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Of
War and Poets, Part III - The Contemporary Battle
read part 1
read part 2
by Doug Talley
Last
month’s poetry column addressed a modern view of war articulated
by American and British poets, with samplings from Walt Whitman,
Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell. That column was preceded by another,
which examined a more ancient perspective, citing examples from
Homer, Virgil, the Old Testament, and Shakespeare. This month’s
column considers the response of poets to the recent Iraqi conflict.
That conflict fostered its own smaller skirmish among contemporary
poets in America’s continuing culture wars.
The skirmish
began when the First Lady, Laura Bush, organized a symposium and
reception for February of this year, titled “Poetry and the
American Voice”, to commemorate the poetry of Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. Invited to the White House
to read and discuss the work of these American icons were a number
of contemporary poets. Apparently, the First Lady’s staff
compiled the list of invitees after consulting the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Library of Congress, and various experts.
Among those
invited was Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of Copper Canyon Press.
In a widely circulated e-mail, Mr. Hamill wrote he “felt no
joy” when he received his invitation, but rather “was
overcome by a kind of nausea.” He had no intention of accepting
the invitation, but instead planned to gather statements against
the imminent Iraqi conflict from various poets and have someone
deliver these statements to the First Lady at the reception. When
word of his plans reached the White House, the symposium was postponed
indefinitely. The First Lady’s press secretary explained,
“While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all
Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and
believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended
to be a literary event into a political forum.”
The effective
cancellation of the symposium led to a very public outcry by a host
of poets, broadly reported in the media this past February. The
widely anthologized Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, explained
to Reuters News Agency that inviting poets to the White House was
naïve. “The poet by definition . . . has to be an enemy
of the state,” he said, “. . . and one of its primary
activities, which is war.” The poet Li-Young Lee told the
St. Petersburg Times, “It’s impossible for poetry not
to be political. The way I understand poetry, all poems are anti-war
poems.”
In the name
of protest, polite manners were laid aside. Mary Oliver, the winner
of a Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems, American Primitive,
told the Boston Globe, “I don’t think this is the hour
when people should be polite for the sake of politeness.”
The country’s current poet laureate, Billy Collins, told Associated
Press, “If political protest is urgent, I don’t think
it needs to wait for an appropriate scene and setting and should
be as disruptive as it wants to be.”
In the vacuum
of the symposium that was never held, and in a continuation of the
anti-war protest, a number of Internet web sites came to life, the
most prominent being poetsagainstthewar.org.
The home page of this site indicates it hosts the anti-war poems
and statements of at least 11,000 poets. The site was created to
handle the enormous response to Sam Hamill’s original request
for poets to join with him in his White House symposium protest.
However, because the Iraqi war ended so quickly, the relevance of
this web site as a protest to this specific conflict was short-lived,
but the Board of the web site decided to maintain it into the foreseeable
future nonetheless. The web site declares:
Today, although
the attack wasn’t prevented, poets continue to speak out
for a world in which non-violence and international cooperation
will ultimately prevail over a single administration’s philosophy
that the most horrendous crimes are justified in the name of foreign
policy. . . . In all of America’s history, poets have never
made such a difference.
If nothing else
the poetsagainstthewar web site is sprawling and noisy.
A number of prominent poets appear with very emphatic views, such
as this excerpt from a statement of W. S. Merwin: “To arrange
a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed
in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a
greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.”
The views and
the poems of this particular army of poets have not gone unchallenged.
T. R. Polnick in the Washington Times dismissed the anti-war “poems”
on the poetsagainstthewar web site as “hastily scribbled,
unrevised, anti-U.S. free-verse screeds clearly cobbled together
in 10 minutes or less from a knapsack full of Marxist clichés.”
A number of web links have surfaced in response to the anti-war
poets, some of which can be found at the web site edge-city.com.
One of these
links is the dissent of a respected poet and professor at the University
of Texas, Federick Turner. After he identifies his credentials as
a poet, which are considerable, including eight books of poetry
with respectable presses, such as Princeton University Press, he
notes the “poetry community” raising the anti-war protest
“consists of a network composed mostly of creative writing
professors and their students who invite each other to their campuses
to give poetry readings for a fee of around $500 plus expenses,
usually attended by about 30 people (who are also taking creative
writing classes).” One of Mr. Turner’s own former students
is Sam Hamill, the very originator of the White House protest, in
whom Mr. Turner admits a “deep disappointment” for selling
out his “poetic voice for a cheap political gesture”.
Mr. Turner remarks
in his dissent “it ought to be said to the American public
that there are poets who do not share the views of such Laureates
as Amiri Baraka, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and the rest of that
herd of independent minds. The dissenters are silent, perhaps because
they have not yet prepared a response, perhaps out of contempt for
the whole disgusting affair – and this may be a wiser approach
– or perhaps for fear of reprisals.” In this same dissent,
Mr. Turner issues his own poem in favor of the Iraqi war, titled
“Reply to the Five Thousand”. It begins:
Never till
now was I shamed by the name of poet.
What could it even mean, if five thousand “poets”
Sign the same misspelled and malicious manifesto?
Is not a poet a truth-teller, a seer of inner visions?
Why do they make this smell, like the back seat of a taxi?
An opposing
web site, poetsforthewar.org, has formed in response to
poetsagainstthewar.org. Examining the volleys back and
forth between these camps of poets is rather amusing, like a carnival
sideshow attraction to the more serious conflict of the war itself.
Each site accuses the other of posting bad poetry. Each site accuses
the other of being comprised of unknown poets, but, of course, one
wonders if any living American poet qualifies as a household name.
The commotion between the two camps of poets calls to mind Virgil’s
image about two swarms of bees attacking each other:
Hi motus
animorum atque haec certamina tanta
pulveris exigui iactu compressa quiescent.
These
epic battles of bees, this fury of souls,
can be silenced by flinging a handful of dust.
(Georgics,
IV, lines 86-87)
Maybe not a
handful of dust, but perhaps a handful of sacred texts, might resolve
this conflict between opposing forces of poets, such texts which
are themselves great literature and worthy authorities for poets
to consult. These texts will be examined as we come full circle
in next month’s concluding column, Of War and Poets, Part
IV – The Eternal Perspective. In the meantime, readers are
encouraged to examine the poetry on both websites for and against
the war and, as always, to submit their own views to Meridian Magazine.
As a final observation,
perhaps one more modern perspective on war is worth noting, as expressed
by W. B. Yeats when asked for a poem during World War I. He thought
it best a poet neither speak out against the war nor in favor of
it, but rather remain silent, because:
We have no
gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
(See, Selected
Poems of William Butler Yeats, published by the Macmillan Company,
1962, p. 66).
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