Phoenix New Life Poetry, Spring 2015

PHOENIX NEW LIFE POETRY
SPRING 2015 No 56

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.

SPRING 2015 Editorial
Poetry, Competition & The Modern Culture of Celebrity

The essence of poetry is that each and every poem is the vital and valid creative expression of each person who writes one, however few or many they write and whatever the style, be it simple or sophisticated and complex. No one can, thereby, devise any set criteria or standard whereby all work can be judged to be “best”, “better, good or indifferent! What matters is that it be true to the individual person whence it is manifest. This makes a nonsense of any idea of “Poetry Competitions” as any decisions ultimately depend on the subjective, personal taste of each judge, such as vary widely. Yet, in our modern, centralising mass media society, so many have become so accustomed to TV Talent competitions, like Britain’s Got Talent, The X-Factor and even the Eurovision Song Contest that their same idea of choosing the “best” and rejecting the rest, whereby a “lucky few” may become a greater or lesser “star” or “celebrity” seems, also, to have infiltrated the world of the Arts and Literature, as many other spheres of society, the result being that a few “great” poets are listed in “the Top Ten” (as in “Top of the Pops”) while the rest end up marginalised, forgotten, as often made to feel like they are “not really good enough”, especially if their style and theme “does not fit in with the current trend or fashion”. Poetry is, thus, reduced to “just another form of entertainment” (as witnessed by the ersatz shallowness of some, though not all performance poetry, as standards and content, as in pop-music, have over the decades since the 1960s been lowered or reduced to short sound-byte clichés! Where, now, in popular appreciation, are the unfolding ballads of traditional folk-music and the philosophical and political depth of the songs of such as Bob Dylan, so popular in the 60’s, the heart-felt simplicity of the old roots of the “Blues”, now that “blues” has come to be reduced to a few clever guitar chords and riffs, in pale imitation of the old masters?

This has become a copy-cat age of imitation and this (to me) degeneration has been accelerated by the technologically-enabled, phenomenon of mass-concerts, with a few stars, in place of older more intimate & smaller-scale festivals and the displacement of traditional live-music clubs by the remoteness of privatised and personal electronic gadgets, for your ear alone, minus that vital creativity-stimulating element of social interaction! (I started out, in the 60s & 70’s involved in live-poetry- &-music venues: the best performers coming from the live theatre, music or the old music halls & such.

Hence, I see our Phoenix as a small antidote, to the above, creative individual-destructive trends, as being both non-judgemental and all-inclusive. When I ran my first local-international , Manchester-based poetry quarterly, Firebird, in the late 1960’s (the forerunner of this Phoenix, so called as by the time it arose again, later, from its ashes, I discovered that a friend was, at that time, using the title Firebird) some readers were bemused by it; the “modernists” could not understand why I included in it traditional Lancashire Dialect verse and those “old-fashioned” octameters and pentameters, while traditionalists could not comprehend why it included the surrealist and Dadaist pieces that came my way, like some people dig only jazz and others are “Opera snobs” (I like both). This kind of narrowness can often creep in when anyone is “judging” competitions.

Back to “cults of celebrity” (which begin in School literature curriculums), I, personally, never felt all that excited by that acclaimed poet Philip Larkin, a dull, boringly “British” librarian, so often included, while very much enjoying many others, like Keats, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth and D.H. Lawrence and several overseas Russian, German, French & American poets (who deserved to be called ‘great’ along, of course, with Shakespeare! It is easy to be a “success” by hogging some of the limelight in a world where the stage is narrowed down to a few mass-media spotlights, so to be less & less inclusive!

Thereby, I seek to select, from others, contributions that are “good” in their own style or theme so as to ensure a challenging & vital diversity so as to broaden the reader’s range of appreciation, it not mattering whether or not anyone is little or well-known, so long as the poem is “true” to its creator.

One sort of poem I do not like is that which sets out, “for the sake of writing a poem” to show “how clever the creator is at metaphorical acrobatics and tricks” while devoid of inner content (it is a different matter if the metaphorical acrobats help to convey the inner meanings which is to be revered, as in classical Italian renaissance art!) or specifically designed to “fit in with the prevailing trend” (like goods for the commercial consumer market), in imitation of someone who went down well in, preconditioned by popular taste, as a lot of “progressive glam rock” bands did in the 1970’s & even some copycat punk bands in the 1980’s. I do not name anyone that, here, comes to mind, as this is a case of “whomsoever the cap fits”. Of course, imitation, in one’s formative stages, can be a good thing, teaching one a great deal about one’s craft, and, indeed, in my younger years, I learnt by imitating all kinds of styles, both ancient & modern: but, whatever your creation, it must be originally yours, as you evolve your own styles, acknowledging all that so enriches them from others, our circles being refuges of non-competitive values!

Namaste David Allen Stringer

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