In a wonderful, understated and refreshing evening of international poets
at the S.F. State Poetry Center last Friday featured Eleni Stecipoulos (USA
- with a fascinating, historic based poem rooted in Buffalo past and present
with a bow to Artaud on plague and illness), Kai Nieminen (Finland - in dry
witful translations by Anselm Hollo - in fact, Kai looks - fully bearded -
like Anselm),_Nora Gomringer (German - wonderful "slam" performer and
daughter of the great German-Bolivian concrete poet) and Dunya Mikell
(Iraq/USA). Mikell's poems of the war could cut ice - informed, smart, and
satiric to the core. I hope her work is getting around. It's great to hear
well writ stuff from inside, from the subjects of the suffering from the
condition, the war.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
She who writes Baghdad Burning is now back more frequently and interestingly
so on giving the account of the run up to this weekends' vote. I continue to
find her voice refreshingly sanguine in relationship to the continuous Bush
Ad fiction spin. (Since both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are on notice via
the NY Times' Judith Miller's suck up et al, and it's probably
professionally highly embarrassing for apparently a whole group of reporters
to have been their 'privileged' Iraq spinners - it will be curious to now
see which reporters for which Admin intermediaries now line up to report Con
Rice's and Bush's Iraq accounts as 'truth.') Fortunately I think much of the
American public - via the polls - are poking through the veil. When and if
Rove and Scooter get nailed by Fitzgerald in the Plame/Flame case, it will
be curious to see if Cheney and Bush get named as "unindicted
co-conspirators."
Stephen Vincent
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