunk back to their core, the eternal, Inner Cosmic Life-force. This is starkly obvious to those who have not been engrossed in their privatized routines of consumerist careers, nuclear families and superficial media “entertainments” of so much of modern urbanised man in more comfortable and smug parts of society, for whom “Winter is outside, while they are always inside”, insulated by the warmth from the fossil fuels that are destroying creation with carbon emissions.

On each of these detached islands, nevertheless, one can turn on the Media for the World News and witness, as in some apocalypse movie, the very real live TV images of mass death and suffering, brought on, for millions, by rampaging brutal, blitzkrieg wars, seemingly unstoppable diseases like Ebola, famine and terrorism (the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, as depicted by the Medieval Albrecht Durer), all “beyond & outside” that almost seem to reinforce that selfish sense of ‘at least that is not happening to us here’, while one does one’s bit and gives a tiny portion of one’s wealth to some appropriate charity, as is that will ‘make it all go away’!

Where in all this is the place and space for poetry, song and the arts, either for those who are too smug in their illusions of comfort to go beyond a trip to the theatre or Art-gallery to enjoy some classic masterpiece from a previous more peaceful, generally more prosperous, cultural world, as was shattered, in Europe, by World Wars I & II, or those who’s lives have been bereft and wrecked, and who cab only focus on desperate survival, as in the Middle East, where the rich heritage of our root civilisations has been shattered by shells, missiles and vandalism as in Syria and Iraq, extant, now, only in old books? Nostalgia for happier pasts, a la recherché des temps perdus (aw in Marcel Proust), as of any person, with a messed-up life for happy childhoods, can be brilliant form of escapism, as that movie is no fantasy, but, at the time, was as real and in the flesh, as any current reality! Is it any wonder that so many see these art-forms as either grossly irrelevant to real life or just another alternative entertainment channel?

Many poets who are disengaged from all realities beyond, writing and reading in privatised isolation retreat self-indulgently into the self-spun or decorated spheres of their own personal musings, with the help of “retreating” into Nature, “Far Away from the Madding Crowd” (Thomas Hardy). This is not to criticise others as I have often done so myself, when craving simple serenity above understanding of more tragic dramas:; should any one else enjoy such poems that is because it provides them with a portal so to do likewise, as when reading a poem about the Lake District. Meanwhile, the “engaged” poet, in his or her still sensitive compassion and empathy, in an often brutality desentisized and morally degraded world, either expresses the splintering pain of those who suffer or stridently protests against the diverse evils of greedy exploitation or fanatical dogmatisms that cause this & is as likely to be found in the picket lines and popular demonstrations or on the barricades as in any Barddic Halls reciting sagas, as in yore..

That I have, also, done. Both responses are logical and natural, in our “divided selves”, as from Man’s earliest mental roots, the “Fight or Flight Mechanism”! This begs the question, however, whose expressions would most people rather listen to, as in Music, Beethoven’s Pastorale or the grim Requiem for Auschwitz (the favourite piece, once of an old psychiatric nurse friend who committed suicide while listening to it, so great was his empathy!)? That old saying Mind over matter is true; a powerfully executed work of art, if idyllic, can lift us up to Heaven and Harmony, like the magic harp of Orpheus , & reinforce our challenged faith that Love and Beauty could triumph over Evil and destruction, even as Christ rose from the dead on the Third Day, or, if too graphic in pain, plunge us, cynical, ever deeper into Hell, a self-fulfilling prophesy!

To return to my original question – What relevance has poetry & song (alas a too often tiny minority pursuit, these days!) to our current, painfully fractured society? The answer to that is quite simple that wherever any people anywhere still come together, either in traditional or modern festivals or gatherings, to share dancing, stories and song as since time immemorial, to express the root goodness life, then, they, together, light a beacon bonfire of peace and hope for the return of the life-affirming joys of a Spring to come, that drives back all closing-in darkness enough to create “islands of Peace and sanctuary” for all refugees from the was beyond, for healing and remaking lives, a power emanating from the Inner Creativity of each and everyone of us! Let us do likewise! The Phoenix can rise again from the ashes of all such fires to re-illumine whole worlds!

Namaste David Allen Stringer

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