Ken Waldman's
As the World Burns
The Sonnets of George W. Bush and Other Poems of the 43rd Presidency

Ken Waldman's sixth poetry collection is part of a project that includes film and music.  Book & CD Now Available — click ORDER for more information.

Ken Waldman has made his living since 1994 touring as Alaska’s Fiddling Poet, performing at some of the nation’s leading universities, festivals, arts centers, and clubs. His combination of Appalachian-style fiddling, storytelling, and original poetry has defied categorization, though he’s been compared to such artists as John Hartford, Billy Collins, and Spalding Gray. As the World Burns is Waldman’s sixth poetry collection, and is part of a project that includes film and music.

About the book, the subtitle says it: The Sonnets of George W. Bush, and Other Poems of the 43rd Presidency. 43 poems are in George W. Bush’s voice, the poems he might have written if he’d somehow chosen to write sonnets. The remaining 21 poems, also sonnets, act as commentary. Here, Waldman has written a book square in the midst of our national dialogue. Sometimes subtle, sometimes scary, every page is arresting.

In early October, Waldman released a CD with his band, The Secret Visitors. Also titled As the World Burns, the CD’s subtitle is 9 tunes, 26 poems, mischief. Like his earlier CDs, it received wide airplay nationally and internationally, and on one community station in California, KMUD, in early November it rose to #8 on the charts, right behind Bob Dylan and Beck, and above such artists as Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, and Elton John.

There’s also the film component. There's footage online of the mid-August week Waldman spent in Texas being filmed first during a club date in Austin, then at sites in Crawford, Texas (still waiting for the Crawford video to be edited), and then back in Austin inside the Texas state capitol. Back in Austin mid-November, Waldman was filmed once more at a club date, performing more of this material.

“Rather than take the cheap path and make President Bush a comic caricature, Ken Waldman, in his brilliant sonnet sequence, As the World Burns, has chosen the harder, true road of art: to allow the president to speak his own firmly held and utterly sincere beliefs. But with each of Bush's assertions, Waldman damns the man's hypocrisy, arrogance, and intellectual shallowness. As the World Burns is a powerful indictment, for taking Bush seriously, not writing him off as a cartoon boob with jug-ears and a dopey smirk.”

—Robert Cooperman, author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains
(winner of the Colorado Book Award)

“Just when I was beginning to think that the only good politician was a dead politician, along comes Ken Waldman to restore my faith in laughter. Not easy to do here in the belly of the beast that is Washington, D.C.”

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