Tag Archives: United Nations

UN Plaza, International Day of Peace, San Francisco, September 21, 2025

Frederick Glaysher, reading from Into the Ruins of Modernity at the UN Plaza, International Day of Peace, San Francisco, September 21, 2025. 26:49 minutes.

Watch on Youtube Channel or below

Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations June 26, 1945
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which
twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,
and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

San Francisco City Hall in the background. Videographer, Jay Krohnengold.

Into the Ruins of Modernity:
FROM Into The Ruins: Poems. By Frederick Glaysher. Softcover. $18.00. Preface. Earthrise Press, 1999; 2024 Revised Edition. Several new poems. 88 pages. ISBN: 9780967042190. Printed in the USA, UK, Australia, India.
FROM The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem. Softcover. $18.00. Earthrise Press, 2002; 2024 Revised Edition. 72 pages. ISBN: 9780967042143. Printed in the USA, UK, Australia, India. https://bookshop.org/shop/earthrisepress
Holiday Special 15% Discount, until January 31, 2026, on The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem and The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays use LOVEBOOKSELLERS in the Bookshop Org checkout cart.

Frederick Glaysher has been an outspoken advocate of the United Nations, an accredited participant at the UN Millennium Forum (2000), and attended the UNA Members Day 2012 on the Millennium Development Goals, held in the General Assembly Hall. Member/Board Member, UN Association of Greater Detroit UNA-USA. 2000/2012-2013.

Frederick Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial, at the University of Michigan, with the poet Robert Hayden and edited both Hayden’s Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright). He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, the latter in English. At the college and university level, he taught rhetoric, American and non-Western literature, humanities, world religions, etc., for ten years.

He lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan—in Japan, where he taught at Gunma University in Maebashi; in Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, site of one of the largest internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII; in Illinois, on the central farmlands and on the Mississippi; ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester.

A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, Glaysher studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the old Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, including Hong Kong and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, he further explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity.

#unitednations #UNPlaza #sanfrancisco #internationaldayofpeace #poetry #epicpoetry

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In 2018, Stepping Back from the Brink of Self-Destruction

Blue Water Planet

Blue Water Planet

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In 2018, Stepping Back from the Brink of Self-Destruction
Contact: Frederick Glaysher
Phone: 248-652-4982
fglaysher@gmail.com
https://EarthrisePress.Net/about.html

We human beings on this planet need a new vision and understanding of life, to help bring us together, to see and feel and understand our common humanity, to step back from the brink of self-destruction.

From the Moon, together, we can see it, a new global, universal vision of life. Many millions of people around the world have already evolved toward such a vision. Frederick Glaysher’s The Parliament of Poets, published by Earthrise Press, is set partly on the moon and evokes a new way humankind can come together in peace.

Reviewed by Hans Ruprecht at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, as “A great epic poem of startling originality and universal significance,” while Kevin McGrath in South Asian Studies at Harvard University wrote, “A remarkable poem by a uniquely inspired poet, taking us out of time into a new and unspoken consciousness…”

Thirty years in the making, set partly on the moon at the Apollo 11 landing site, the Sea of Tranquility, Glaysher’s epic poem charts a way forward for humanity, from the perspective of a quarter of a million miles out in space, gazing back at Mother Earth.

In a world of Quantum science, Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, calls all the poets of the nations, ancient and modern, East and West, to assemble on the moon to consult on the meaning of modernity. The Parliament of Poets sends the main character, the Poet of the Moon, on a Journey to the seven continents to learn from all of the spiritual and wisdom traditions of humankind. On Earth and on the moon, the poets teach a new global, universal vision of life.

One of the major themes is the power of women and the female spirit across cultures. Another is the nature of science and religion, including Quantum Physics, as well as the “two cultures,” science and the humanities.

Frederick Glaysher is the author or editor of ten books. At the University of Michigan, Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial with the poet Robert Hayden and edited his prose and poems. He has lived and traveled widely in Japan and China and was a Fulbright-Hays scholar on China and an NEH scholar on India.

Reviving both the art of epic poetry and the Greek story-tellers known as rhapsodes, Glaysher has given more than twenty epic poetry readings from The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem (ISBN: 978-0982677889 $23.95 EarthrisePress.Net and Amazon), described by the audience, “like a story around a campfire.”

Mr. Glaysher has written a new story for humanity that can help inspire people toward peace in the real world.

Frederick Glaysher

 

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Poetry Month, Robert Hayden, Space Traveler, & Epic Poetry Reading 2017

Poetry Month, Robert Hayden, Space Traveler, & Epic Poetry Reading 2017

Saturday, April 22, 2017. 1:00 – 2:30 PM.
Detroit Public Library, Main Branch. 5201 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48202. Fine Arts Reading Room, 3rd Floor.

In addition to speaking on Hayden and reading from some of his poems dealing with themes about outer space, Glaysher reads two excerpts from his epic poem The Parliament of Poets, in one of which Hayden is a character, the other set in a village in East Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war, with Sogolon, a character from the Mali epic Sundiata.

“We are one in our struggles toward perfection. And I hope that we shall always be.” —Robert Hayden, Letter to Frederick Glaysher, November 14, 1979

Read a Free Chapter, The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem
Amazon, Hardcover, Kindle https://www.amazon.com/The-Parliament-Poets-Epic-Poem/dp/098267788X/
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Buy direct from Earthrise Press. Free shipping in the USA, UK, and Australia, processed within 24 hours.
https://earthrisepress.net/parliament_of_poets.html

REVIEWS

“Like a story around a campfire.” —From the Audience

“A great epic poem of startling originality and universal significance, in every way partaking of the nature of world literature.” —Dr. Hans-George Ruprecht, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

“A remarkable poem by a uniquely inspired poet, taking us out of time into a new and unspoken consciousness…” —Kevin McGrath, Lowell House, South Asian Studies, Harvard University

“Mr. Glaysher has written an epic poem of major importance… Truly a major accomplishment and contribution to American Letters.” —ML Liebler, Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

“Glaysher is really an epic poet and this is an epic poem! To put this in context, in my view the last complete and true epic poem in the English Language was Paradise Lost written by John Milton in the 17th century… One can hardly congratulate him enough, then, on this achievement, since it has been so long awaited… One fabulous quality of this poem is its clarity and luminous quality. I love the fact that despite the wide ranging topographical and lexical references this poem is easy to understand and follow: it is a poet writing for people, not one trying to be clever, and not one concealing their lack of poetry in obfuscation. Glaysher has written a masterpiece… I strongly recommend Frederick Glaysher’s poem.” —James Sale (UK), The Society of Classical Poets

“And a fine major work it is.” —Arthur McMaster, Department of English, Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina

“Very intrigued by his background. I’m extremely impressed with the quality and depth of the writing. So well written. It’s almost like a stepping stone into all this world lit that people might otherwise never touch.” —R. J. Fox, Kerrytown BookFest, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sept. 11, 2016. https://Youtu.be/YDaPs1dGS4c

“Bravo to the Poet for this toilsome but brilliant endeavour.” —Umme Salma, Transnational Literature, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

A stain-glass window in the Detroit Public Library, with Apollo above Erato.

Frederick Glaysher.
Reading for Poetry Month, April 22, 2017

Frederick Glaysher.
Fine Arts Reading Room

 

YouTube Playlist – Epic Poetry Readings and Workshop. Copyright (c) 2012-2017 Frederick Glaysher.

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For Fancy Reigns in That Estate

Frederick Glaysher

Frederick Glaysher

The notion has been raised that my poetry is about “ideas.” I assure my readers that there are, in that sense, no “ideas” in my poetry, for it has been my life-long ambition that Fancy, that highest form of epistemology, might reign in that estate, as in the great epics around the world, East and West, Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Alas, we human beings are dying all around the world because of “ideas”! So, I said to myself, let us journey to the Moon, beyond the world of “ideas…”

Yet in another sense, if you’re really interested in knowing where my “ideas” come from, I invite you to read my five literary books, which together represent more than forty years of study of Western and world literature, world religions, history, and philosophy. In The Grove of the Eumenides, I concentrated especially on the rise of nihilism in modern culture and its spread around the globe, ending with essays looking to the future, on the United Nations and epic poetry. My study for that book forms the foundation of my epic poem, while much of The Myth of the Enlightenment was written concurrently with my epic and was where I resolved many issues, as I wrote my way through it.

When I was in about my mid-twenties, I had decided that I would follow the example of Virgil, who wrote three books, two often thought of as leading up to his epic poem. When I had looked around at many of the “prominent” poets back then, I felt that I didn’t want to write thirty or seventy books of lyric poetry but, as they say, “cast all my lot on one book.” And so my two books of poetry are where I very much felt that I was developing the ability that I needed to write an epic poem, by writing lyrics that developed my voice and sense of language, grappling with what seemed to me the “ruins” of the 20th Century, Into the Ruins, along with a number of dramatic monologues in which I first experimented with “putting on the mask,” of a character, and speaking through personae. With The Bower of Nil, I surveyed Western philosophy and Buddhism in Japan, speaking through a few characters in a dramatic book-length narrative poem, telling a story of an academic philosopher and his family, with wider symbolic implications.

In broad outline, this is how I thought and think of my own personal journey toward writing The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem. I invite you to make the Journey and read my four other literary books, which should help you understand what my “ideas” really are and their sources.

Last year I also discussed my development as a poet in “My Odyssey as an Epic Poet: Interview with Frederick Glaysher,” with Arthur McMaster, Contributing Editor, Department of English, Converse College, in Poets’ Quarterly (Spring 2015). ” You might find it of further help in understanding the sources of my ideas.

Frederick Glaysher

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