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March
7, 2003, 11:20 a.m.
Nonfighting Words
Poets against
the war.
By Mark Goldblatt
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ednesday, in case you missed it, was the very first International Day
of Poetry Against the War. The event was organized by Poets Against the
War — a gang of established mediocrities seeking desperately to inflate
their microscopic book sales and brown-nosing wannabes who know that the
only proven path to publication in the altogether subjective, free-verse
world of contemporary poetry is by kissing up to their well-connected
elders — and featured dramatic readings at venues in the United States
and Great Britain.
According to
W. S. Merwin, a doddering Pulitzer-prize winner whose contempt for President
Bush's policies towards Iraq is exceeded only by his contempt for formal
punctuation, "A deeply entrenched administrative institution now finds
itself wholly undermined by the people." What qualifies Merwin, who's
split his adult life between a home in a farming village in France and a
home on the edge of a rainforest in Hawaii, to speak on behalf of "the
people" is unclear. Still, you have to respect Merwin's views on military
matters; he did, after all, translate "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
into modern English.
Then there's a furious
little fellow named Jay Parini, who recently declared that "poets
are always the conscience of the people," but whose conscientious
objection to the war is framed in decidedly knee-jerk terms: "We
have a damn president who's about to kill, to burn, to dismember tens
of thousands of Iraqi children, mothers, fathers, and innocent American
soldiers who don't know what they're doing."
It was the poet Sam
Hamill who initiated this tempest in a chamber pot with his calculated
refusal to attend Laura Bush's ill-conceived symposium on poetry in January.
The White House cancelled the event when the invitees' political agenda
became clear, thus provoking howls of indignation from the literary community.
"They're afraid of poets," Hamill cried. "They're afraid
of the truth."
So that's
what keeps Colin Powell up at nights. Not Saddam's weapons of mass destructions
but the jottings of a couple of hundred self-righteous posers whose lines
come up short of the right side of the page.
At any rate, Hamill
trudged down to D.C. on Wednesday to present a bundle of antiwar poems
to presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio), who remarked: "The
work of these poets is in a tradition of poets throughout contemporary
history who have used their art to challenge war."
The entire arrogant
lot of them, including Kucinich, would do well to recall the wisdom of
William Butler Yeats, who was asked to write a war poem during World War
One and responded with these lines:
I
think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
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.
—
Mark Goldblatt's is the author of, Africa
Speaks, a novel just released in paperback.
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