Tag Archives: activism

New proost poetry podcast with Samara Pitt…

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One of the delightful things about our Proost project is that it enables us to walk the edges and find others that are doing the same. We try to gather some of this edge walking via our two podcasts- one that has a more general focus (and includes trying to do Proost ‘buisiness’ out in the open), the other one gathering poets and poetry- as this seems to have always been a strong and important strand of what we are about.

Today I was delighted to listen and share this conversation;

Where does poetry go? What is it for? How might it be used in the service of justice, peace and reconciliation? How does this relate to spirituality?

In this episode, our Talitha talks to the poet, musician and activist Samara Pitt about her practice, her songs and her love of words. In particular, she describes a process of turning poetry into song – an almost magical process…

Samara describes herself like this;

Samara is a 7th generation coloniser-inheritor living on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri Woirurrung people in the hills outside of Naarm/Melbourne.

She has lived and worked in several different intentional communities, most recently at Gembrook Retreat where the community invites people on to the land to encounter God in creation and to equip each other to live a soulful life.

She loves singing, singing with others, and putting music to words that help us listen more deeply to Country and to soul. Drawing on the liturgical tradition of sung refrains as a congregational response to the reading of a psalm, she has just started to compose short songs based on the repetition of short phrases, designed to help us dwell with the emotion and beauty of words and harmonies. They are also a grateful tribute and offering to the writers.

You can find more of Samara’s work – and support it – here.

Here is Samara’s account of her poetry choices for this episode.

Butterflies

Shaun Tan is one of my favourite writers and illustrators working in these lands now called Australia. His books are haunting and beautiful. and help me to look at the ordinary through the lens of wonder and imagination. This is taken from his book Tales from the Inner City which explores the mythic presence of the more-than-human world in the midst of our cities.

The hunger

The lyrics come from Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s book ‘Thin Places’, a mix of nature writing and Troubles memoir about growing up in in the midst of violence in Derry and the role of nature in helping her find peace and healing.

The halos and the rocks

Gout Gout is an up and coming Australian sprinter who gave the most poetic statement I’ve ever heard from an athlete in a press conference, when he was asked if he still feels normal. I found another slam poetry style quote from him about how he ‘steps light but presence heavy’, and then added my own line imagining the cycle of preparing for, running and coming down after races.

Turn towards the darkness

I found these lines in a book by Chris Anderson called ‘Light when it comes’. Based on the spiritual practice of ‘examen’, these words suggest that we turn to face darkness rather than flee from it.

Ethical capitalism debate podcast…

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If you are interested in the reformation (or destruction) of our capital driven economic system, then check out this podcast from a recent debate held by the Oasis’s Charities Parliament-

Does capitalism need reforming, replacing or is it fine just as it is?

Listen to the lively debate around the question of our generation with representatives of Occupy London Stock Exchange, former investment banker Ken Costa and Dr Luke Bretheton.

You might also be interested in checking out some of the stuff on the Occupy Movement’s ‘Occupy Cafe’ website. It full of activism, protest and even poetry! Any activist website with poetry will get my vote…

I really liked this for example-

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

~

Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

~

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

~

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

~

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

~

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

~

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

~

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

~

He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

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And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

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Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

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And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

~

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

~

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

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But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

~

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

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Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

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And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

—Tony Hoagland—

There is also quite a lot on the site about faith- and how this might stimulate or oppose activism for change. Check out this or this for instance.

Let’s join in the conversation at least friends…