Poets are heard in protest

There have always been two ways to think about poetry. Either you believe, as W.H. Auden wrote at the dawn of World War II, that “poetry makes nothing happen,” or you agree with Percy Bysshe Shelley that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Either way, the issue has become increasingly central in the last few weeks as the American poetry community emerges as an unexpected, and highly visible, fulcrum for the growing opposition to an Iraqi war.

On Wednesday, in the kind of coordinated grass-roots action unseen since the Vietnam era, poets and writers will stage more than 50 readings in bookstores, libraries, churches and meeting houses across the country, inspired by poet and Copper Canyon Press publisher Sam Hamill, who in an e-mail late last month asked 50 friends and colleagues to dedicate the day to “Poetry Against the War.”

How did one e-mail launch a nationwide protest movement that will stage events through the month and beyond? Ironically, it has everything to do with First Lady Laura Bush, who, in mid-January, invited several prominent American poets, Hamill included, to participate in a Feb. 12 White House symposium celebrating the work of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes.

Former poets laureate Rita Dove and Stanley Kunitz declined to attend because of the administration’s stance on Iraq, while Hamill took a different approach; he solicited poetry for “an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon.”

Responses to Hamill’s call for protest poetry began to snowball -- “I expected 200 responses,” he explains by phone from San Francisco, but now, two weeks later, his “anthology of protest” features more than 5,000 poems, including work by “virtually every major poet in the country,” from Dove and Kunitz to W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Marilyn Hacker and Adrienne Rich.

When the first lady learned of plans for the anthology, the White House canceled the event. “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry,” the White House said.

According to the poets, the idea that poetry should be apolitical indicates a fundamental misapprehension on the first lady’s part. “If she had said that in any other country,” says Grace Paley, the poet and short story writer who will appear with Kinnell and Julia Alvarez at a Feb. 16 Poets Against the War reading in Manchester, Vt., “every major newspaper would have laughed at her. Poets live in the world, and their work can’t help but reflect that. Even if you reject politics, that’s a political statement.”

Then there’s the fact that, of the three poets the White House meant to honor, two -- Hughes and Whitman -- repeatedly touch on political and social themes in their work. In his 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes addresses American hypocrisy, writing, “From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives / We must take back our land again”; his left-wing sentiments led to years of harassment by the FBI. Whitman, for his part, referred to the highest offices of government as having been “bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes.”

“Of all people,” Hamill says, “that she would use Hughes and Whitman to say that poetry is not political. If Whitman were alive right now, this administration wouldn’t allow him within 10 miles of the White House.”

Of course, the exponential dissemination of Hamill’s e-mail may have more to say about the influence of technology than poetry. “I’m impressed by the speed of the organizing,” Paley says, “but in the end, it’s pushing a button. People have to go to readings, to demonstrations. I believe in the presence of a person.”

That’s the idea behind setting aside Wednesday as a day of poetry against the war, a way of bringing the poets’ protest into three dimensions and using it to engage the world. “Our first idea,” says Larry Jaffe, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Poets for Peace and the United Poets Coalition, which have coordinated many of the Wednesday readings, “was to invite the first lady to a reading, but then we decided why one reading? Why not 50? Readings blossomed all over the place.”

The nation’s poets are joining ranks with other artists who are organizing against the war, such as Not in Our Name, a nonprofit group formed by writers, artists and academics in May, and Theaters Against War, a New York group that will stage protest readings and other performances in early March.

A quick look at the United Poets Web site (www.unitedpoets .org) reveals the extent of this efflorescence, from New York, where E.L. Doctorow, Paul Auster and others will read at NYU’s Fales Library, to readings in Chicago, Austin, Seattle.

Here in Southern California, five events are scheduled for Wednesday, including readings in Palm Springs, Ventura, at the Ugly Mug in the city of Orange, and a noon rally at the Federal Building in Westwood, where organizer Nancy Lambert has asked participants to “bring a box lunch, a blanket, a poem, a song, your thoughts and ideas -- and help us turn the lawn of the Federal Building into the public space our Founding Fathers intended it to be.” On Wednesday night, the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard will host a reading of local poets, including Laurel Anne Bogen, Leslie Monsour and SA Griffin; on Feb. 22, Griffin will emcee an open reading of “Poetry as Protest” at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice.

What all this suggests is a way in which verse can be inherently democratic, the very essence of a populist form. This, in turn, brings us back to Dickinson, Hughes and Whitman, who sought to write in the vernacular, and take on everyday themes.

“Poetry,” says Alicia Partnoy, an Argentine poet and professor at Loyola Marymount University who specializes in the poetry of political repression, “is a powerful instrument of personal expression because it resonates with others. It helps generate solidarity by allowing people not to feel so impotent, so smashed. Whether the poetry is good or bad -- that’s almost irrelevant. What’s important is that you have thousands of pieces by people who want to express themselves.”

This solidarity is clear not only in the readings, but also on the Internet, where a variety of organizations have taken up the anti-war gauntlet, from the online magazine “Nth Position” (www.nthposition.com), which offers free downloads of two anthologies of protest poetry, “100 Poets Against the War” and “100 Poets Against the War Redux,” to Hamill’s Web site (https://poets againstthewar.org), where 25 volunteers work 16-hour days to download the submitted poems.

Although only a small sample is available (“Mr. President,” Hayden Carruth writes in one of the most powerful: “We say, desist, resign, / hide yourself in your own shame, / lest otherwise the evil you have / loosed will destroy everything / and love will quit the world”), everything ultimately will be posted and delivered to the White House and “several major libraries” on computer disk. “We’re taking it all,” Hamill laughs, “from the very best to the very worst. I think Whitman would be pleased -- and appalled. Let democratic chaos reign.”

In the end, the issue is whether poetry can be enough to sway an administration that seems determined to wage a war in the Middle East. Is Auden right or is Shelley? Can poetry somehow counter the military impulse? “That’s a sentimental question,” Paley says. “The poets got organized and we will have to stay organized. The truth is that people have to talk louder, be braver, be nonviolent. That’s what creates change.”

Yet if nothing else, Jaffe suggests, poetry “gives people pause, a moment to break away from the insanity of the world and take stock of where we are.” On the one hand, this may make nothing happen, but on the other, it could legislate the world. After all, as the Japanese poet Ki no Tsurayuki wrote in AD 905, “It is poetry that effortlessly moves the heavens and the earth, awakens the world of invisible spirits to deep feel, softens the relationship between men and women, and consoles the hearts of fierce warriors.”