What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Life in Public
"I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy." |
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In Memoriam: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, "the Poet of Exile"
He wrote, in Petals of Blood, "The truth is that our people are starved, not only of food but of knowledge, dignity, and honour. The only cure for hunger is food. The only cure for oppression is to fight back.” "And Ngugi did precisely that. Fight. Back. From refusing to be cowed down from writing a play in his Gĩkũyũ language and preferring prison instead to having his book Matigari banned in Kenya. And of course the exile. For decades. And of course the famous laugh that made mockery of threats including those that arrive at gunpoint."
via FRONTLINE |
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