1988 in Poetry - Events

Events

  • The first annual The Best American Poetry volume is published this year.
  • During a poetry reading in which popular Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky took written questions from the audience, he read out two responses: "All of you are Jews or sold out to Jews", one read. Another only said, "We will kill you". In The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial, published in 1986, Voznesensky had written poetry and prose about a 1941 German massacre of 12,000 Russians in the Crimea, and the looting of their mass graves in the 1980s by Soviet citizens that was tolerated, he said, by officials because the victims were primarily Jews. Voznesensky read the notes out loud and challenged the writers to identify themselves. None did.

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