RECORD-BREAKING GLOBAL COLLECTION OF POETRY TIMED TO COINCIDE WITH BLIX UN REPORT
In a remarkable show of global protest against a possible war with Iraq, over 100 of the world's leading, mid-career and emerging poets who work in the English language, have gathered their work together in a book of new peace poems.100 Poets Against The War is perhaps the fastest-assembled world anthology ever. Editor Todd Swift, working with Val Stevenson of Nthposition.com, announced the first call for poems last Monday, January 20, 2003. Within hours, poems from dozens of countries were pouring in.
"Poets usually take weeks, if not months, to submit poems for an anthology," says editor Swift, "so I was astonished when they sent me poems within hours and days of my call for new work."
Over the week, Swift and Stevenson selected, edited and arranged the collection of powerful poems, into a format designed for maximum impact. The anthology of poems will be presented on the website http://www.nthposition.com as a PDF file.
As all contributors have donated their poems, any and all interested readers, writers and peace activists are encouraged to download the file, share it, host it on their own sites, and ultimately print it up and make it into a book of poetry.
"It would have been impossible to complete the project within this time-scale without the Internet," added Stevenson. "The poems come from all over the world, they were commissioned and edited in Paris, page lay-out was in London, and file conversion was done in the States."
"The plan is to make a book of poems against the attack on Iraq instantly available to anyone who wants it, anywhere in the world," says editor and poet Todd Swift.
The collection features many widely-published and award-winning poets across a broad spectrum, from performance to new formalism, and seeks to fuse a political, inspiring message with well-written verse.
It is available as of Monday, January 27, 2003 from www.nthposition.com
For further information, please contact the editor, Todd Swift: todd@toddswift.com
or Val Stevenson, of nthposition.com: val@nthposition.com
tel: (London) (0)20 7485 5002
J. R. Carpenter || bio || electronic literature || publications || talks || blog