The Poets' Struggle

In an emergency conference of Israeli Poetry titled "The State against Culture", The Poets' Struggle organization, protested about the poor state of poets and poetry in Israel: lack of funds allocated to poetry education, hardly any government support for poetry orgs, projects, magazines, events etc. (about 500,000 Euros annually), and lack of government art policy and failing to foster young audiences, or establish poetry centers. There are hardly any poetry books on sale in our 2 major book chains, and in fact, in the last decade, while Israel has been taken over by tycoons and acquiescent rightist politicians, it has all amounted to trying to hush the poets' voice, and turn our culture into entertainment

The conference was a major success with many of our prominent poets participating and a lot of coverage. We'll strongly continue to resist the violation of UNESCO's world conference resolutions concerning the role of artists in society and the ensuing commitment of every country to foster public interest in art and artistic creativity, to artistic education etc.  1997, articles 11, 26, 31

We are working on a Poetry Law that will establish the rights of poets foster poetry and make it available. At the same time we are starting a "Poetry in School" project and a "Poetry-friendly Stamp of Approval" project for bookshops. On February 29^th we plan to have our next major event, that will be also our contribution for the WPM "Leap Forward" worldwide umbrella

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Poetic flash mob on Feb. 29^th

On Wednesday Feb.29^th we'll go for and intimate mass event. At exactly 17:13 we ask each and every poet and poetry lover to read aloud one poem wherever he or she is.  It can happen in the office, street, demonstration, café, the sea shore, supermarket, your own room or car

In this very moment poetry will echo all over the country in all its languages – Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic, English, Yiddish – and further on to the whole globe

We invite you, poets and poetry lovers to join in. You're all invited to video the moment or record it on the cell phone and put it on Youtube.

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The Poets Struggle