[R-G] Bards Not Bombs

[Usman Majeed]

>From the Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/press2.php


Bards Not Bombs in NYC
by Joy Press
February 19 - 25, 2003


When the White House canceled its "Poetry and the American Voice" symposium
for fear of anti-warmongering, a wave of activist energy shot through the
poetry community. Sam Hamill, the poet (and Copper Canyon Press editor) who
started the controversy by exhorting other invited poets to "speak up for
the conscience of our country," immediately suggested a "Day of Poetry
Against the War." At 1 p.m. on February 12, at the very moment the White
House event should have taken place, writers across the U.S. read poems and
spoke of opposition. (Hamill maintains a Web site: poetsagainstthewar.org,
with updated lists of readings and poems.)

In Manhattan, the largest reading took place at NYU's Fales Library, where
dozens of poets and novelists including Sharon Olds, former poet laureate
Galway Kinnell, Paul Auster, and E.L. Doctorow sat in the front of a
standing-room-only crowd. Students leaned on bookcases and crouched on spare
patches of carpet throughout the 90-minute event. Several writers chose
verse that directly addressed war: Auster opted for an affecting prose poem
from George Oppen about a man in occupied France during World War II who
chose to crash into a tree rather than be drafted into the Nazi army, and
Aracelis Girmay offered a rendition of Langston Hughes's confrontational
"Negroe Speaks of War." On a different tip, Olds intoned a work by Rabi'a
al-'Adawiyya, an eighth-century female poet whom she described as a celibate
Iraqi mystic whose descendants live in Baghdad and its surrounds. Sara
Nelson prefaced her Walt Whitman verse with an optimistic nod to the power
of art: "When you're in a state of awe, you're less likely to drop bombs."

Anyone who came in search of rowdy protest would've been sorely
disappointed. The audience remained reverently silent, chuckling only
once‹when Marie Ponsot uttered the line, "All wars are boyish and are fought
by boys." Not much sense of political uproar, in fact, until Fales's head
librarian Marvin Taylor took the podium and called for Laura Bush‹a former
librarian herself‹to step down from the American Library Association.
Afterward Taylor said that Mrs. Bush had broken an ethical code shared by
librarians, "to challenge censorship wherever it is. Someone had to say
something, because what she did was clearly censorious. I wanted to get
involved because I see a larger attack on the arts, from the covering up of
Guernica to the cancellation of the poetry lunch." (Taylor hasn't decided
whether he should push the idea further, since libraries would be afraid to
protest for fear of losing funding.)

At the same hour, 38 blocks north on the steps of the New York Public
Library, a cluster of poets stood below one of the marble lions, next to a
homemade sign reading "Poets Against the War." Fanny Howe, Honor Moore,
Victoria Redel, and an assortment of fellow poets took turns reading Middle
Eastern poetry to a crowd huddling in the chill wind. Howe says they chose
this verse because poets are "the same everywhere. Poets across the world
are connected and it would be nice to give some voice to the poets of
Baghdad." People passing by the library on their lunch break stopped to
listen, and a few decided to read something themselves, choosing a poem from
a packet that had been prepared for the occasion. (Howe says the idea was
born at a party Moore had given the week before. Howe says, "Within five
minutes we weren't speaking to each other anymore, just yelling about the
war. Within 15 minutes we had a plan to do this reading.")

Ironically, the First Lady showed up at the same library the very next
night, but she wasn't there to listen to protest poetry. Instead she was
being feted by the UN to mark her new role as UNESCO's Honorary Ambassador
for the Decade of Literacy. On the dais alongside UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, Mrs. Bush proclaimed that "literacy is freedom" and that "for people
throughout the world, literacy is also power‹the power to reshape their
communities and their own destiny."

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On March 4, Grace Paley, Molly Peacock, and others read from Women on War at
the CUNY Graduate Center. For more information, call 212-817-7150.


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"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the
oppressed." 
Steve Biko