Got Gulf Oil?
Like to eat Louisiana seafood? Swim with the Florida fishies? Enjoy a little oil in your cereal? No? Please answer the call for work at Poets for Living Waters today!
Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.
The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.
This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.
If you would like to submit work for consideration, please send 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to:
poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com.
Editors: Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples
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If you care, share this urgent call!
Eco Friendly New Orleans Poetry Politics BP Call for Work Clean Up disaster fisheries Flordia geology Gulf Coast Gulf of Mexico habitat Louisiana marshland New Orleans Obama Oil Spill poems Poetry tragedy wildlife
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
I have just now joined with Poets for Living Waters and am grateful for its existence. Something to do besides just wringing one’s hands and brain cells. This action reminds me of the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s words to do with the truth of poetry, of putting love into action. Remember she was the poet who went to Hanoi and stood on the sidewalk in front of the prison gate in silence, for days, paying witness to the human casualties of war imprisoned there.
Thank you, Donna – well put.
Thanks for doing this. I’m going to submit something ASAP and also put out the call on my blog and Facebook. And Twitter, too.
Thanks much, Collin!