September 29, 2012 marks the second annual global event of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a grassroots organization that brings poets, artists and musicians (new this year) together to call for environmental, social, and political change, within the framework of peace and sustainability. The local focus is key to this global event as communities around the world raise their voices through concerts, readings, workshops, flash mobs and demonstrations that speak to the heart of their specific area of concerns, such as homelessness, ecocide, racism and censorship.
“Peace and sustainability is a major concern worldwide, and the guiding principle for this global event,” said Michael Rothenberg, Co-Founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. “We are in a world where it isn't just one issue that needs to be addressed. A common ground is built through this global compilation of local stories, which is how we create a true narrative for discourse to inform the future.”
Organizers and participants are hoping through their actions and events to seize and redirect the political and social dialogue of the day and turn the narrative of civilization towards peace and sustainability. Those that want to get involved can visit www.100tpc.org to find an event near them or sign up to organize one in their area.
There are nearly 700 events planned worldwide, including:
• 25 different events in the San Francisco Bay Area, the birthplace of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, with live poetry readings by Beat Legend Michael McClure, former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass and other major poets
• The Occupy Wall Street Poetry group kicks off a weekend of events in New York City with a poetry reading at the famous St. Mark’s Poetry Project
• Peace On Streets, R.O.A.D., Tasker Elite and SHARP will host performance artists, poets, musicians, hip hop artists and various youth and parent groups who will perform and lead workshops throughout Philadelphia to bring awareness to the ongoing problem of street violence in their city
• Wordstock, a 3 day festival at the Bamboo Arts and Celebration Center in De Leon Springs, FL, will include poetry slams, concerts, and an art exhibition focusing on images of war and peace
• In New Orleans, a blues festival featuring ten bands will help raise funds for medical care for aging musicians
• In Jamaica a week long Street Dub Vibe series called “Tell the Children the Truth” will include concerts, spoken word performances, art exhibits, lectures, and workshops to bring attention to the damaging culture of secrecy and denial surrounding the abuse, poverty and illiteracy impacting the nation’s children and destroying their future.
• Poetry and peace gatherings are planned in the strife-torn cities of Kabul and Jalalabad, Afghanistan
• In Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, poets, musicians and mime artists, in response to the revolution in Egypt and the major changes taking place in the Arab World, will perform in public spaces and theaters and explore new ways to communicate their concerns, and their roles as artists, in influencing the future of their country
• In Volos, Greece, there will be 5 days of poetry and music events, including an exhibition of photography looking at the new phenomenon of homelessness in Greece
• An event in Blackpool, England will celebrate activist poets and writers of past generations through a special performance of Bullets and Daffodils, a play about the life of peace poet Wilfred Owen
100 Thousand Poets for Change began in Sonoma County, Calif. The official Headquarters’ Event will take place at the Arlene Francis Center in downtown Santa Rosa and will feature poetry readings, group meditations, workshops, and music and dance of various styles including hip hop, flamenco, African drums, reggae, salsa, folk and more. The HQ event will also live-stream other 100 Thousand Poets for Change events worldwide. This 3-day event is sponsored by the Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County and the Sonoma County Arts Council.
Immediately following September 29th, all documentation on the 100TPC.org website, which will include specific event pages with photos, video and other documentation compiled by each city coordinator, will be preserved by Stanford University in California. Stanford recognized 100 Thousand Poets for Change in 2011 as an historical event, the largest poetry reading in history. They will continue to archive the complete contents of 100TPC.org, as part of their digital archiving program LOCKSS.
About 100 Thousand Poets for Change
Co-Founder Michael Rothenberg (walterblue@bigbridge.org) is a widely known poet, editor of the online literary magazine Bigbridge.org and an environmental activist based in Northern California. Terri Carrion is a poet, translator, photographer, and editor and visual designer for BigBridge.org.
100 Thousand Poets for Change
P.O. Box 870
Guerneville, Ca 95446
Phone: 305-753-4569
www.100TPC.org
Showing posts with label Michael Rothenberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Rothenberg. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Sunday, 11 September 2011
100 Thousand Poets for Change Organises Largest Poetry Event in History
Number of Participants Worldwide Growing Daily
650 events in 450 cities and 95 countries will take place on September 24 to promote environmental, social, and political change. Poets, writers, artists will create, perform and demonstrate in their communities, and decide their own specific area of focus for change within the framework of peace and sustainability, which founder Michael Rothenberg stated, “…is a major concern worldwide and the guiding principle for this global event.”
Bob Holman and Margery Snyder, in a recent article on About.com said, “the beauty of the concept of 100 Thousand Poets for Change is that it is completely decentralized and completely inclusive.” All those involved
are hoping, through their actions and events, to seize and redirect the political and social dialogue of the day and turn the narrative of civilization towards peace and sustainability.
Poetry demonstrations are being organized in political hotspots such as Madison, Wisconsin and Cairo, Egypt. Poetry and peace gatherings are planned in strife-torn Kabul and Jalalabad.
In Mexico there are over 30 events, with 18 poetic actions in Mexico City, where poets as well as environmental and political activists are hoping to encourage reflection and creative responses against systemic violence through the written and the spoken word with day long street events, readings and workshops. More than a third of these events are organized by collectives actively working towards a non-violent approach to solve the country's most pressing problems.
To date there are over 260 events in the United States. There are 20 events statewide in North Carolina where teacher/poets have mobilized to protest cuts in education funding. And along the Platte River near Omaha, Nebraska, poets will be demonstrating against TransCanada’s planned Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. More examples of events can be found at the 100 Thousand Poets for Change www.100TPC.org. Each event organizer has an Event Location blog page on the website for posting, poetry, artwork, photos, and video to document this global mega-event across national borders.
Immediately following September 24th all documentation on the 100TPC.org website will be preserved by Stanford University in California, which has recognised 100 Thousand Poets for Change as an historical event, the largest poetry reading in history. They will archive the complete contents of the website, 100TPC.org, as part of their digital archiving program LOCKSS.
Founder Michael Rothenberg is a widely known poet, editor of the online literary magazine Bigbridge.org and an environmental activist based in Northern California.
For information contact: http://www.100TPC.org
Contact: walterblue@bigbridge.org
Phone: 305-753-4569
650 events in 450 cities and 95 countries will take place on September 24 to promote environmental, social, and political change. Poets, writers, artists will create, perform and demonstrate in their communities, and decide their own specific area of focus for change within the framework of peace and sustainability, which founder Michael Rothenberg stated, “…is a major concern worldwide and the guiding principle for this global event.”
Bob Holman and Margery Snyder, in a recent article on About.com said, “the beauty of the concept of 100 Thousand Poets for Change is that it is completely decentralized and completely inclusive.” All those involved
are hoping, through their actions and events, to seize and redirect the political and social dialogue of the day and turn the narrative of civilization towards peace and sustainability.
Poetry demonstrations are being organized in political hotspots such as Madison, Wisconsin and Cairo, Egypt. Poetry and peace gatherings are planned in strife-torn Kabul and Jalalabad.
In Mexico there are over 30 events, with 18 poetic actions in Mexico City, where poets as well as environmental and political activists are hoping to encourage reflection and creative responses against systemic violence through the written and the spoken word with day long street events, readings and workshops. More than a third of these events are organized by collectives actively working towards a non-violent approach to solve the country's most pressing problems.
To date there are over 260 events in the United States. There are 20 events statewide in North Carolina where teacher/poets have mobilized to protest cuts in education funding. And along the Platte River near Omaha, Nebraska, poets will be demonstrating against TransCanada’s planned Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. More examples of events can be found at the 100 Thousand Poets for Change www.100TPC.org. Each event organizer has an Event Location blog page on the website for posting, poetry, artwork, photos, and video to document this global mega-event across national borders.
Immediately following September 24th all documentation on the 100TPC.org website will be preserved by Stanford University in California, which has recognised 100 Thousand Poets for Change as an historical event, the largest poetry reading in history. They will archive the complete contents of the website, 100TPC.org, as part of their digital archiving program LOCKSS.
Founder Michael Rothenberg is a widely known poet, editor of the online literary magazine Bigbridge.org and an environmental activist based in Northern California.
For information contact: http://www.100TPC.org
Contact: walterblue@bigbridge.org
Phone: 305-753-4569
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
100 Thousand poets for change
100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE: An Anthology
(Ed. Anny Ballardini & Obododimma Oha, in collaboration with MICHAEL ROTHENBERG)
"We will turn to the idea of the messianic in Chapter Ten of this book, but for the moment it suffices to stress that both Benjamin and Agamben employ the term in singular fashion. For them, a messianic idea of history is not one in which we wait for the Messiah to come, end history, and redeem humanity, but instead is a paradigm for historical time in which we act as though the Messiah is already here, or even has already come and gone. What is so difficult about Agamben's use of the term messianic is how radically it is to be distinguished from the apocalyptic. Agamben says that to understand "messianic time" as it is presented in Paul's letters "one must first distinguish messianic time from apocalyptic time, the time of the now from a time directed towards the future" (LAM, 51). To this he adds, "If l had to try to reduce the distinction to a formula, I would say that the messianic is not, as it is always understood, the end of time, but the time of the end" (LAM, 51). The model of time corresponding to this idea is one that no longer looks for its decisive moment in a more or less remote future, but instead finds it in every minute of every day, in this world and in this life; and it is through such expressions as "dialectics at a standstill" and "means without end" that the two thinkers aim to return our gaze from the distant future to the pressing present."
(from GIORGIO AGAMBEN: A Critical Introduction, Leland de la Durantaye, 2009, p. 120)
Set in the context of this split between "the end of time" and "the time of the end" is Michael Rothenberg's recent invitation for the global writing public to participate in "a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change" titled 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE on 24 September, 2011. As protests for political reforms sweep across North Africa, the Middle East, in some parts of Europe, in the US, with the recent disasters in The Gulf of Mexico and in Japan, one cannot help thinking about the "Rothenberg Project” as a highly significant creative response to change as something more than an adjustment to the way social relations are constructed.
Obododimma Oha and Anny Ballardini, in collaboration with Michael Rothenberg’s event, will edit and feature outstanding poetic compositions for the 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE on Fieralingue's Poets’ Corner. Visual art, poems, poetic fiction, poetic nonfiction, and photographs to be submitted for consideration should go beyond the simple, gratuitous statement that ‘a change is needed.’ Our present, our Messianic time requires a STILLSTELLUNG (Benjamin’s word, translated by Dennis Redmond in On the Concept of History - 1940) with “an objective interruption of a mechanical process” into which we have been engulfed. Dennis Redmond continues in his explanation of STILLSTELLUNG: “rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not”. We feel that we are living in a similar situation, and we are in need of a Stillstellung followed by ideas to offer our politicians, to make students/friends/our communities more aware of how we can change, revise history, start over again.
Visual works and photographs for submission are to be saved in JPEG format, while texts, which should not have rigid formatting, are to be in Word. All submissions should be emailed to editors anny.ballardini@gmail.com and obodooha@gmail.com by September 1, 2011 with "100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE" in the Subject line.
SIGN UP TO JOIN US AT 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE:THE EVENT
Ps. If you are interested in signing up to participate as a reader, organizer or attendee, in the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event on September 24, 2011, (in your town) please go to Facebook for more details and indicate that you would like to attend the event. Link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106999432715571 . At Facebook you will be able to read more about event organization ideas and our thoughts about “what kind of change.” Over a thousand people have already signed up and over twenty cities have begun to organize events for their communities. JOIN US!!
(Ed. Anny Ballardini & Obododimma Oha, in collaboration with MICHAEL ROTHENBERG)
"We will turn to the idea of the messianic in Chapter Ten of this book, but for the moment it suffices to stress that both Benjamin and Agamben employ the term in singular fashion. For them, a messianic idea of history is not one in which we wait for the Messiah to come, end history, and redeem humanity, but instead is a paradigm for historical time in which we act as though the Messiah is already here, or even has already come and gone. What is so difficult about Agamben's use of the term messianic is how radically it is to be distinguished from the apocalyptic. Agamben says that to understand "messianic time" as it is presented in Paul's letters "one must first distinguish messianic time from apocalyptic time, the time of the now from a time directed towards the future" (LAM, 51). To this he adds, "If l had to try to reduce the distinction to a formula, I would say that the messianic is not, as it is always understood, the end of time, but the time of the end" (LAM, 51). The model of time corresponding to this idea is one that no longer looks for its decisive moment in a more or less remote future, but instead finds it in every minute of every day, in this world and in this life; and it is through such expressions as "dialectics at a standstill" and "means without end" that the two thinkers aim to return our gaze from the distant future to the pressing present."
(from GIORGIO AGAMBEN: A Critical Introduction, Leland de la Durantaye, 2009, p. 120)
Set in the context of this split between "the end of time" and "the time of the end" is Michael Rothenberg's recent invitation for the global writing public to participate in "a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change" titled 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE on 24 September, 2011. As protests for political reforms sweep across North Africa, the Middle East, in some parts of Europe, in the US, with the recent disasters in The Gulf of Mexico and in Japan, one cannot help thinking about the "Rothenberg Project” as a highly significant creative response to change as something more than an adjustment to the way social relations are constructed.
Obododimma Oha and Anny Ballardini, in collaboration with Michael Rothenberg’s event, will edit and feature outstanding poetic compositions for the 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE on Fieralingue's Poets’ Corner. Visual art, poems, poetic fiction, poetic nonfiction, and photographs to be submitted for consideration should go beyond the simple, gratuitous statement that ‘a change is needed.’ Our present, our Messianic time requires a STILLSTELLUNG (Benjamin’s word, translated by Dennis Redmond in On the Concept of History - 1940) with “an objective interruption of a mechanical process” into which we have been engulfed. Dennis Redmond continues in his explanation of STILLSTELLUNG: “rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not”. We feel that we are living in a similar situation, and we are in need of a Stillstellung followed by ideas to offer our politicians, to make students/friends/our communities more aware of how we can change, revise history, start over again.
Visual works and photographs for submission are to be saved in JPEG format, while texts, which should not have rigid formatting, are to be in Word. All submissions should be emailed to editors anny.ballardini@gmail.com and obodooha@gmail.com by September 1, 2011 with "100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE" in the Subject line.
SIGN UP TO JOIN US AT 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE:THE EVENT
Ps. If you are interested in signing up to participate as a reader, organizer or attendee, in the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event on September 24, 2011, (in your town) please go to Facebook for more details and indicate that you would like to attend the event. Link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106999432715571 . At Facebook you will be able to read more about event organization ideas and our thoughts about “what kind of change.” Over a thousand people have already signed up and over twenty cities have begun to organize events for their communities. JOIN US!!
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