Tuesday, August 21, 2007

News at Eleven: "The Detainees Speak" is this book's subtitle:

but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever "speak" through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person's actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry's long history, and often poets "speak" least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by "linguists with secret-level security clearance" but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale--"speak"?

from The New York Times: Notes on Prison Camp

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