Tuesday’s New Verse News: ALWAYS A POEM, JIMMY
by Indran Amirthanayagam
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The melanoma spread from skin to liver to brain and President Jimmy Carter started to fall often, walking in the peanut field, at church on Sunday, at home. He wrote Always A Reckoning. I wrote The Elephants of Reckoning. We exchanged our reckonings in 1997 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. I was assigned to the American Embassy and sat down with Jimmy, Rosalynn and Chip to talk politics, health and environment. The President visited to gather facts in his fight against river blindness, one of countless maladies and challenges he dedicated his life to resolve. These included everything he faced as president— hostages, recession, first steps to making America green and sustainable—and every election after as he traveled the world to observe their conduct, to help keep them safe and free. Jimmy Carter, you walk blessed, a life of good deeds and harvests and fighting back against the blows, approaching a century, a marvel. Godspeed. Thank you again for the poetry.
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Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.