Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Great Regulars: As the American Poet Jimmy Santiago Baca

(Born in 1952) puts it: 'When you work at a poem long enough--if you just do that one poem and don't worry about anything else--that the imagery of one verse line exudes a sparkling fountain of energy that fills your heart". By making us stop for a movement, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

Sublime poetry gives us revelations, flashes which illuminate those things which are mysterious to us. Victor Hernandez Cruz is a Puerto Rican poet, who was born in 1949 in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico.

from V Sundaram: News Today: Why do we need to read great poems?--I

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Bill Moyers declares in his introduction 'Poets live the lives all of us live with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions others can share. We only have to learn to listen . . . Democracy needs her poets, in all their diversity because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another's lives'.

The setting in which Bill Moyers has interviewed great American Poets like W S Merwin, Claribel Alergria, James A Autry, James Santiago Baca, Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, William Stratford, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forche, Donald Hall, Joy Harjo, Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Li-Young Lee, Linda McCarriston, Octavio Paz etc. is the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersy's Historic Village of Waterloo. Bill Moyers says that during the 1994 Dodge Poetry Festival he came upon thousands of poetry lovers, from a score of States, having the best time of their lives.

from V Sundaram: News Today: Why do we need to read great poems?--II

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