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Of War and Poets, Part III - The Contemporary Battle
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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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