Word: poets
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Travelers like the erudite British naturalist Redmond O'Hanlon used to come to these parts in search of untouched rainforest and unadulterated indigenous life. His Into the Heart of Borneo recounts a 1983 attempt, with poet pal James Fenton, to "rediscover" the Borneo rhinoceros near Sarawak's mountainous border with Indonesia. O'Hanlon describes wild dance parties at Dayak longhouses, fueled by gallons of tuak, a potent milky rice wine, and enthuses about jaw-dropping tangles of tropical growth along the Rajang and its watery veins, some walled in by lush, 200-ft.-high (60 m) tree canopies...
...Neda's the only metamorphosis to emerge from Iran. Tehran's nights have been echoing with the protest chant "Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar" (God is great, God is great). The Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi remarked that those words would once have struck fear into the hearts of most Americans. That they are now a global inspiration is a revolution all by itself...
...life was about being overlooked. Harold, who died June 8 at 92, was a brilliant poet in an era in which you were supposed to veil your marital problems or homosexual angst in 10 layers of metaphor. But in poem after poem, Harold used his tremendous pain--he was an illegitimate child who stood 5 ft. 2 in. and was openly gay--and, in a language that was accessible to anybody in America, made you feel very powerful things...
Harold's poems were chiseled. William Carlos Williams, who was pretty much a god of American poetry, called him the "best poet of [his] generation." In Harold's most famous poem, "I Am in the Hub of the Fiery Force," he flashes back and forth between three or four rhythms like a virtuoso. He was writing about the agonies of being a gay man and an outcast in the U.S. before Allen Ginsberg. The Beats looked up to him. It was a tragedy that Harold never got the recognition that he should have...
...Agha, Ferdowsi am ba mast!" a young man tells his friends and points towards the statue in Ferdowsi Square. A green shawl has been wrapped around the neck and wrists of Iran's national poet, the author of the country's thousand-year old epic, the Shahnameh. "Ferdowsi is with us!" We are in the middle of our own epic...