By Alyssa A. Lappen
June 2001
City Lore, Poets House and thirty-nine other organizations and foundations hosted the bi-annual, three-day People’s Poetry Gathering at Cooper Union and myriad other nearby locations on March 30, 31 and April 1. Nearly 150 events crowded the three-day poetry extravaganza and more than two hundred poets lectured, discussed, read–and that says nothing of dozens of musical readers and musicians.
The staggering wealth of artistic genius presented in this forum, with events stacked together by as many as five or more into hour-long time slots, made it impossible for one person to see it all. Yet the feast of poetry–eight, ten and twelve hours a day–enabled me to happily miss lunch on all three days. I hungered for the poems, not food.
What spoke most to me were the poetries of downtrodden and endangered people, often in endangered languages. Of these, I unofficially dub U Sam Oeur poet laureate. This slight Cambodian poet, a survivor of the Pol Pot regime who committed his horrifying experiences to Khmer verse in Sacred Vows, gave one of the most soulful readings I was privileged to hear. “I am the ambassador of the silenced,” he said at the opening of his reading, noting that the Cambodian people remain imprisoned in their own land. He would read first in English (translations by Ken McKullough) and then chant his poems a capella in a voice as vibrant as it was heart-piercing. Continue reading “Ambassadors to the silenced”
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