let us praise the poet jaan kaplinski

i mean DAMN!  kaplinski was a blogger too.  you can find a link to his blog in my blogroll.  i've been wanting to hear what kaplinski would say re the risk of war with russia vs ukraine the u.s. & much of the rest of the world.  kaplinski's last post was published on july 11, 2021, in russian.  he was a polyglot & wrote in several languages including english, russian & i believe chinese.  tonight, i google his name & find that the poet died at age 80 on august 8 2021.  fuck!  i can't tell you in this short text how much jaan kaplinski's work influenced my own writing.  his simplicity & plain style might be evident in my own brand of antipoetry.  i can tell you how i discovered kaplinski.  i was a muck around student at university.  i spent more time in the stacks of the library than i did in the classroom making one magical discovery after another.  i am long attracted to poetry in translation.  particularly, at the time, the post-war eastern european poets.  i discovered the wandering border translated by kaplinksi, riina tamm & sam hamill published by copper canyon press in 1987.  kaplinski's simplcity sent me soaring as well as his buddhism that helped in the making of his poems.  i was hooked.  & have been since that day i pulled that book off the shelf in the university library when i should've been studying for my classes   poetry is ordinary as kaplinski's says in a poem regarding a day in the life of the poet, 'it is like this, or a little bit different/it was like that, or a little bit different.'  kaplinski also had the honor of having an asteroid named after him: 29528 kaplinski.  & because we live in the age of digital reproduction you can find a wonderful documentary about kaplinski, the kaplinski system, by clicking here,