Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Payam Hassanzadeh: Solidarity and Guilt
A Tribute to the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World
This letter and accompanying material must be read in the context of two related letters published here (11/18/22) and here (1/20/23). After the second letter was published Behnaz Amani was released from prison; our letter was used in support of this life-saving action. The participants have asked that I publish this new material. Our previous letters were written poets to poets, as is this one. Listen please to Behnaz Amani’s voice here and in the previous post. We are not talking about multitudes: we address the precarious situation of this one person, who cannot be conflated with anyone else and who is, above all, indispensable. ––Ch.B.
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