Call for Submissions
The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century
Poems of Spirituality
Edited by Dr. Oliver V. Brennan and Dr. Todd Swift
For Publication by Eyewear Publishing 2013-14
Deadline for submission: August 1, 2012
Eyewear Publishing is planning to publish an
anthology of new, mostly previously-unpublished poems, written in English,
concerned with spiritual issues in this secular age, by persons of any faith,
or none. Submissions will be welcomed
via email as word documents, containing no more than three poems, and including
contact details and a brief 100 word biographical note about the author.
One of the
characteristics of our contemporary culture which is generally described as
post-modern is the human search for the spiritual. The advent of post-modernity has been
accompanied by the dawn of a new spiritual awakening. Many spiritual writers say that desire is our
fundamental dis-ease and is always stronger than satisfaction. This desire lies at the centre of our lives,
in the deep recesses of the soul. This
unquenchable fire residing in all of us manifests itself at key points in the
human life cycle. Spirituality is
ultimately what we do about that desire.
When Plato said that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond
and that beyond is trying to draw it back to itself, he is laying out the broad
outlines for a spirituality. Augustine
made this explicitly Christian in his universally known phrase: ‘You have made
us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You’.
This new emphasis on
and openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence which is
characteristic of contemporary lived culture is accompanied by a new emergence
of atheism - ‘The Rage against God’ – as well as a sometimes-aggressive secularism. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are
the two best-known exemplars of this in Western Europe. Perhaps the best response to this rage
against belief in a Divine Power at work in the universe is a poetic one. In reply to people such as his brother
Christopher and Dawkins, Peter Hitchens believes that passions as strong as
theirs are more likely to be countered by ‘the unexpected force of poetry,
which can ambush the human heart at any time’.
Hence we invite poets from
around the world who can empathise with the new search for the spiritual to
write about their belief, search or struggle with their quest for God (or a
God), whether their image of God is what one young person described as ‘a
creative energy that exists all around us, a life force’, the female image of
God of the Old Testament, or the Abba (Father) image which lay at the core of
the spirituality of Jesus of Nazareth, or indeed, some heretofore unimagined apprehension
of the divine. The purpose of this
collection is to awaken debate, create an imaginative discourse and generally
open a space for religious poetic practices in the contemporary world, while at
the same time refusing to delimit the horizon of the possible.
As poetry, and poets,
have a long, rich, and no doubt complicated tradition of writing to, and about
God (one needs only to think of Dante, Milton, Donne and Dickinson) and other
issues surrounding faith, belief, and transcendence, the editors believe there
should be no shortage of inspiring, inquiring, intriguing and imaginative poems
available for readers at this challenging time in human history.
For more information, or to submit, contact Dr
Swift at T.Swift@kingston.ac.uk or
at Facebook
Comments
Sounds like an interesting project - you got me thinking now...