On the belief that poets, not politicians, can help bring about tangible political change, London’s Southbank Center will again host its biennial Poetry International festival, nine days’ worth of readings, music, translations and new poetry commissions.

The festival, which runs from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7 in various venues within Southbank, has political roots. Ted Hughes, Charles Osborne and Patrick Garland created the first Poetry International as a space for artistic dialogue in 1967, a time of “radical political change and transcultural revolutions,” said Rachel Holmes, Southbank’s head of literature and spoken word.

The full blog post, on London’s Poetry International Festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES. The post also continues here, after the jump.

The 2010 version will continue in that political tradition, by focusing heavily on poets and poetry from the Middle East, including Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Syria, as well as work by Iraq war veterans.

This year’s festival will also, according to Ms. Holmes, feature more women poets, and place a greater emphasis on a range of styles in aesthetics in poetry, drawing from ancient tradition to multimedia innovations in both print poetry and spoken word.

On Nov. 5, the Brooklyn-based performance poet Suheir Hammad, who mixes narratives of Palestinian displacement with hip-hop, will collaborate with Tashweesh, an audio-visual artist’s collective. On Nov. 6, the composer Michael Nyman will perform a suite of songs based on Paul Celan’s post-World War II poetry, set to backdrops of extracts of Mr. Nyman’s films about Auschwitz, as writers and actors read Mr. Celan’s work.

“As I witnessed recently at the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), poets are at the forefront of shaping the future,” Ms. Holmes said. “Saying the unspeakable, envisioning the unimaginable, and in the great tradition of poetry actively confronting illegitimate authority

“While politicians re-engage in fractious talks toward political settlement in the Middle East, Poetry International 2010 holds out not only the hope of imagining peace beyond the apparently intractable present, it is a creative and defiant congregation to build the future.”

Photo: Vietnamese poet Da Thao Phuong performing at the Poetry International festival in 2008. Courtesy of Southbank Centre

I don’t usually write about music or journalism produced by friends or colleagues, but when friends or colleagues happen to produce badass work, I gotta give due credit.

The San Francisco-based Mac McClelland, a former colleague of mine at Mother Jones, recently wrote a book about refugees from Burma called For Us Surrender is out of the Question, after living with refugees there in 2006. She tackles her subject with such a candid sense of humor that prompted me to tell her in a recent email that she was completely “punk rock.” She agreed.

Milan-based Joel Schalit, a fellow skateboarder and musician who gave me much journalistic motivation while living in London last year, recently wrote a book called Israel vs. Utopia, about Israel’s perceived identity in the West. This from the same writer who taught me to pay more attention to fliers, graffiti, adverts, street signs, menus, and other things you pass every single day.

Reactions to Joel’s work are here. More about Mac is here. Coincidentally, Schalit is the former associate editor of Punk Planet, which was published by Soft Skull Press, the same folks who published McClelland’s book.

The rationale behind an upcoming Afghanistan film festival in London came about during a trip to Afghanistan in November of 2006. Zahra Qadir and her friend Dan Gorman were there working on a short film called “Circus for Life,” about a therapeutic circus for children in Kabul.

While making their documentary, the two filmmakers noticed that Afghans liked talking with them about movies. Images of the outside world – of other people’s ideas and ways of life – were exciting.

The full blog post, on London’s Afghanistan Film Festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES

I watched Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration yesterday via an internet connection in Brixton. I was the only American in the room, and couldn’t help but crack jokes about Dianne Feinstein’s hair and the strange pit orchestra they assembled for the event (Watching the event live, Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman seemed bored and under-used to me. It was later reported that they weren’t in fact playing).

One young woman in the room noted that Aretha Franklin’s best singing days had probably passed (it was difficult not to agree, but hey, that was a hell of a hat she had on). The full blog post at INTELLIGENT LIFE

A foreign policy lecture at London’s renowned international affairs hub, Chatham House, isn’t the sexiest way to spend an evening. But with Zbigniew Brzezinski as the invited guest speaker, the discussion was complex, enlightening and stunningly direct. The full blog post at INTELLIGENT LIFE

A young guy with a mohawk and an American flag painted on the side of his head bumps into me and spills my coffee at around 1am. I turn to ask Chris, a guy in his early 60s married to a woman from Manhattan, how important he thinks this election is for Brits. “The US is like a video game that we Brits like to watch”, he tells me. “We don’t understand it one bit, but we’re fascinated.”

The full story at Intelligent Life

Pistolera front woman Sandra Lilia Velasquez dishes on San Diego slow pokes, fierce New Yorkers, and how to make it without a record label.

The full story, with audio, is at MOTHER JONES

Boots Riley talked with me about politics, and vented about how the biz shortchanges idiosyncratic bands like the Coup.

The INTERVIEW appears on motherjones.com, and appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of Mother Jones Magazine.