Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...said, Yeltsin's extraordinary political career time and again has demonstrated that he had one thing they lacked: an intimate relationship with the Russian masses. "Yeltsin rises on a turret and around him there are no ghosts of past Kremlin rulers, but real Russians, not yet vanished," observed the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yeltsin, unlike his peers in the Kremlin, has experienced a mercurial rise based on shaking off the past and embracing the radical opportunities of the uncertain present...
...even the Swiss can resist making disparaging remarks about themselves and their country. Poet Carl Spitteler claimed that if the Swiss had created the Alps, they would not have been so high. Playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt noted that his country's vaunted neutrality "makes me think of a virgin who earns her living in a bordello but wants to remain chaste." Not surprisingly, the Swiss celebrated the septicentennial of their confederation this month with restraint...
...story, to some extent, with the difference that whatever Madison may have once thought, Bly is a gifted poet, critic and showman who has transformed his long struggle into a strange, mythicized American phenomenon of celebrity and mass therapy. Bly is the bardic voice of that interesting but vaguely embarrassing business, the men's movement, which strikes many men as somehow unmanly. Well, says Bly, that shame is something they will have to get over...
...sits in his new Minneapolis house -- a handsome, substantial Midwestern paterfamilias place that he has just acquired. He divides his time among this house, another on Minnesota's Moose Lake and stops on his lecture tours. The Minneapolis house feels cleansed of ghosts and even gentrified. A poet named Louis Jenkins (author of a splendid collection called All Tangled Up with the Living and other books) is doing some work around the place for Bly and emerges from the basement from time to time as if he had been down there rewiring the house's unconscious. Bly sautes scallops...
...kingly man is a public man, even if he is a poet. Shakespeare used to adorn the British 20-lb. note. Perhaps, I suggest jokingly, Bly's face will one day be on the $20 bill. "I hate being a pop figure," he winces. But he has made the transition from private trauma to public stage. His testimony in effect now begins, "I come from a dysfunctional country...