Anti-War Weekend: Two Special Events
 
This coming Saturday, April 9, 2011 in New York City is the Rally
Against the Wars at Home and Abroad (and in San Francisco on April
10), convened by the United National Anti-War Committee, a coalition
of several hundred local and national organizations. The New York
march and rally will assemble at noon at Union Square, and march down
to Foley Square. The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) has
endorsed this event. More info is at
http://nationalpeaceconference.org
 
Coinciding with this weekend of peace activities are two special events:
 
1. Cindy Sheehan and Howie Hawkins at the Brecht Forum (4/9)
2. 3 Poets 4 Peace at the Brecht Forum (4/10)
 
Details are below.
 
The Brecht Forum is at
451 West Street (West Side Highway, at Bank Street,
one block north of West Eleventh Street )
New York City
 
 
1. Dawn of a New Revolt: Challenging Corporate America's Two Parties
 
a forum with Cindy Sheehan and Howie Hawkins
 
Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 4:30 pm
 
From Cairo to Wisconsin working people are rising up against
injustice. Massive strikes and demonstrations rocked Europe last year.
Popular uprisings have challenged dictatorships and neo-liberalism
across North Africa and the Middle East. Now workers and youth in
Wisconsin and across the country have begun to fight back against
budget cuts and attacks from both major parties. Come to this
important discussion about how we can organize to challenge the
corporate agenda and build a real political alternative to fight for
the future of working people and youth.
 
Admission--sliding scale: $6/$10/$15 (no one turned away)
Reserve online at
http://brechtforum.org/civicrm/event/info?id=11906&reset=1
 
 
2. 3 Poets 4 Peace = Poetry Against the Tide of War
 
readings by Chris Brandt, Veronica Golos and Angelo Verga
 
Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 7:00 pm
 
In January 2003, at New York's 1199 Union Hall, poets Chris Brandt,
Veronica Golos and Angelo Verga organized a huge outpouring of poetic
protest against the Iraq war. Theirs was a voice of outrage, one that
united their decades of activism with their finely honed craft, using
the spoken word to focus resistance and conscience. They also traveled
to events called by anti-war groups in New York and Massachusetts to
read as fundraisers for those groups' organizing efforts. On April 10,
the "Three Poets for Peace" reunite, as they continue their commitment
to stop the "never ending wars" led by Washington and the
Pentagon--made all the more urgent and timely by the uprisings in the
Arab world.
 
Chris Brandt is a writer and political activist. Also a translator,
carpenter, furniture designer, theater worker. He teaches at Fordham
University. His poems and essays have been published in Barcelona,
Valladolid; Paris; Mexico; and in New York in Phati'tude, Appearances;
The Unbearables; National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side and
several anthologies. His translations of Cuban fiction have been
published in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press, and his
translations of two volumes of Carmen Valle's poetry by the Instituto
de Cultura Puertorriquena. Seven Stories published his translation of
Clara Nieto's Masters of War, a history of U.S. interventions in Latin
America.
 
Poet Veronica Golos has created a conundrum--her book, Vocabulary of
Silence, acts as a kind of zen koan for the reader: a negative space,
an echo chamber, a mirror. Witnessing from afar the continuing wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan conducted by the country in which she lives, the
poet also witnesses herself, and struggles to find words to carry the
weight of her felt responsibility. Ms. Golos then empties her
well-wrought poems into the vast silence, filling it with the names of
the dead and the living.
 
Angelo Verga's sixth collection is a long poem set in the crooked
footpaths of lower Manhattan, Praise for What Remains (Three Rooms
Press, 2009). He has been widely published and anthologized, and
translated into a dozen languages. He presides over the myriad
literary events at The Cornelia Street Cafe.
 
Admission--sliding scale: $6/$10/$15 (no one turned away)
Reserve online at
http://brechtforum.org/civicrm/event/info?id=11874&reset=1