Opa Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry: FROM THE EDITOR

I think, most of us would agree that poetry is actually the evidence of life, written in words and lines with an inherent desire to communicate with the infinity and the eternity. According to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. Yes we also do believe this from within the very fiber of our inner self. This was also our goal from the start of our journey as the monthly web journal named Our Poetry Archive to breakdown all the frontiers and to reach all with the creative excellences of poets around the world through a single platform. We also know, as put down by one of the most popular poetess of recent time Rita Dove, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful”. We at Our Poetry Archive always try to keep this standard with each publication. And to make this a reality we need poets, real poets and poetesses to maintain a high standard. And who is the poet? The poet is the magician, only who can make the invisible visible by exploring his or her inner self; vibrating the tune of his time. This magic is the ultimate manifestation of art and culture, which becomes the tradition and literary heritage one day. Thus poetry is equally important for our social progression as well. Perhaps keeping it in mind one of the most beloved poet of all time Percy Byshe Shelley, once wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. I wonder how prophetic his utterance was! We at Our Poetry Archive always try to give due honor to these unacknowledged legislators of the world through our various projects. So keeping it in mind, this year we have decided to bring out an Anthology of Contemporary Women’s poetry. As we do believe women have the rights to bring out their creative brilliance and to make the world listen to their inner voices as well. So here we are, with these inner voices of women excellence from various part of the world, bringing in numerous literary traditions and heritages into this single collection of poetry.

To our surprise as well as joy we got tremendous responses from all over the world for this Anthology. To keep the literary standard up to the expected mark of our esteemed readers we had to select the best contributions from all the submissions. This doesn’t mean that all the submissions that have not been included in this Anthology are bad, but they were not at par with the rest of the entries that have been selected for the publication. So we would certainly encourage them to try and develop their poetical skill and literary merit every time. As renowned poet Robert Frost once said: “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession,” – we do also believe one has to attain this condition through rigorous practices with utmost devotion.

Actually this is also the time of confusion as well. Who is the real poet? Nowadays people do think poetry is the only medium that can be easily ventured upon. So, almost everyone is writing poetry overnight. Now, one can argue that it is better to try out with poetry than to spend the time doing nothing creative. Yes we hope everyone would agree with this argument. We have nothing against it. Although this is not bad for society as a whole, yet this trend is not good for literature either. Then what to do? This is the ultimate question for the literary fraternity of the world. Should we consider this trend will actually bring mediocrity in literature? Or can we believe that with the passing of time this trend will be phased out eventually. These are the questions of this time. We don’t have any clear-cut answers either. We can only encourage others to uplift their literary taste for the benefit of the literature as a whole. Yes that can be done, and even over the internet. Our Poetry Archive is only trying to do this since its inauguration in web publishing with the introduction of more and more new poets of highest literary caliber around the world. We believe with this continuous process of uninterrupted endeavor to bring out poems of highest literary merit can eventually uplift the overall taste of the readers and upcoming poets as well. And to our relief we have got the encouragement blessings and supports of many renowned poets and poetesses from different parts of the world to make Our Poetry Archive one of the rearguards of the literary frontier of the present time. Even for this Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry we got these supports as well. Poetess Claudia Piccinno of Italy, Poetess Maria Miraglia, poetess Alicia Kuberska of Poland, poetess Deborah Brooks Langford of USA, poetess Anca Mihaela Bruma, poetess Stacia Reynolds to name a few, have extended their unconditional support to make this massive Anthology possible. We are really grateful to all of them. We are also grateful to all the contributors of this Anthology as well.

From The Editorial Desk

OPA

WORLD WIDE WRITERS’ WEB

PRESENTATION!

PUBLISHED BY

OPA

OUR

POETRY ARCHIVE

ONLINE MONTHLY POETRY JOURNAL

https://ourpoetryarchive.blogspot.com

email us to:

ourpoetryarchive@gmail.com