A Night of Poetry and Performance

Ramu Aki – This African-American poet, artist, and social critic, is riddled with originality in everything he does and touches. A true revolutionary of the spirit he brings to mind with depth and continuity that sublime conviction of Che Guevara’s when he said, “At the expense of seeming ridiculous, I believe that all true revolutionaries are motivated by the spirit of love.” – Ramu Aki is like a restless panther in the night whose courage commands him to bear witness to some of life’s most deadly and depraved social tragedies but never fails to make us feel that there is genius and integrity even amid the sorely abandoned. A great destroyer and inventor of language, his poetry in its daring and flamboyance can only be compared to sartorial flair in its oriental splendor.

Robert Anbian – In this author’s remotely humble opinion, his ongoing and ever added-to poem “WE” is the single greatest poem in American English of his generation. It is a tour de force of worldliness and uncompromising complexity that has the very depth and breadth of Whitman; with lyrical footing he has paced the scope of the African interior northward through Morocco and thence around Europe. Albert Camus’ tragic and piercing intelligence hangs over him like a prayer and a song. On the road to an authentic honesty, and the byroads of our pain and hope, he has parted the Red Sea of the world’s moral ambiguities.

Jessica Loos – Possessed of an unkillable literary proclivity, Jessica Loos has been a close friend and fellow traveler of many of the literary lights of her time, from Gregory Corso and Jack Micheline and Csaba Polony, right through the enduring Aggie Falk, and Jack Hirschman. Eschewing every literary trend and convenience endemic to the myth of political correctness, she has remained an original talent unto herself, impossible to categorize, stubbornly intact, and brings various peppers and art-performance surprises to the table each and every time. You won’t forget her originality.

Ronald F. Sauer – This refugee from the brutal heat of August summers in NYC, is positively infected to the marrow with 19th and 20th century French poetry. As a translator of Charles Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand, Jacques Prevert, and many another great literary Frog, he sees himself quivering on the bridge between Wallace Stevens and Rimbaud, a sort of obsessive, latter day psychedelic Romantic, mit schlag.