POETRY KANTO 2011: "poetry that navigates the divide of ocean and language"

Via poet and author Alan Botsford, co-editor of the luminous Poetry Kanto:

POETRY KANTO 2011: free copies available

This year's issue of POETRY KANTO No. 27 is now available. If you wish to receive a free copy (while copies last) just notify me by e-mail:

alan@kanto-gakuin.ac.jp

and include your name and mailing address.

This offer applies to anyone interested in reading this year's issue-- a pivotal year here in Japan marked by the March 11 Great Eastern Earthquake and the subsequent, ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Nuclear Facility.

The line-up of poets in issue No. 27 is:

Ito Hiromi
Jeffrey Angles
Libby Hart
Geneva Bronwyn Hargreaves
William I. Elliott
Gavin Bantock
Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Gregory Dunne
Leila Fortier
Niels Hav
Changming Yuan
William Heyen
Michael Sowder
Adele Ne Jame
Yumiko Tsumura
Jane Hirshfield

We especially encourage prospective future contributors--poets or translators-- along with potential reviewers to request a copy and to help spread the word about this bi-lingual journal aiming to promote dialogue between Japan and the English-speaking world.

Poetry Kanto will begin reading submissions for the 2012 issue from December through April.

Poetry Kanto, a not-for-profit journal distributed free in Japan and in locations around the world, is funded by the Kanto Poetry Center of the College of Humanities at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan. The bi-lingual journal, featuring contemporary and modern Japanese poets in translation, and English-language poetry from around the world, has been in publication for nearly 30 years.

For more on Poetry Kanto, please visit our websites:

http://home.kanto-gakuin.ac.jp/~kg061001/

Mamaist.com

For those who love literary nonfiction, Alan Botsford's "Defining Whitman" is a rich exploration of the role of poetry in the realization of self and life itself:

In this light a poem is a sacred story that, in connecting psyche and cosmos, can offer core lessons of unfolding discovery in each of us. For it is here at the site of the poem as a work of art and spirit —where the dynamic whole is greater than the sum of its parts—that we may be reminded, in Whitman’s words, “That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession”… And that at the threshold of the text the perpetual re-gathering out of the depths, in a cycle of losses and gains, binds poet and reader together to testify that poetry is living communion.