Tag: Terry Trowbridge

Posted in Calls for submissions, General Interest

Woman, Life, Freedom | Call for Poetry Submissions

Posted on by The BeZine Editors
Tehran, March 8, 1979 – Women demand a government based on gender equality
Source

Since September 2022, protests by the longstanding women’s movement in Iran have been violently repressed by Iran’s government and complicit police forces. Among many incidents, hundreds of girls in Iranian schools have been targets of chemical attacks. Increasing rates of executions have emboldened solidarity across entire families to continue the protests for gender equality and the social, political, and economic changes possible with expanded civil rights for women. Journalists and artists have been documenting the local events as they occur. Because the Persian women’s movement is an international network of people who live in communities and work for institutions around the world, events in Iran have effects everywhere. International solidarity is turning into responsive international action.

Tehran, March 8, 1979 – Women demand a government based on gender equality
Source

If poetry has a role in social change for social justice, then surely the next several months will be time for literary publishers, poetry event organizers, and readers, to undertake that role on an international scale. Poems must be made available and accessibly distributed for that to happen.

Bänoo Zan, an Iranian-Canadian poet living in exile, and Cy Strom, an award-winning editor from Toronto, have a call for poetry submissions for an anthology with the Toronto publisher Guernica Editions, to be titled Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. Submissions are currently open, and the deadline is March 15, 2024.

Demonstrators opposed to the Iranian regime hold a candlelight vigil to pay tribute to those who have died protesting the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was killed in police custody after allegedly violating the country’s hijab rules, outside the White House on Saturday. (Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
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Submittable page.

Along with the call for submissions, Guernica and others are reaching out for further funding to this project for social change.

Women Life Freedom GoFundMe page.

©2023 Terry Trowbridge
All rights reserved

Posted in General Interest, interNational Poetry Month, Poems/Poetry, Poets/Writers

We Should Respond | Terry Trowbridge

Posted on by The BeZine Editors

Why We Should Respond to Individual Short Texts

I’m annoyed at how writers of flash fiction, poetry, and flash nonfiction are all howling into the abyss of the internet with very few readers. I’m considering writing some kind of daily critical response to one or two pieces of literary writing that appear in online literary journals, just to prove there is an audience (even if the audience is just me).

Currently, the apparent majority of readers for online literary journals seems to be ChatGPT iterations and other attempts at generative algorithms. And they are under-equipped readers, because they lack intentionality, as demonstrated when GPT conversations go in a loop of “Goodbye!” “See you later!” “Goodbye!” “See you later!” ad infinitum. “Goodbye!” is a word you experience; a word that is defined by the intention to leave; and not definable by whatever explanation is in a dictionary, vocabulary lesson, or lexicon.

Many other examples of writing cannot be read or interpreted by generative algorithms, no matter how many iterations they pop out, because of the embodied intentions. The disembodied superficiality of generative algorithms is deeply inscribed by a human-led corporate culture that devalues literacy, but over values the production of bureaucratic paperwork. By which I mean, our online literary artwork is being turned into fodder that feed generative algorithms, as passive readers, to produce more text for the text’s corporateliability’s sake.

We should think of ourselves before we think of Silicon Valley corporations. We should be active readers for social change, creative conversation, or leisure.

We can’t afford to limit our readership to the data sets of generative algorithms. While AI labs control the legislative power that allows them to use our words without compensation and without critical consideration, we still have the power to be active readers. If we want to exercise power in the sociopolitical changes happening now, then we need to start producing critical and appreciative texts that demonstrate some kind of human reading.

©2023 Terry Trowbridge
All rights reserved

Terry Trowbridge…

…has poems appearing in The New Quarterly,Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, Gray Sparrow, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, AoHaM, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mathematical Intelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics,The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis

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Pastel of European Robin perched on a small branch by Tom Higgins ©2021
Art: European Robin, pastels, ©2021 Tom Higgins