Greatest Living Poet

The plan is that he and Luo live in the cage for 10 days. In that time, they cannot talk to anyone nor change clothes. There is a white cloth hanging in the cage so they go to the toilet behind it.

Every day, food, mostly vegetables, is sent to the artist and Luo, Ye collects any rubbish and stores it in a black plastic bag which is taken away each day.

The two in the cage not only don't talk to others, they don't talk to each other.

But every day they write on the wooden cage. The artist said it is the only means of communication for them.

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Seventy years ago, in the middle of a late summer night, Spain's greatest 20th-century poet, Federico García Lorca, was bundled into a hollow in a wooded ravine north of Granada and shot dead. Lorca, 38, was a challenge to everything Franco's clerical fascism stood for. He was gay. He hailed Spain's infant democracy. His sympathies were with the left.

The poet could have fled Granada easily when it fell to the nationalists in the first days of the uprising against the Spanish republic, but he chose to stay with his sister, who was married to the city's mayor. Yet, despite fame, status and connections, he was soon dragged away and murdered.

Anselm Berrigan has been called the founder of Scholasticism. He is famous as the inventor of the ontological argument for the existence of God. His new book is Some Notes on My Programming.

Alex Young is a former Scottish footballer. He was a prolific goal-scorer in Everton's 1962/63 championship season.

Sunday September 10th, 2006
Zinc Bar 90 W Houston St.
Readings to begin late (around 7:30)
out of respect for another event
elsewhere that will be found & linked to
that somehow involves Eugene Ostoshevsky

This week guest-curated by: Greedo from 'Star Wars.'

Or, if you're in Chicago on Friday...

Zinc Bar Google Map Zinc Wikipedia Entry Films About Sex and Shitting

Faludy is most widely known for poetry and prose about his experiences, in particular the novel "My Happy Days in Hell," about the infamous Recsk labour camp, where he was sent to on trumped up charges in 1950. First published in English in 1962, the book was considered a precursor to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Soviet concentration camps (“The Gulag Archipelago").

It was translated to French, Hungarian and German as well but was banned in Hungary until the collapse of communism.

Faludy continued “writing" poetry even while at Recsk, mostly in his head, as no writing tools were available. He made his fellow prisoners memorize the verses as a mental exercise and to save them for posterity in case any of them survived the concentration camp. Whoever was released from the camp with parts of the poems in his head, they went to visit Faludy's wife, Zsuzsa Szegõ, and dictated the verses to her.

Faludy wrote his poem “For Posterity" by taking straws from a broom and using his blood as ink on toilet paper. When his eyesight turned really bad in his late years, he started writing poems in his head once again.

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Learn by Heart This Poem of Mine

Learn by heart this poem of mine;
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that's how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.

Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Soon books will vanish and you'll find
there won't be any poets or verse
or gas for car or bus - or hearse -
no beer to cheer you till you're crocked,
the liquor stores torn down or locked,
cash only fit to throw away,
as you come closer to that day
when TV steadily transmits
death-rays instead of movie hits
and not a soul to lend a hand
and everything is at an end
but what you hold within your mind,
so find a space there for these lines
and learn by heart this poem of mine.

Learn by heart this poem of mine;
recite it when the putrid tides
that stink of lye break from their beds,
when industry's rank vomit spreads
and covers every patch of ground,
when they've killed every lake and pond,
Destruction humped upon its crutch,
black rotting leaves on every branch;
when gargling plague chokes Springtime's throat
and twilight's breeze is poison, put
your rubber gasmask on and line
by line declaim this poem of mine.

Learn by heart this poem of mine
so, dead, I still will share the time
when you cannot endure a house
deprived of water, light, or gas,
and, stumbling out to find a cave,
roots, berries, nuts to stay alive,
get you a cudgel, find a well,
a bit of land, and, if it's held,
kill the owner, eat the corpse.
I'll trudge beside your faltering steps
between the ruins' broken stones,
whispering "You are dead; you're done!
Where would you go? That soul you own
froze solid when you left your town."
Learn by heart this poem of mine.

Maybe above you, on the earth,
there's nothing left and you, beneath,
deep in your bunker, ask how soon
before the poisoned air leaks down
through layers of lead and concrete. Can
there have been any point to Man
if this is how the thing must end?
What words of comfort can I send?
Shall I admit you've filled my mind
for countless years, through the blind
oppressive dark, the bitter light,
and, though long dead and gone, my hurt
and ancient eyes observe you still?
What else is there for me to tell
to you, who, facing time's design,
will find no use for life or time?
You must forget this poem of mine.