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Reading Cardenal with Cardenal
Last night I had the luminous experience of reading beside Ernesto Cardenal. This was a hastily put together event on the Regis University campus, in the St. John Francis Regis Chapel. Despite the late notice of Cardenal’s appearance (most folks didn’t hear about it until the day of the event), an audience of 50 or so mostly young people turned out to hear him. My old friend Victoria McCabe had emailed me the previous afternoon to ask if I could help out by reading the English versions of Cardenal’s poems. The poet wanted his poems read by another poet.Read More
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Interview with Ernesto Cardenal
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Mexico Books 2009: The Violent Foam
Unless one is promiscuous by nature, one needs a decent interval between leaving one lover and finding another.* One needs a similar interval after reading writers as strong as Bolaño and Parra. But I’d brought a stack of books to Mexico with me, and some secret drive to read them all before coming home made me move directly on to Daisy Zamora’s The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Press in 2002.Read More