Word: poets
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Like many exiled writers from the contemporary Arab world (Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Syrian poet Adonis), an elusive homeland has always been on Sinan Antoon's mind. Antoon left Baghdad in 1991 after the first Gulf War to study in the U.S. Now an associate professor of Arab-Islamic culture at New York University, he returned to his bedeviled hometown for the first time in the spring of 2003, to co-direct the anguished documentary About Baghdad, following the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq...
...Antoon rarely mentions Iraq explicitly in the poems. Were it not for this slim volume's title - and a few references to the Euphrates and the Tigris - you'd hardly know that the poems in The Baghdad Blues were specifically about the ordeal of life in Iraq. Like Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic - whose Sarajevo Blues recounts the wracking of that city - Antoon finds that agony is agony regardless of your GPS coordinates...
...first time that someone has tried to put words to Spain's Marcha Real, a military composition that dates to the 18th century. During the Franco regime, schoolchildren learned a version with lyrics by the anti-republican poet José María Péman, but the words were never officially approved, and they quickly fell out of favor once the dictator was dead. Prime Minister José María Aznar convened a committee of experts during his second term in office (2000-2004) to devise suitably patriotic lyrics, but committee member Jon Jauristi says it couldn...
...could say the visionary geneticist had a clear genetic edge. Capecchi's grandmother was a painter, his uncle a renowned physicist, and his mother Lucy Ramberg an expat American poet living in a chalet in the Italian Alps when Mario was born in 1937. She had fallen in with a group of bohemian writers who believed, her son says with just a trace of bemusement, that "they could wipe out Fascism and Nazism with a pen." After the Gestapo came in 1941 to take her to Dachau, Mario landed on the streets. He was 4 years...
...wedding, you signify by your presence a pledge of support for this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution. As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals have meanings and purposes; they are intended to arouse emotions and channel intentions. In ritual, as the poet Thomas Lynch has written, “We act out things we cannot put into words.” But now my task is in fact to put some of this ceremony into words, to capture our meanings and purposes...