A Message from the Earth First! Warrior Poets Society

Posted on the 03 April 2013 by Earth First! Newswire @efjournal

The EF! Warrior Poets Society recently began keeping up a website, Armed With Visions.com which features hundreds of poems by dozens of biocentric poets. The site also includes videos and audio tracks of many new and classic EF! poems, and more. What follows is a brief introduction…

by Dennis Fritzinger

Anyone can write a warrior poem, but not everyone can be a warrior poet. Warrior poetry is a perspective–a way of looking at the world. Warrior poets see things differently, and often see different things. There’s the activist side–make that Earth (green) activist–that can’t help showing up in their poetry.

More people are starting to notice this, it seems. There’s not just the critical studies on Gary Snyder and a handful of other poets (Frost, Jeffers, Stevens), or some superb anthologies (top of the list being News of the Universe, subtitled Poems of Two-Fold Consciousness, edited by Robert Bly), but now there’s Can Poetry Save the Earth? by John Felstiner, a Paul Celan scholar who looks at “green” poetry as acts of resistance, much as Celan’s poetry resisted the Holocaust.

The Earth First! Journal, that has always promoted acts of resistance against the environmental holocaust, was a natural home for such poetry and even gave it its own page, “Armed With Visions”, named by Art Goodtimes its first editor, where it functioned as sort of a poet’s campfire within the greater Rendezvous of the Journal.

We hope to transpose this campfire (not replace it, but grow it) into the relatively new media of the internet.

So ArmedWithVisions.com will be sort of a social networking site for warrior poets, if we’ve done it right, and in the process raise the visibility–and effectiveness–of the warrior poem itself.

Dennis Fritzinger

Dennis Fritzinger co-founded the Warrior Poets Society in 1992 and went on to edit Earth First! Campfire Poems with Karen Coulter and Dwight Metzger, as well as publish a book of poems Branded With Desire with co-author Karen Coulter. In addition Dennis  is author of two books, Tame Wilderness and Earth National Park, and currently serves as editor for Armed With Visions, the Earth First! Journal’s poetry page.