| Poets Way | |
The First 4 Poets' Words
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Poets Way will be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond.
Quiet and moving, these poems combine an intimate voice with a searing direct look at suffering and senseless violence at human desire and love, and at man's relationship with nature.
The poets collected here have a respect for the passage of time conveyed throughout, and their words move fluidly through the landscapes of the past, present, and future with distinctly contemporary juxtapositions and metaphors.
Of the initial poets chosen, all share in common the ability to reveal the power of simplicity. The characters come to life as they face overwhelming obstacles, some watching their countries being rebuilt, and their own cultural identity reshaped.
“Passion and witness, flight and frustration -- these are the forms of knowledge that endure in the poetry of national struggle. Wounds are question marks, which punctuate every vista," writes Christopher Merrill, author of Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. This is true whether one comes from North Vietnam, the highlands of Scotland, or the American South, whether one is the child of teachers, farmers, soldiers, politicians, shopkeepers, or musicians. Making poetry in one form or another is an accepted, expected response to the universal experiences of love, loneliness, and separation.
Poets sometimes write under the most extreme circumstances, but write poems whose clarity and depth of feeling are dramatic testimony to the place of poetry in the hearts and minds of the global community.
Poets Way can be an absorbing, magnificent labor of love. Poetry matters. Whether you love oetry or have never been exposed to it, you can still come to Poets Way and leave with a new perspective. Poets Way will rekindle in those who see it the flame of the imagination. The voices are in the footprints of time, engraved in the sandstone that visitors will walk upon, that will reflect change through the written word. It may also raise the inevitable subject of return. It will mirror the personalities of poets and will encourage viewers to understand how social, political, and religious issues impact our perception and understanding.
Poets Way takes a comprehensive, multiethnic approach across the spectrum of poetry. Poetry is about time: lost, stolen, celebrated, despised, remembered and forgotten -- and those who have the courage to stand alone. Poets know that reality is a context made of moods or recollections joined by chance or design, sets of associations grown over the years, and poets are often people who have suffered under oppression or written from their own personal experience in secrecy or beneath a willow tree, from a prison cell or beside a creek. Driven by blustery winds or the gentlest of rains, through deepest chill or searing heat, poets write because they are seized by a storm of a deeply personal nature.
Poets Way is dedicated to those who have challenged and helped reshape the prevailing expectations of people everywhere, and especially to the wisdom of those poets who live and work in relative isolation.
Michael Evans-Smith page 1, 2
“I regard the Poet as a sentinel warning us against the approach of enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy; Intolerance, Ignorance, Inertia, and other members of that brood."
--Gandhi“I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad I had my flight."
--Rabindranath Tagore“So long ago my father led me to
The dark and impounded orders of this canyon,
I have confused these rocks and waters with
My life, but not unclearly, for I know
What will be here when I am here no more."
--Thomas Hornsby Ferril“I visited the poet,
Precisely at noon. Sunday.
It was quiet in the spacious room,
And beyond the windows, intense cold."
--Anna Akhmatova“The Elders have waited for the young people to ask such things."
--Wawatay Eninew“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant."
--Henry D. Thoreau
Project Director
Poets Way
The Poets Way Committee includes:
- Ghada Elturk, Community Outreach Librarian, Boulder Public Library
- Mandy F. Yick, Law Offices of Mandy F. Yick
- Mercia de Reipurth
- Rachel Harding-Gandhi
- Hammer, King Center, Iliff School of Theology, University of Denver
- Robert Carl Cohen, Colorado chapter, PEN International
- Ray Ramirez, Native American Rights Fund (NARF)
- Lorna Dee Cervantes
- Daniel Escalante
- Carrie Jenkins Williams
- Naomi Horii, Many Mountains Moving
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