Bush, bin Laden Merge in Poetic Expression

President George W. Bush and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden have never had a conversation. Until now.


In his latest book, "God Bless," released this month by Etruscan Press, University of Wyoming English Professor and National Book Award finalist H.L. Hix pits excerpts from Bush speeches against arguments from bin Laden in a unique poetic dialogue that embraces politics, literature, language and culture.

"These are two people who ought to be talking but aren't, so I'm going to make up a dialogue between them," says Hix, who also serves as director of UW's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. "I think there's important dialogue that hasn't happened, and I'm trying to generate that dialogue."

In his book, Hix creates poems using Bush's own words from speeches, executive orders and other public statements. He also constructs poetry from the letters, speeches and other discourses of bin Laden.

"God Bless" also includes candid interviews with a diverse panel of experts, ranging from M. Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, to CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen.

"It's a weird book. It was even a weird book for me," says Hix, whose previous 10 books were poetry, philosophy or literary criticism. "I've never done anything like it before, and I don't think I'll ever do anything like it again."

He laughs and adds, "I don't know how it started happening, I just sort of found myself doing it."

As part of his research for the book, Hix says he read more than 8,000 pages of speeches by the president, obtained from the official White House Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, and "pulled out language usage that I thought was interesting."

He then studied bin Laden's words and wrote what he called "interleaves" that use both direct quotations and reconstruction.

"God Bless" is available for purchase at local bookstores or on the Internet