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POETS AGAINST THE WAR IN BROOKLYN & LOWER MANHATTAN
Laura Bush thought she was being a friend to poetry when she planned the February 12th symposium at the White House celebrating the work of three long-dead poets. She became an even better friend than she knew to poetry -- to living poets -- when she cancelled the gathering out of fear of giving Sam Hamill’s planned antiwar anthology too much exposure. But hey, anything that can scare the White House enough to make them deep-six a long-scheduled event must be newsworthy, right? The net result of poor Laura’s panic was to get news of the symposium, its cancellation, and the peace anthology into every major paper and wire service in the country, and quite a few in other countries. In lieu of a sedate (stuffy? stuffy!) and tightly managed government symposium on poetry, February 12th became a day for huge antiwar readings throughout the country, and even beyond, with peace readings being held as far away as the UK. Here are a few first-hand reports:
Elizabeth (Beacon411@aol.com) attended a reading at NYU’s Bobst Library with Paul Auster, E.L. Doctorow, Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Marie Ponsot, Jean Valentine, Chuck Wachtel and others:
Sitting on the floor due to the large crowd, I listened to men and women of various ages and races honor poets from all over the world. The reading was begun with “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes and featured poems by Dickinson, Whitman, Shakespeare, Melville, a World War II vet, Fernando Silva, and a Russian poet who died in a labor camp in 1938. At the close of the reading Marvin Taylor, director of the Bales Collection at Bobst, admonished Mrs. Bush for canceling the symposium, pointing out that as writers “we are to always challenge censorship wherever it appears.” Taylor called for the First Lady to resign from the American Library Association as she is a discredit to the profession, then read a moving poem by Tim Dlugos. The most prominent lines that I heard were “Resist much, obey little,” from Whitman's “To the States,” and “...if I do, it ain't the same war the president wants to go to. No sir, I have been hanging on a rope in Alabama too long” from “The Negro Speaks of War” by Langston Hughes. Over all, the use of classic poets helped to fortify the fact that we are still struggling with the same issues and politics, still fighting the same war, if you will, as has always been fought.
From Rick Klaus Theis (KlausPoet@aol.com):
Brooklyn Voices Against the War was held at Park Slope Methodist Church, and included original poetry in English and Spanish, and satirical prose, as well as readings from Arthur Rimbaud and Langston Hughes, a Vietnam vet who died in the war, and an Iraqi poet in exile. Poet Les Lopes, who also served as the event's MC, opened the evening with thoughts meant to help those opposed to the war keep from becoming demoralized in the face of the great odds against being able to stop it. He said, “We will never know what we've stopped, only what we haven't stopped. So protesting is an act of faith -- faith that our voices do count and will have an effect.” Readers included Ammiel Alcalay, Moustafa Bayoumi, Susan Brennan, Al Graves, Kimiko Hahn, Amy Holman, Patricia Spears Jones, Janet Kaplan, Richard Levine, Brendan Lorber, Rick Klaus Theis, Alexandra van de Kamp, Suzanne Wise, Matvei Yankelevich, and Enrique Zaldua.
POEMS NOT FIT FOR THE WHITE HOUSE AT LINCOLN CENTER
And look what’s coming to Lincoln Center on Monday night... (Thank you again, oh Laura Bush, for putting Mos Def on the same stage as Stanley Kunitz, Odetta with Robert Pinsky, C.K. Williams with Saul Williams -- who else could have pulled this off?).... The reading’s called “Poems Not Fit For the White House,” 7:30 pm, at Avery Fisher Hall. Other readers include Ammiel Alcalay, Lee Ann Brown, Steve Colman, Robert Creeley, Martín Espada, Jorie Graham, Andre Gregory, Sam Hamill, Suheir Hammad, Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell, Youseff Komanukaa, Ann Lauterbach, Sharon Olds, Willie Perdomo, Peter Sacks, Sapphire, Wallace Shawn, Mark Strand, Anne Waldman. The event is presented by the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience, and most of the participants have signed the Statement of Conscience which appeared twice in The New York Times. “Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.”
OFF THE CUFFS
Another kind of peace we need more of in our country is peace between civilians and police. That’s the concept behind Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and about the Police, edited by yours truly, introduced by Bob Holman, and just published by Soft Skull Press. The 130 contributors include cops, convicts, lawyers, teachers and some very well-known poets (think Waldman, Espada, Gunn, Olds, Merwin). And we’re putting as many of each as we can on the same stage in three upcoming readings in NYC:
- February 20 at Exoterica, 4450 Fieldson Road in the Bronx
- March 19 at The Writer’s Voice, 5 West 63rd Street, NYC
- April 4 at The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery @ Bleecker, NYC
ENOUGH ABOUT NYC
Look what’s happening on the other side of the country (Port Angeles, Washington, to be precise): Poet Kate Reavey and bookstore owner Alan Turner organized a reading at the library that drew more than 130 people on a freezing cold night and lasted for over three hours. Alice Derry kicked off the event with a poem Tess Gallagher wrote for the occasion, followed by readers such as ex-marine Bronson West, and publisher Kenneth Gurney of Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry. “World peace starts in the individual. You must have peace in the heart to have peace in your actions and footsteps and the land you walk,” says Kenneth. During the open reading, a number of Vietnam vets spoke about how they were used and how many promises have been broken. Yet, Kenneth says, “there were only three or four college-age people in the room. I know students are in the middle of their semester, but I expected more of them to show up. My thought is, if the draft was still in place, there would be more protesting by young people.”
