In Case You Missed It: Truong Tran and Mary Burger

Truong Tran and Mary Burger were a delightful pair.

Here is the introduction by CAConrad:
"I don't like overt political content in poetry" is a sentence said by an increasing number of American poets. "I don't like overt political," from AWP to the MLA, "I don't like overt," each poet saying the same sentence as though they were the first to say it. "I don't like overt political content in poetry, I don't, no I don't. I prefer political FREE poetry in my poems!" American poets, as complicit as any tax-paying American funding American invasions, occupations, paying for suffering completely impossible to imagine. It's safe to say that Canadian poet Aaron Vidaver doesn't like "overt war" in our world. He witnessed firsthand the brutality of Canadian police against the direct-action housing squatters known as The Woodwards Squat in 2002. His collection of interviews and writings by the squatters were compiled into the book Woodsquat. The everyday bravery for shelter and food on the back of decaying empire. In 2009 at the EcoNvergence Conference in Portland, Oregon, Vidaver read his poems with fellow travelers on the heels of the amazing keynote address by Noam Chomsky, and presented a workshop and talk on his political work with Woodsquat.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is also Canadian, and channels for us the weird and the weirdest in the face of an angering empire. She said in an interview with Donato Mancini, "Myself I’d like to take back ‘cunt’ as a term of pejorative rage, I want to make it bad again, to call people ‘You fuckin’ cunt!’" She refers to herself as a "contradictivisischist." On the Official Facebook Dorothy Trujillo Lusk Fan Club Page you can find the interview with Rob McLennan, where he asks her how her first book changed her life. She said, "Completely, in that I now had an identity not appended to father, husband, boyfriend or gay male best friend and that it could be verified by reading the cover and body of the book. I had been one of those disposable young women of weak social and class position that are there on sufferance and are casually punted off the field." Later when McLennan asks Lusk what made her write as opposed to doing something else, she said, "I second guessed my sketchbook notes at art school into what I unlaughingly called immaculate conceptualism. I theorized the life and possibility out of every single idea that could have become art. From this disappointment came the apprehension of language’s supple polyvalency and the ability to interrogate that which remained restrictive in visual/conceptual art."

PLEASE WELCOME AARON VIDAVER AND DOROTHY TRUJILLO LUSK