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News :: Arts |
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Pickled Poetry |
Current rating: 0 |
by Alan Bisbort via Rev Dave
Email: DarkMatter (nospam) Hypocrisy.org (verified) |
06 Feb 2003
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'Howl for America - The poets have the last word with Laura Bush' |
By Alan Bisbort, Hardford Advocate
"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!...Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!" -- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"
Poetry, if it is done right, is a very dangerous thing. It forces people to expand their minds and their souls. It forces people to embrace the light and the dark, the pain and the joy of being alive. Though spoken language is ultimately limited, it is all that we have as human beings. Most dangerously, poetry unhinges the people. It unhinges them from the convenient lies and comforting delusions that otherwise guide their lives. Yes, that's right. Poetry is for the people, of the people, by the people all the people, not just the miserable loners clad in black nursing their Starbuck's at the Barnes and Noble slam night. Poetry is particularly dangerous in nations ruled by leaders who have valid reasons to feel threatened. These leaders cannot afford to let the people become unhinged.
Just ask Victor Jara, who had his fingers broken, one by one, before being publicly executed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's agents after the legitimate government in Chile had been overthrown by Pinochet's military. Ask Federico Garcia Lorca, executed by Franco's Fascists in Spain. Ask Dante, exiled by a vindictive pope. Ask John Milton who, though blind and old, was imprisoned and had his life savings taken from him by a vindictive king. Just ask Joseph Brodsky who was sentenced to five years of hard labor for "social parasitism" and, after being exiled by the Soviet Union, became America's poet laureate in 1991.
Or ask Laura Bush, the former children's librarian who allegedly reads Dostoevsky. Mrs. Bush enjoys dabbling in literature, on the taxpayers' dime, by hosting book festivals and literary symposia, where the marginalized scribblers in our midst can feel the warmth of her condescension. Mrs. Bush was scheduled to host a symposium on Feb. 12 in Washington called "Poetry and the American Voice." The symposium was to focus on the poetry of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Mrs. Bush, however, did not reckon on the invited poets actually bringing their consciences with them to the nation's capital. She was banking on their craven need for validation from the powers that be. But poets are a funny bunch, and they began talking among themselves. Sparked by Sam Hamill, a poet from Port Townsend, Wash., they felt that they, as humans first and versifiers second, needed to make a statement about the unpoetic prospects of war with Iraq. As Hamill put it, "I am asking every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon."
When Mrs. Bush discovered that the invited guests, nearly to a person (including Connecticut's laureate Marilyn Nelson), were going to participate in Hamill's ad hoc campaign, the Queen of Hearts called in the dogs. The symposium was "postponed" (read: "see that these ingrates are never invited to the White House again"). Mrs. Bush's spokeswoman (note how neither Bush actually speaks to the people) said, "While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum."
Mrs. Stalin, Mrs. Brezhnev, Mrs. Andropov, Mrs. Franco and Mrs. Pinochet could not have expressed it more clearly.
And yet, one has to wonder how you discuss the poetry of Langston Hughes at a Washington, D.C., soiree in the year 2003 without bringing in Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond and the Republican Party's pro-Aryan coalition? As Hughes himself might put it, "What happens to a dream deferred, Mrs. Bush? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore, and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over, like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"
How do you discuss the word-hurricane that is Walt Whitman without the possibility of blocking the troop train or, as Allen Ginsberg did in 1969, trying to levitate the Pentagon?
Poetry is a very dangerous weapon in America these days, Mrs. Bush, and I would not want to be in your shoes. The bankers and oilmen may love you right now, but when the poets hate you, oh baby, that is an indictment for the ages.
Let Ginsberg have the final word, "America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb ... America when will you be angelic?"
Copyright © 1995-2003 New Mass Media.
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Re: Pickled Poetry |
by Rev Dave
DarkMatter (nospam) hypocrisy.org (verified) |
Current rating: 0
06 Feb 2003
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Poetic Protests Against War, Censorship
by John Nichols
A bit of advice for the Bush White House: Don't pick fights with professional wordsmiths.
First Lady Laura Bush's decision to cancel a White House symposium on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes because she feared antiwar sentiments might be expressed has provoked a pummeling of the Administration by poets who would have been part of the February 12 "Poetry and the American Voice" session.
"The abrupt cancellation of the symposium by the White House confirms my suspicion that the Bush administration is not interested in poetry when it refuses to remain in the ivory tower, and that this White House does not wish to open its doors to an ‘American Voice' that does not echo the Administration's misguided policies," declared Rita Dove, the nation's poet laureate from 1993 to 1995. "I had no doubt in my mind that I couldn't go, if only because of the hideous use of language that emanates from this White House: The lying, the Orwellian euphemisms..." added Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine, who said that he was sorry the first lady cancelled the symposium before he could refuse his invite.
Stanley Kunitz, the 2001 and 2002 poet laureate, observed that, "I think there was a general feeling that the current Administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse."
The poet who got off the best line may have been Sam Hamill, who noted that his name was on the invitation list despite his own history of antiwar activism. "I'm sure the person who put my name on the list is looking for a job," joked Hamill, whose request that writer friends send him antiwar poems for the symposium might have inspired the Administration's decision to cancel the event with a tart statement from Mrs. Bush's office that "it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." (Hamill's call has, so far, drawn more than 2,000 responses, including those of W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who sent along a copy of, "Coda," a poem featuring the line: "And America turns the attack on the World Trade Center-Into the beginning of the Third World War.")
Actually, Mrs. Bush would have been lucky if her symposium had featured only contemporary criticism of US imperialism and conservative policies. A far greater danger for the Administration was the prospect that those attending the conference would have used the words of Dickinson, Hughes and Whitman against them.
Dickinson may not have been a radical, but nor was she enthusiastic about militarism. Benjamin Lasee, a distinguished professor emeritus of English at Northeastern Illinois University, has written of how Dickinson counted the cost of war: "In one poem ('It feels a shame to be Alive'), she provides a startling image of corpses stacked up like dollars and closes by asking why ‘such Enormous Pearl' as life should be dissolved 'In Battle's horrid Bowl.'"
Hughes (who would have turned 101 on Saturday, February 1) was a proud leftist whose poetry condemned US government hypocrisy at home and abroad. Reflecting on racism in the United States, Hughes wrote, "I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes..." and argued: "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above." And could there be a more damning reflection of the Bush's Administration's use of post-September 11 sentiment to pass the Patriot Act than Hughes' line: "O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath"?
Whitman, of course, would have been the most problematic poet for the Bushes. Openly gay and radical, he was no friend to politicians, complaining that offices such as the presidency were "bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes." And one can only imagine the reaction of this Administration's conservative thought police to Whitman's great mandate: "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..."
Hamill, who plans to post the antiwar poems at www.PoetsAgainstTheWar.org, made a very good point when he said, "I saw profound irony in their choice of poets. These people wouldn't let Walt Whitman within a mile of the White House -- the good gay gray poet! I don't believe anybody there has ever read Whitman." |
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