This is the second annual volume of an anthology and cultural festival in San Francisco. How can a small volume of poetry overthrow a world order? Poetry can bring us together and heal many deep wounds. The 61 poets in this volume are doctors and visionaries. This troubled time is in desperate need of vision. In the regime we live under today, wealth is power. Transnational financial institutions run our world to extract wealth and privatize it into the hands of a tiny elite. The elite then uses that wealth to make the world their personal playground and to perpetuate the system. It's called capitalism. Read some of these poems out loud. They contain the answers to many of the deepest questions of our time. Sometimes you can find the meanings in the spaces between the words, in the music of the syllables, in the friction of homonyms, in your thoughts or emotions after you have read the poem, or in the poem that is hovering in the air of your room, that you just need to catch and pull down into your heart. We want a world structured around people caring for each other and for the environment, looking out for the best interests of all, an equitable civilization, a sustainable, thriving planet to pass down to our great-grandchildren. What prevents us from having that? Capitalism requires people to maintain a low level of consciousness based on individualism, competition, consumption. A world based on sharing is only possible through raised consciousness, and poets and artists are among the gatekeepers of our consciousness. The spirit embodied in the poetry in this little volume is at the cutting edge of all that is most relevant to the future of this beautiful threatened world.
About the Author: JACK HIRSCHMAN is the emeritus 4th Poet Laureate of San Francisco (2006-2009), one of the founders of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade (RPB) of San Francisco in 2009; a founder of the World Poetry Movement (WPM) in Medellin, Colombia in 2011, and a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA). He has co-edited this Anthology. JOHN CURL is co-editor of this anthology. Among his more recent books are For All The People (history), Yoga Sutras of Fidel Castro (unclassifiable), The Co-op Conspiracy (novel), and Revolutionary Alchemy (collected poems). He is chair of PEN Oakland and is known also for his translations of ancient Aztec, Mayan and Inca poetry. He is currently finishing a new novel, Maroon.