Like Great Birnam Wood is an anti-inaugural poem for the commencement of the 45th President of the United States, set for January 20, 2017. The text was conceived as a review of the five previous inaugural poems written by Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander, and Richard Blanco, respectively dedicated to presidents John Kennedy (1961), Bill Clinton (1993, 1997), and Barack Obama (2009, 2013). Following this chronolgy, Like Great Birnam Wood challenges the President-Elect of the United States not from a political point of view, but from the side of American poets and the different ways in which they have envisioned the history and future of their country.
About the Author: Emilio de Armas was born in Cuba in 1946. His father was born in Santiago de los Caballeros (Dominican Republic) to an exiled Cuban family during the Cuban War of Independence, and lived and studied in North Carolina (US) until the entrance of the United States in the First World War. His mother was born in Canary Islands (Spain), and migrated to Cuba with her family as a child. He grew up in an American sugar mill in Florida, a town in the Cuban province of Camagüey, where his father was a landowner. After completing his high school education in his hometown, he graduated from Havana University in 1972 with a degree in Spanish Language and Literature. His first book of poetry, La extraña fiesta, won an award from Havana University in 1979. His book Junto al álamo de los sinsontes was awarded the Casa de las Américas Literature for Young Readers Prize in 1988. From 1981 to 1988, he published five books in Cuba. In 1991, he was invited to give lectures on Cuban poetry in Argentina, where he applied for political asylum and was granted the status of international Refugee by the United Nations. He resided during six months in Buenos Aires, and traveled to the United States in 1992. Since then he has lived in Miami, Florida, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature from Florida International University. In the United States, he has worked as a translator, editor, journalist and professor of Spanish and English, and has published four books of poetry in Spanish, including Sobre la brevedad de la ceniza (Eugenio Florit Prize, Miami, 2002). His poems were collected in Una sola palabra (Emmanuel Publisher, 2015).