Maya Angelou's Poem "On the Pulse of Morning"

1. Maya Angelou

   Author
2. Maya Angelou was an American author and poet. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than 50 years. Wikipedia
4. Born: April 4, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri, United States
5. Died: May 28, 2014, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States

On the Pulse of Morning

Maya Angelou’s 1993 inaugural poem and remarks

12 January 2009

This document and its associated audio file (5:48) are distributed with permission of the Clinton Presidential Library.

Mr. President and Mrs. Clinton,
Mr. Vice-President and Mrs. Gore,
And Americans Everywhere …

On the pulse of the morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

Read more: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2009/01/20090112155227berehellek0.2457697.html#ixzz33MRcPB3J

Akhil Sharma and His New Novel, 'Family Life': The VICE Podcast 035

Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father

Literature has taught me you are going to regret being cruel – you are not going to regret being kind.

Born in India and raised in the US, Akhil Sharma is the author of An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award. His short story, Cosmopolitan, was anthologised in The Best American Short Stories 1998, and was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name. Gary Shteyngart, Kiran Desai, and Mohsin Hamid are among his many champions and Family Life, his new novel, is generating a phenomenal buzz. The New Yorker has twice run excerpts. The story of how a family copes with their gifted son’s calamitous accident,Family Life (Faber, £14.99) is, according to the Observer, “a delicate and often moving work of palliative poetics, based on a calamity that befell his own brother”.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brought-to-book-akhil-sharma-on-his-debt-to-hemingway-and-robinson-crusoe-1.1789900

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CIA, Chile & Allende

 

This video gives a clear and yet brief summary of the forces which destroyed Chile's attempt to have a democratically elected Communist President - Salvador Allende..The internal forces included the middle class and ruling elites of the rich and the military who feared loss of the wealth and power under a communist government.
One exception to this was that some of the students, academics and writers who wanted a communist government were caught up in the idealistic, some would say naive view of communism and Marxism which was fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Universities.
There were some people and groups who were also caught up in a panic that socialism/communism would come to power all over the world and we would all live under a terrible dictatorship, with no personal freedom. It was a time when it was 'cool' for young people to be interested in politics, it was just a few years after the murder of JFK and MLK and young people wanted to know more about politics and how 'to change the world.'
The external forces included the USA President Nixon who saw every country as either with the USA or with the USSR, the former communist empire led by Russia.
One irony of all this is that the author of the play, Ariel Dorfman became a Professor of Literature in the USA, despite being a critic of American Foreign Policy. Another refugee from Chile, was Isabel Allende the daughter of the ousted President Allende. She later became famous as author of the novel,  "House of Spirits" which was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

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GOETHE

 Some interesting quotations attributed to Goethe

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/behavior_is_the_mirror_in_which_everyone_shows/322279.html

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image" and:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes (German Playwright, Poet, Novelist and Dramatist. 1749-1832)   All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - [Thoughts and Thinking]

DORFMAN DEATH AND THE MAIDEN IB INTERACTIVE ORAL REFLECTIVE STATEMENT CULTURAL CONTEXT

This video gives a clear and yet brief summary of the forces which destroyed Chile's attempt to have a democratically elected Communist President - Salvador Allende..The internal forces included the middle class and ruling elites of the rich and the military who feared loss of the wealth and power under a communist government.
One exception to this was that some of the students, academics and writers who wanted a communist government were caught up in the idealistic, some would say naive view of communism and Marxism which was fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Universities.
There were some people and groups who were also caught up in a panic that socialism/communism would come to power all over the world and we would all live under a terrible dictatorship, with no personal freedom. It was a time when it was 'cool' for young people to be interested in politics, it was just a few years after the murder of JFK and MLK and young people wanted to know more about politics and how 'to change the world.'
The external forces included the USA President Nixon who saw every country as either with the USA or with the USSR, the former communist empire led by Russia.
One irony of all this is that the author of the play, Ariel Dorfman became a Professor of Literature in the USA, despite being a critic of American Foreign Policy. Another refugee from Chile, was Isabel Allende the daughter of the ousted President Allende. She later became famous as author of the novel,  "House of Spirits" which was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

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