First Lady/ Ex-Librarian/ Stepford Wife, Laura Bush, will be remembered for her one great gift to America: Poets Against the War
Her beloved Dubya had just dropped our country’s approval rating from an all time high to an all time low with his shock and awe, illegal invasion of a harmless third world country.
Laura invited poet laureate, Sam Hamill to a White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” in an effort to reveal the true heart of compassionate conservatives. The topic: the poems of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. Sam responded, “These are three of the most original and anti-establishmentarian (and anti-war) poets in our literature. Do you understand what’s on the minds of poets today?”
The symposium (scheduled for 2/12/03) was postponded (forever), but 200 “poetry readings against the war” occurred that day. Mr. Hamill asked a few friends for help and 11,000 of the world’s greatest poets immediately responded. The result was the book Poets Against the War (get it cheap on Amazon) and the website Poets Against the War
God Bless you Laura for bringing us together. You are a true (but unwitting) constructive anarchist!
Mussolini defined fascism as the marriage of corporation and the state. When a handful of conglomerates clutch virtually the entire media, repeating the official party line hour after hour, we approach a fascist state. A true patriot is born in the act of questioning and in acting upon a reasoned response. Poetry, too, is born in an act of questioning. Since most poets write in the same language politicians are given to abuse, in the language of everyday common speech, they must struggle to reveal clarity by way of musical and imagistic expression, and by transparency of emotion. We question ourselves, our art and certainly those who rule. And through a miraculous marriage of intuition and scholarship, we are “given” poetry to write. “A hero,” the Greek Nobel prize-winning poet George Seferis wrote, “is one who moves forward in the dark.”
Sam Hamill from the introduction of Poets Against the War.
Published by Greg at 10:03 AM on June 29, 2004