It's been a while Poetry Ireland folks, but I wanted to share a sequence of sonnets that are featured this month at The New Formalist here:
http://theformalist.org/
A companion video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7T9ApkFMWU
A explanatory essay follows which warns on the graphic nature of both the subject matter and the images. The whole notion of birth defects from weaponized depleted uranium continues to give me nightmares. The implications it has for humanity redounds in too many ways to count...
“The death camps were not built in the Gobi Desert. And when barbarism challenged, the humanities, the arts, philosophic thought proved not only largely impotent but often collaborative with despotism and massacre,”
–George Steiner, from ‘A New Literacy’, The Kenyon Review, 24:1, Winter 2007, 10-24
To date culture has been a broad disappointment. However our new up-close planet beckons with both peril and promise brought about by advances in human proximity. Evil works best in the shadows. Should a mass awakening break out, culture and its potential for edification may yet serve as a prototype for meaningful civilization. Such an awakening would belie centuries of stony sleep. But it could happen.
The oldest cave art dates back over 30,000 years. So the arc of human culture easily eclipses the totality of human civilization. Practically all things human happened on culture’s watch. Culture has been impotent against the inhuman aspects of human community, maybe even as Steiner suggests actively collaborative. But grassroots proximity is relatively new. Plane travel and commerce have nibbled at the edges of collapsing distance. But the Internet could be a cultural epoch-maker in the sense of advancing the former’s long-sought promise by out-dazzling —with light, speed and ubiquity— the many tedious and banal campaigns that have traditionally typified evildoing.
...
(contined at webpage)