WELCOME
TO
OUR POETRY ARCHIVE
FROM
THE EDITOR
Humanity has come a long
way since the dawn of the civilization. It has evolved around life and hope, to
reach its present state. During this long journey human nature has also evolved
around few basic characteristics. Namely fear, desire, grief, joy, pride, ego,
love and hate. These are the main emotions which shape the human nature. Many
believe that we as human being have not changed much since the dawn of the
civilization. Their argument mainly stands on two facts. One is, as they want
to put it straight, that we are unable to understand one another. This is our
inheritance from our ancestors. So, the conflicts between various tribes,
groups, and races remain still. And the second one is, this tradition of
differences actually prevent us to establish true human connections between
various sects, which leads to numerous wars and fights between one another.
Although not every war is the outcome of racial conflicts, rather than
conflicts of economic interests. Yet, we cannot deny their views entirely. Yes,
we have inherited this hatred among the tribes and races, nations and peoples
from our ancestors. And still we wage wars on others on and often. We didn’t
overcome this human characteristic still now. We as human being has changed in
both appearance and ability, from discovering the wheel of civilization to the
technologies to voyage into the outer space. Yet our basic instinct of hatred
among each other remain all the same. We have built nations with brutal
military forces; we spend trillions of dollars yearly on arms and armaments. We
put borders almost everywhere to block the immigrants to enter our lands.
Constantly we try to find out new mechanism to exploits others to consolidate
our economic supremacy. So, hatred among each other’s and occasional wars in
between military powers is also necessary for this sort of civilized societies
that we have proudly created.
We forget that we all are
human with the same basic instincts that we have already discussed earlier,
namely fear and desire, grief and joy, pride and ego, love and hate. Yet the
irony of our civilization is, most of the time we overlook these overwhelming
similarities with one another. Instead constantly we hover around the secondary
differences such as language, color, religion, races etc. Again, these
secondary differences dictate us how to behave and communicate with the others,
who are not from our own community. Actually, this communal instinct is our
prime inheritance that we want to preserve as our cultural tradition.
So, the problem of human
civilization is primarily the problem of communication of sympathy among each
other communities. This problem although has largely been tried to encounter
throughout the human history, still persists in our inner soul and in our
social structures. We should examine our own individual nature and make a
comparative study with the nature of the other people of different communities.
Only then we can learn about their conditions and aspirations and would realize
that we are on the same boat together. It’ll help us to understand different
communities and realize our own limitations. During the last couple of
centuries our civilization has started to examine these cross-cultural
differences and prejudices through the lens of literature. It is the domain of literature
where one can overcome the barriers of prejudices to realize the comparative
situations of different cultural sects and can relate to each other without any
misperceptions. Although literature expresses itself through a particular
language, yet it can also overcome the language barriers through translations.
So, literature is the most important tool to play a definitive role in the
cross-cultural interactions between various communities. It is through the fine
arts, mainly literature even more specifically through poetry, we as a human
being can find that human connections of sympathy which can bring us closer to
each other among different communities around the world. Thus, poetry can also
play an important role in cultural exchange worldwide.
As the founder editor of
Our poetry Archive, personally with this vision and belief I have started to
publish Our Poetry Archive as an international monthly web journal back in
2015. It is indeed true at that time even I was not sure about the success of my
endeavour. During this long journey of five years I have made number of friends
around the world with more or less same visions, who have joined OPA in various
capacities. One can wonder, how a journey of only five years can be long enough
to be praised. Yet it is indeed true that not many web journals can continue as
long in web publishing. We have published Sixty issues of Our Poetry Archive
during last five years. Not only that, we have also published five massive
annual Anthologies during the same period. Our aspiration was to bridge up the
cultural barriers and establish a world forum of human sensitivity to spread
out the essence of humanity around the world. And we have taken this aspiration
only to counter the traditional communal differences among various tribes,
races, communities, nations. Actually, we believe language is not at all a
barrier to embrace others with love and compassion. The vice lies in the basic
instinct of communal prejudice and hatred. Basic instinct of greed and power to
exploit and manipulate others. Yes, literature and poetry specifically can play
an important role in encountering these forces, prejudice and hatred, greed and
power.
With this issue Our Poetry
Archive has completed its fifth year of web publishing. I would like to extend
my gratitude to poet Deborah Brooks Langford and poet Stacia Lynn Bocskay of
USA; poet Maria Miraglia of Italy, Poet Alicja Kuberska of Poland, poet Aprilia
Zank of Germany, poet Anca Mihaela of Romania for their constant support and
hard work to help OPA during this long journey of five years. I would also like
to thank poet Leyla Isik of Turkey and Poet Ipsita Ganguly of India for their
supportive role as the members of the editorial desk. Last but not the least,
we from the entire editorial team remain obliged to each and everyone who have
supported OPA with their contributions during these five years. And especially
our readers should also be credited for their huge support to make OPA so
popular around the world.
From The
Editorial Desk
OPA
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WORLDWIDE WRITERS’ WEB
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