Poets Against the War

Derek Richards: the soldier who stood

Shadab Zeest Hashmi: Call to Prayer

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A Reading of David Harsent's Legion and Brian Turner's Here, Bullet

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Emily Warn

        

A Seattle resident, Emily Warn recently taught creative writing at Lynchburg College. She is author of three books of poetry The Leaf Path, The Novice Insomnia and Shadow Architect, and has been recipient of the Pushcart Prize Anthology Outstanding Writer Award as well as the Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University. Warn led 30 poets in a poetry reading in Lafayette Park across from the White House and attempted to deliver a sampling of poems from the Poets Against the War web site to its gates. The guards refused them.

 

California Poppy

I was crying for you.
You brought me a California poppy
in the scented warmth
under the eucalyptus.
You knelt beside me
and let your eyes be my eyes
to the bottom of the earth.
Was that the look we held
that later was no more?
A weight settled in me
as I became the person raised
without you. Come back,
moment in the grass.
Come back momentary father. 


Questions for Reflection: “California Poppy” 

Warn writes of her poem:“California Poppy” is a poem about searching for the lost father. It’s also about trying to grapple with the absence of a father. “When one grows up without a parent—what I felt was just emptiness, a certain sense of absence that was always present.” 

  1. What feeling does “California Poppy” leave you with after having heard it? What emotion is felt by the poet for her father?
  2. What importance does the poet place on having a father?
  3. How do you interpret the line “come back momentary father?” How do you relate to this line?
  4. What does this poem say about the importance of a relationship of a child to his/her father?

Pearl: Poets in Wartime

As a former journalist, Sherman Pearl has a unique perspective on the role of a poet in society. The passage below was taken from an interview Pearl did for Voices in Wartime. After reading answers to questions asked of him, consider the discussion questions that follow.

What do you think is the role of the poet in wartime?

I think the poet is a revolutionary, regardless of his or her political positions, by the nature of the art itself.  The poet in seeking truth and inner truth is not subject to the dictates of the state if he or she is writing with integrity.  Once you are removed from the political winds and once you are in the business of truth seeking, you become a bit of a subversive.

Does the poet stand outside of society or have a special view of society?

Well, I don’t think the poet has any unique position regarding society.  The difference between what the poet does and what most of us do, vis-a-vis politics and the problems of any particular time, is to write, not from the head, not from a perspective that dictates what the poem is going to be about, but from the heart, from the emotions, and from one's personal experiences.  That means you don’t know where the poem is going.  If it’s an outcry against injustice, so be it.

But the poem does not incorporate what the state has mandated as the acceptable point of view.  In that regard, I think the poet is a subversive.  To the extent that the poet's works get read and get into the public mind, the poet is freeing other people to listen to another aesthetic and not just to the propaganda that all states provide.  So, I think that just by being a bit freer than many other people, the poet influences others to seek truth.

When the war began, did you feel that the Poets Against the War effort had been wasted?

Well, I was horrified but not surprised when the shooting war started.  I felt that the Poets Against the War movement was generating a lot of anti-war sentiment, at least within the perimeters of poetry audiences.  In fact, the poetry programs against the war that I was involved with drew large audiences— not necessarily poetry fans or aficionados, but rather large, non-poetic audiences.  

As the war went on and as the anti-war movement developed, the Poets Against the War movement gained steam, and there were more anti-war poetry events.  I was involved in some of them.  So I think that poetry did put on its political face during this war, just as it had in Vietnam. There were lots of poetry events, art exhibits, plays, and other forms of art that were adjuncts, necessary adjuncts, to the overall anti-war movement.  

Are you a pacifist, or do you think that war is sometimes justified?

I’m not a pacifist—I do think that war is sometimes justified.  I think that World War II was necessary, in spite of the injustices and horrors that took place within that war. I am an Army veteran, although I didn’t experience war myself. I think that it’s necessary to have a strong defense in this country and to oppose tyranny. That doesn’t mean that I support intervention or pre-emptive war, but I see the necessity of having a strong position in the world, as long as we ourselves maintain our democracy. We have to be careful about what kind of democracy we’re spreading to other countries. We have to safeguard our liberties and our democratic system before we can so blithely export it to other countries and assume that our system is, by definition, superior to theirs.

Discussion Questions: The Poet’s Role in Wartime 

  1. What is meant by the term “revolutionary?” Given your definition how is the poet a revolutionary?
  2. According to Pearl what is the role of a poet in time of war? How is this role different as to what it might be at other times?
  3. How are poets subversive?
  4. How does poetry move people to seek truth? How would you define the process that poetry allows the listener to explore after hearing a poem?
  5. What place does poetry have in a time of war? For the poet? For those who listen to poetry? How might poetry be an invitation to dialogue?

 

Swift: Poets Are First

In his interview for Voices in Wartime, Todd Swift discusses the poets’ need to speak out on an issue. In te excerpt below, Swift speaks of poets historically who have written about war. He also talks of the role that the Internet is playing in promoting poetry globally.
 
In some ways I feel that the Poets Against the War movement encouraged the other movements that then sprang up. Of course by the time you had this wonderful march in London for example, and in other cities where millions of people were marching; at that point it became truly everyone’s war to protest against. But for the first month or two, the people out there in the lead were the poets. The ones that almost made it safe for everyone to realize, “Hey wait a minute, this is something that we can do.”

And you know the thing about poets is they’re always the first to broach a subject, or to dare to say something, they break taboos — that’s what they do in society. And they don’t have as much to lose; you know we didn’t see a lot of filmmakers against the war at first, or a lot of rock stars against the war. Why? Because they have more to lose, in a few cases where people did speak out, they were censored or there were problems. People in the media were losing their jobs, they were threatened.

Poets don’t make a lot of money, and they’re not often in positions of authority, so it’s more difficult to intimidate them. S o I think that they were in an ideal position around the world to speak out, as Ezra Pound has said, “Poets are the antennae of society, of civilization.” And that’s what happened in this case.

What is the role of poets—to criticize, to look at society, and to give it an unjaundiced look?
The role of poets — there’s a lot of roles for poets—and one of the things that can never be forgotten is that poetry is an art form. I’m going to set that aside in a moment, but I want to get that on record. Because a lot of people have criticized me, and other people like Sam Hamill, almost as if we’re selling false goods or shoddy goods; as if we’re trying to put across poetry that isn’t real poetry.

Poetry is an art form, it’s like ballet or painting, I mean it can be done well or it can be done badly. That being said, what poetry is—and we all know this, I mean we’ve all seen a poem—poetry is playing with language. And it’s always a balance between new ways of using language and what language refers to, which is the world. So actually, it was an ideal moment for poets to speak out because this was a war of rhetoric. Before the war began what was happening was that we had spin doctors, particularly in England that were—and this has of course become extremely controversial with the Lord Hutton report, and the BBC, and the weapons of mass destruction, and did they exist or didn’t they—but there were all these reports, and there were all these claims being made by Blair and Bush.

It was a time of rhetoric, because they were of course trying to build this up, as Churchill did during the war, beautifully. But we had these war leaders who were using rhetoric to build up this kind of war fever. Poets were ideally placed to puncture that web of language, because they use language in a way that is more honest, more direct, and more concise. They cut through the jargon, and they express what people feel, and they show how language can be used in a different way, perhaps in a more honest way.

And I think that’s the role of poets, and that’s why poets became so invaluable to this effort. I mean obviously, I wouldn’t encourage everyone to protest, but when you’re dealing with language and exposing its flaws anyway, you’re in a good position to criticize when language is lying to us. But don’t you think that the strength of a poet—whether it’s Shakespeare, or Shelley, or Allen Ginsberg—that a lot of the strength of poets and poetry, is its absolute honesty?

Poetry is either absolutely honest or absolutely dishonest, and I’m not sure which it is, because it works on so many different levels. On the one level, no poet who’s ever written a poem to his mistress or to a woman he claims to love is telling the whole story. Half of what the poem’s about is how—and this is especially the case with Shakespeare—half of the poem is about how great I am, and how famous I am, and I’m going to live forever.

Because you know, the use of language is wonderful; so there’s always duplicity with poetry. Poets are vain like most artists, they’re very creative and they’re living in a world where they’re threatened because they’re not commercially viable for the most part, they’re not really successful in the eyes of the world in the way that most people judge success these days. But that being said, poets do take risks and they have been driven—historically—by conscience and by wishing to speak out and there is a wonderful tradition of political poetry.

I don’t accept the idea that a poem has to be either aesthetic and beautiful or political, I think they can be all, and I think that we’ve seen throughout history poets that have— from Shakespeare to [John] Milton, who’s poetry was quite political, to Dylan Thomas writing poems during the Blitz— that they are extraordinary; very, very moving. They work supremely well as poems but they also send a strong message.

Is the Internet really suited to poetry? Do you think it is a medium that poetry’s been waiting for?
I think poems and the Internet are an ideal match because you have a form, you have a poem, which is text, which is words; and it’s easy to send out on the Internet. And the Internet can reach, as we know, instantaneously tens of thousands or maybe millions of people, the Internet’s an incredible delivery system for poetry, for text. And what it is that you have with a poem that you don’t have with just a normal email? You have a message that’s been crafted in a delightful way that intrigues people so that they want to share it with their friends.

So what we were discovering at that moment was that if people wrote poems that were clever, or witty, or satirical about Bush or Blair, or had a strong emotional message about why war was best avoided, these poems could not only be sent out but then re-circulated. Because people like them and wanted to share them with their friends. It was just a moment when poems were in vogue and the Internet was perfectly suited to deliver them quickly.

Do you think it’s a good thing for poetry that this medium is available? As opposed to 1,000 copies of a book.
I think that the way new media has impacted not just poetry, but literature in the last few years is—there’s no other way of saying it—is a paradigm shift, and a lot of publishers and writers haven’t accepted that yet. I mean I, myself, I’m not writing hyper-poetry. That’s a different thing, that’s almost a new form in and of itself.

But even the idea of distributing poetry or any kind of book, electronically by the Internet, is only now just beginning to find its full role and impact. And what it’s going to do, and what actually happened with the 100 Poets Against the War e-book—which had never happened before and which is historical, and has to be remembered—is that e-books had been around for several years.

Stephen King had put one out, had tried to sell it. No one went to them, they were like floating there in cyberspace, and you’d put out an e-book with your poems or the memoirs of your grandmother’s trip to Africa. It would be wonderful, it would be there in cyberspace, but your mother and three friends would go and get it; no one else would.

No one had found a way to connect the audience that was there with the idea of the e-book. And by suddenly distributing the e-book link in an email and by having it available—not on just one web site—but saying hey, “Put this on as many web sites as you want, download it, it’s free.” Suddenly it all exploded, because a lot of things came together at once: ubiquity, not having to pay for it, and a reason to read it. So when people get very excited about the Internet, and literature or poetry at this time, we can never forget that it’s because people were angry at the war that was looming. It wasn’t because literature suddenly became more special, or the poets were suddenly better, or that everyone in the world was using the Internet and was suddenly more enlightened. It was just that there was a zeitgeist moment, a moment that isn’t there now, a moment that came together when people around the world felt something very wrong was happening. And they found one way to protest it that was quite effortless and fun.

But the Internet will learn from this and will move on; but that moment is gone. There’ll be other iterations or other forms of it, but it’s a process—if I can just say one thing–that mainstream publishers didn’t learn from. They continue to produce books, and people continue to buy them, and the system is still chugging along. But eventually people will realize, “Wait a minute, it happened once. Books were free, books were eminently available.” And they’ll return to that; maybe when it’s easier to produce, to download books in an attractive format.

 
Art Form, Popular Medium, or Both?

One of the things that you’ve mentioned and I think you feel a bit uncomfortable with it also—is the idea of poetry as a sort of popular medium.  But isn’t anti-war poetry a bit like pamphleteering in a way?  Do you think this should have the same form of criticism that academic poetry does?
Some critics were saying that the poetry that was being written wasn’t real poetry and in some cases they were right. There were a lot of people writing things and some of it was doggerel. Just like there will always be poems, we write them on Valentine’s Day, that aren’t very good but maybe they’re sincere. So that’s not a fair criticism.

As the Poet Laureate of America, Billy Collins said last year or two years ago, “Ninety-three percent of everything is crap.” So why criticize poetry, when 93% of that is crap? I mean, it’s just a given. Excellence is always rare. But really it’s unfair to say, “Hey wait a minute, a lot of this political stuff, it’s not very good.” Because people are going to write poems about their dogs, or falling in love, or when someone dies; these are legitimate reasons to write.

And some of the poems are going to be very moving and some of them are not going to be. In general the question, has good poetry ever been written that’s political?  Well obviously, yes. In fact I can’t think of many major poems that aren’t political. The very first great poem by Homer, which is the one that frames all of our civilization’s relationship to poetry, is political. Both The Odyssey, and The Iliad, these are political poems.They’re about war; they’re about society, the divine comedy.The great medieval poetic masterpiece is a profoundly political poem, I mean Dante puts Popes in hell, in certain circles of hell, there’s nothing that could have been more political an act than that and he got in trouble for it. Milton’s poem Paradise Lost was a thinly veiled allegory on the Civil War and issues in Britain at the time.

There has never been a major poet who hasn’t written a major poem that had an explicit or maybe even a hidden reference to politics.We are political animals and poets are social beings. We’re very excited about politics. Ezra Pound’s bizarre sprawling masterpiece The Cantos; it’s riddled with politics. So I don’t really accept the idea that once you set out to write anything political it’s necessarily less well-written, or less enjoyable, or less crafted, or less classical. That’s just not true.

If you start in World War I, you get these great poets. Get to World War Two, and it’s still highly educated poets but much more identifying themselves not as officers with a responsibility to the enlisted men but as enlisted men or as parts of a machine. And then you get to Vietnam and it is working class guys, who are writing very powerful poetry.  
 
Talk to us a little bit about this sort of sequence in terms of poetry and war?
At the beginning of the 20th century the idea of the war poet was not an anti-war poet. The war poet was someone who was in the war, probably an officer who had been educated at Cambridge or Oxford, and certainly in England this was the tradition. And with the great First World War poems, their strength comes from the fact that it’s a collision between two worlds, an extraordinarily barbaric modern world —and we’re all familiar now with the brutality of the trench warfare and the use of technology really in a whole different way—with these very refined sensibilities.These were not 20th-century poets, up until the moment that they experienced these bombardments and this horrific mass-slaughter. So what you get there is the first flowering of modernism in poetry. So what makes the First World War in relation to war poetry special is the poetry is particularly good.

Now there aren’t really very many famous Second World War poets and certainly we don’t have anthologies of Second World War poetry in the same way that we do First World War poetry. Yes they’re there, but everyone lumps them in with the First World War poets and keeps going back to them. The reason is that by the Second World War poets knew that war was terrible.

All of the old Napoleonic illusions of you meet on a battlefield and, “Isn’t this, aren’t we dressed wonderfully? And isn’t the weather fine? And can’t you wait to just get back after the end of the day into the tent and have some sherry and talk about it, and compare little wounds from sabers or whatever?” That was gone. Everyone knew it was horrific; it was a nightmare. So there wasn’t the same—and modernism had already flowered with Eliot at that point—you didn’t have an incredible transition in language taking place.

Nor did you have an incredible transition in sensibility, it was kind of the status quo, “Okay, more slaughter. We’re going to use more modernistic techniques. Where do we go from there?” But by Vietnam, what was interesting is that post-modernism had been introduced because the beat tradition in America is essentially post-modernist. It’s suddenly, it’s guys who aren’t afraid to say, “I take drugs. I have sex, often with people that aren’t women.” And also they’re exploring different religions and different cultures, Buddhism, Eastern traditions in general. All that comes together and it’s a different kind of war again and you have different kinds of people facing that war, so that the anti-war poetry in Vietnam—and the poetry written about Vietnam—is interesting again. And I think what’s also happened now, and what happened in 2003 and 2004, is that once again we had a shift both in technology and in sensibility of language.
 
Changes in War and Changes in Poetry
 

We were talking about changes in poetry and war from World War One to World War Two to Vietnam, and you mentioned that there was something new that was happening. What was that?

When poetry and war become interesting together is when you have a shift in sensibility. When war changes or when the language the poets use change; and in World War One, that happened. Because the battlefield techniques were different, the equipment was different, the technology was different, and so was the poetry. Because these were 19th century people who were suddenly faced with a whole different way of fighting.

So it was an interesting collision of experiences, and we got great writing from that and very powerful writing. The Second World War was less interesting because people were familiar with the brutality of war at this point and total war, and we still had a kind of modernist sensibility. By the Vietnam time, with the beat poets and also Robert Lowell and confessionalism, you had a different sensibility. You had subjectivity, an introduction to people much more honest about their own sexuality, their willingness to take drugs and experiment in general—that was the 60’s—coming up against a different kind of war in Vietnam, a kind of police action. And again at the beginning of the 21st century, what really made this whole collision of poetry, war, and protest—I think once again innovative and interesting like it was in the First World War—is that poets are writing differently again. They’re much more innovative, they’re being much more experimental.

No one had really used the Internet technology in the same way to distribute the poems and I think everyone was amazed by how they were reaching everyone else, which created a kind of coffeehouse atmosphere but on a global level.  You could write a poem and then share it with someone you know in India, or someone in India could suddenly be sharing a poem with someone in Indiana; it was extraordinary. People were excited by that, so they were challenged to write new and better poems, and try out new things.  But also the war was different, and in the sense that we weren’t; you know it as famously a war with embedded media, and more and more so-called “smart technology”.  And this is what the poets were writing about, a lot of them were writing about the language of war, about the involvement of the media, about the camera eye being their eye.

A lot of the poets of course weren’t in Iraq during the lead up to the war, but they felt that they were there. They felt uniquely that they were almost in the boardrooms where Bush and Blair were meeting, but they also felt that they were on the battlefield because of the way the war was being packaged for them. And so it allowed the poets to kind of unpack that packaging and re-explain it and re-explore it.

How did the poets feel that they were actually there on the battlefield?

The poets that were writing pre-war about the war, they mostly weren’t actually in the war but they felt that they were. And what I think was unique about this moment is the way that the media had packaged the build-up to the war and the war itself.  It was as if they were in the boardrooms or the secret meetings between Bush and Blair. And then when the war happened, with the embedded media, the way it was presented, the poets felt that they were able to unpack the package they were being given by the media and then re-present in a new way in the poems. There was this willingness to really play with the ideas of the language that the Pentagon was using, the language that the media was using to describe the events that were taking place, and to re-describe the images. One of the things that I think is incredible about this moment, is that a lot of people thought we had already discovered that war was hell.

And of course over the 20th century—anti-war poets, even the war poets of the First World War— they’re writing poetry to shock us, to tell us, “War is terrible.  Look at the rats, look at the exploded people, look at the stinking muck in the trenches.”  But this had been forgotten by the time of the 21st century, and what the poets had to do again—but without being there—was re-describe those images. Almost to reeducate the public, to say, “Wait a minute, you’re being told this is going to be a painless war.  You’re being told that no one’s going to get hurt.  But the bombs are still going to explode and innocent people are still going to get maimed.”  So a lot of the poems are about what happens to children and what happens to innocent people.  A lot of the poems are about collateral damage and reminding us that it still happens.

A lot of the poetry was talking about people that the press could not see, the Iraqis, the civilians, the people that they are not embedded with. Are the poets speaking for people who don’t have a voice?
A lot of the poems in the build-up to the war and then when the war started, were writing about the people that weren’t being described in the mainstream media; the people that were being killed.  And most of the people that were being killed were innocent civilians that just happened to be Iraqi because it was Iraq that was being attacked.

So a lot of the poems that we received, were just describing that terrible loss of innocence; the brutality of war, and the injustice of it.  And I think what was driving the anger of the poets was that the war was not being described to us as a necessary evil, it was being described to us almost as a necessary delight. No one actually came out in the British or the American government and said, “This is going to be terrible, and we’re very sorry, but we have to do it.”  They said, “We have to do it.”  And then they forgot to mention the terrible nature of it. And the poets were describing that—and certain journalists with a conscience like Robert Fisk and people like that—and there were many of them—but certainly the embedded journalists were, for the most part, selling a story or providing us a line that was being spun by the Pentagon.


Discussion Questions: Poets Are the First to Broach a Subject 

  1. How do poets pave the way for others to say what is on their minds?
  2. Why is it that poets seem to be the first to speak out on a social issue, cause or political event?
  3. Do you agree with Todd Swift that poetry is an art form? What is your reasoning?
  4. Swift makes reference to the Hutton report. Investigate the reason for the report and discuss its significance to the Iraqi War.
  5. Swift claims that the time leading up to the Iraqi War was a “time of rhetoric.” Explain what you think he meant by that? Has this time continued? What effect does using language correctly have on people? How does poetry super cede rhetoric?
  6. Swift speaks of some poetry as “doggerel.” What does he mean by this? What place does such poetry have?
  7. In his interview Swift talks of poets through the ages who have written political poetry—John Milton, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg. Research the writings of these men and report on their work.
  8. What place does the internet and e-books have for promoting poetry?

 

Hamill: Poets Against the War

Starting Poets Against the War

Sam Hamill is the former founding editor of Copper Canyon Press and the founder of Poets Against the War. In the interview below, he talks about being invited to The White House and the founding of Poets Against the War.

Take me back to what you were doing just before you had the idea of going public with a day of poetry against the war on Capitol Hill. What was your life like?
 
I was in the midst of preparing an event in San Francisco to honor the life of Kenneth Rexroth.  I was in the print room preparing a broadside on damp cotton rag paper.  I took a break and ran to the post office to pick up my mail. There was a large square envelope with "The White House" written in gold letters in the upper left-hand corner.  I knew what it was [an invitation to the Laura Bush symposium on American Poetry], because there was no other way I would get anything like that from the White House.

I felt queasy, because anything I did would have a ripple effect, and what ever I do also reflects on Copper Canyon Press and on my board and on my co-workers.  I opened it, and I read it, and I stewed.  I called Hayden Carruth, one of my old friends, and I called W.S. Merwin, another old friend, and stewed on it all day long.  That evening my wife and I talked about it and went to bed.  I woke up at 4 o'clock on Saturday morning, and knew what it was I wanted to do.  I notified the board of Copper Canyon Press and told them what I wanted to do and sent them the letter I was planning to send to the White House.

I asked if they had any objections.  My board of directors stood squarely behind me.  I sent the letter off to about three dozen friends–the poems began coming in and the word began going out.

Why do you think you were invited to the White House? Was it naive, was it manipulative?
 
It was both naive and manipulative.  I think they thought we could actually go to the White House and they could do their little presentation to honor Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson without any political fallout.  It was a stupid, and naive, virtually illiterate way of thinking. Anyone who has read Whitman or Langston Hughes knows that they were men who were outspoken in their devotion to our constitution, in their devotion to die in democracy and human dignity.  All those things have enormous political implications.  They are political poets.  And Emily Dickinson was a divine political poet in a subtle way.

No one read Whitman until the 1940s and the 1950s when the beat movement really resurrected him from the ashes of literature.  In Whitman's time, his poetry was laughed at often as not being poetry. After all, it's not in regular meter and it doesn't rhyme.  But he is the grandfather of American poetry. Langston Hughes is a terribly important Black poet of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.  He wrote almost exclusively about the importance of being a black poet and from a black poet's perspective, and not being consumed by the power culture.

I feel sorry for Mrs. Bush.  But then again I don't feel sorry for Mrs. Bush.  She married George Bush. She supports the policies of this administration.  I wish her well in her endeavors to encourage literacy. But to encourage the kind of literacy that would separate politics from poetry–I don't support it. It's a foolish idea. And that reveals the lack of understanding of the very nature of poetry.
 
Did you ever seriously consider going to the White House?
 
No, of course not. I don't consider this to be a legitimate administration, frankly. I'm frightened of this imperial presidency. I fundamentally agree with W.S. Merwin's now famous statement on Poets Against the War that "this man should be limited in his power." I'm frightened of the way this administration plays to fear.  I'm frightened by what they're doing to our constitution. And I'm frightened by what they want to do with the Supreme Court in taking away a woman's right to choose. I'm frightened by their educational plans, which involved the president's personal commitment to his personal religion. There's no way I would go to this White House.

The decision I made in response to this invitation was about how best to respond, how best to say "no." Should I simply write a polite letter and decline? Or should I speak from my conscience? As a practicing Zen Buddhist, I really felt I had to make my position known.  And I had to state it pretty clearly.  I decided indirectly on the advice of both Hayden and Merwin that I would invite my fellow poets to stand beside me, as many as wished to.  I thought we would have a few good poems, because all of the major poets of the United States oppose this administration in various ways.

But within about 36 hours we had 1,500 entries.  The e-mail site basically collapsed from the load, and a bunch of very nice people whom I had never met–who are all sort of web geniuses–came to our rescue. That's how we set up the Poets Against the War web site, which was the second step in this journey.

How did the Poets Against the War web site get off the ground?
 
Who could predict that there would be 7,500 entries of poetry in two weeks? It was certainly beyond anything that I had ever imagined. My wife, Gray, and our friend Nancy volunteered to act as secretaries to type up the poems. They thought that we might receive as many as a thousand poems, because I knew there were a lot of poets out there who felt very strongly about the war. But 7,000 poems? I could not have imagined such an outpouring. And some of the most wonderful parts of it have been the letters that have come along with the poems. People felt silenced a little bit about others lining up behind this administration, marching in line, the right wing shouting people down and using bullying tactics as they have for so many years, and the Democratic Party caving in to these people.

The Project Alchemy folks from Seattle, whom I have never actually met but they have been wonderfully generous with their time and money, and we’ve cooperated on building the web site, and formatting the poems, and bringing some organization to this enormous groundswell that I hadn’t frankly anticipated. My life has been spent learning how to deal with the kindness of strangers. I've lived in poverty most of my life, and every once in awhile I have had a fellowship, where people have come to our board of directors and they've brought ideas, and energy, and commitment to the value and role of poetry that I feel so strongly about.

I like to talk about living by my begging bowl, but that upsets my fundraisers sometimes, because in America we don't like that idea.  But as a Buddhist, all of my great teachers live by the begging bowl. And my begging bowl is basically for poetry. So I was very surprised but not shocked when these people came forward and volunteered. All that I have ever done has depended on volunteer help from people that I didn't know.

How has your life changed since you received this wave of attention? For example, how do you feel when you read something in the Wall Street Journal that attacks you personally? 

Well it changed everything. I didn't get a good night's sleep for number of weeks after we took a public stand on March 5 of 2003. I was not designed for celebrity. I don't want to be Allen Ginsberg when I grow up. But on the other hand, it is really gratifying to have the support of so many poets, so many people outside of the literary community. The press people I have dealt with have by and large been fair in their treatment of what we're doing. There have been a few people who have attacked me personally, which is what can be expected. It is such a radical change in my life that I am still kind of baffled by it.

That fellow–whose name I have forgotten–and the Wall Street Journal write such ridiculous trash and such ad hominem attacks on me personally, this is exactly the kind of opponent that I would like to have. By doing what this writer is doing, he is really serving our best interests because he shows how arrogant and mean spirited he is. It is a lack of any attempt to understand who we are and what we represent really presents our message more strongly than we could. It's about what I would expect from the Wall Street Journal.

Do you feel somewhat removed from this groundswell, even though you're in the middle of it?
 
Let me say that from day to day, with or without this moment of celebrity, is my Zen practice, which begins every morning at 4:30 a.m. with zazen, a Japanese term from the Chinese tso ch'an, which means simply deep sitting. In the Zen tradition we don't spend much time on sutra recitation and other things. We really focus our practice on our daily sitting habits.  It comes from the great Zen master Hui Neng, who advocated silent, solitary, self illumination.  It's simply brings one down to earth when one's mind is carrying one away. It's a very practical thing for me.

Zen actually has very little to do with religion.  I'm not a religious man but I've been working at my Zen practice for years.  And I also went to school on the ancient Japanese and Chinese poets because they're my teachers, my brothers and my sisters. My conversation with Tu Fu has been going on now for twenty years and he has been dead now since the eighth century.  He speaks to me sometimes very clearly, a poet who was exiled for his political opinions and for the poetry that he wrote.  The Chinese have a tradition of exiling their poets. This administration would like to exile its poets and they did in effect exile us by closing the doors to the White House when they knew that poets were going to protest their policies against Iraq. 

 

Coming Back to the Truth

In one of your interviews, you talk about social lies. Could you explain what you mean by that?

 
Our social lies in this country began with our lack of understanding of our own history. The 19th century in America was a century of genocide. What we did to the Native American nations who lived here is unspeakable. It was in fact the model for Hitler's concentration camps. We destroyed nearly 200 languages in North America in the 18th century. 

So it begins with a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich that now rules the country with an imperial air, and rules those who are voiceless, who have no money. Our political system is based entirely on who can create the most money, which means dancing with the rich. That's why I believe the Democrats caved in to this regime, because they were afraid of being divorced from the money. Whereas, the people who die in these ridiculous wars are invariably the poor.

I must believe that the reason we have had such an outpouring of poets against the war is in some part a product of the fear that this administration has put in people's hearts. Why am I the first to speak out so publicly?  Surely I am not, and yet providing others the opportunity to speak with me, there is this enormous outpouring of outrage over administration policies. Today we are under orange alert, and we have Donald Rumsfeld, a man who lied to Congress and has more than amply demonstrated his contempt for the Constitution of the United States, who is acting as an international bully, and telling people constantly that we must be afraid of him.

All of this begins with fear.  Fear is the great enemy, maybe more than greed. This administration has used every opportunity to put fear in people's hearts, and I think the only thing we can do in response is to refuse to accept that fear and to stand and be happy, to be joyous.  After 9/11, I wrote a poem about the attack on the World Trade Center, and I have a moment of realization in the making of the poem–that it was my duty as a poet to stand up again and sing and dance. And I end the poem by saying 'I will kiss the sword that kills me if I must.'

I will not let these people take the joy out of my heart, and I will not let these people make compassion a bad idea.—even having compassion for them and their ignorance.

Why are poets taking on this issue? What about people who say "leave the politics to the pros"?

 
We are the pros. I am a poet and I am a poet doing a poet's work. If you go and you read the Greek anthologies, poems that were written five-, six-hundred BCE, you will find very political poems. If you read the history of poetry in general, you will understand that it is virtually impossible, as poet Phil Levine observed on NPR (National Public Radio), it is virtually impossible to write a poem that does not have political implications. People who say leave the politics out of poetry are people who know nothing about poetry.

Poets are involved because I invited poets to speak from their conscience. Poets tend to be humanists and they tend to see things from angles that other people don't pause long enough to look at. I think that one of the major functions of poems in particular is to develop sensibility, and I think that means sensitivity to those who are oppressed, to those who have no voice.

One of the most important things I have done in my life as a poet is the twenty years I spent working with battered women and children, and the years I spent teaching in American prisons. Not because it puts me in a position to speak for children or on the racist role of law that treats people so differently in our judicial system, but rather because it has made me understand who has the power and who sees and knows what and how it gets handled.

There is a statement of Albert Camus' that for all who believe in their machines and in their righteousness and how they behave, silence is the beginning of death. And in the case of this particular administration, silence is very literally death.

There were people who wanted to enter poems anonymously at Poets Against the War. And we said absolutely not. This is a place where we all stand together.  It means we all wear name tags.  We are all identifiable people. When they come for us we want them to know who we are and what we stand for.
Some of it is very unreal. But at rock bottom it is really very simple.  I stand in very much a kind of extreme position because I am Buddhist and a pacifist. There is a broad spectrum of people who believe this president's policies are insane, and who don't share my pacifist positions. Nevertheless, it begins with a personal commitment. The life of a person who doesn't have a personal commitment to certain morals and ethics–that really isn't a life worth living.

When I was a teacher at the McNeil Island Correctional Center, I had a friend named Alex. Alex was an enormous African-American man who spent about twenty years in the weight room—enormous chest. Enormous biceps. One of the sweetest guys you'd ever want to meet. He never really wrote poetry, but he read voraciously. He was my poetry enforcer. He used to tell people when they started to read their "pity poor me" poem, "Sam doesn't want me to hear any 'pity poor me' poems. The only poem we want in here is the poem you write tonight when tomorrow is your day."

I think more poets should take that to heart. It's easy to speak out when one has a stage. It's difficult to speak out because one has a certain clarity in one's heart.

How do we move away from social lies? What can bring people back to the truth?


I think the first thing we have to do is reclaim our constitution, and reclaim our democracy. And the first step toward that is taking the money out of politics. As long as American politics are governed by the rich, the government will be a government of the rich for the rich. That's intolerable.

The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Last week this administration wanted to make adjustments in the Head Start program that would basically cut the program. That's one of the most valuable programs that this government supports and the cheapest. And if we don't take care of the people who are not doing a good job of taking care of themselves, there will be no one to take care of us when that time comes.

Where would you like to be three months from now [asked at the start of the war –ed.]?


I would like to be back to my solitary life. If the war's over, I will be busy mourning the deaths on both sides. Because it is not better to die if you're an American than to die because you are an Iraqi. Americans will die because they have signed on to defend their country. Iraqis who died will be mostly civilians, and mostly innocent, and mostly nonmilitary in my estimation. Because the military is spread among the civilian population throughout the country. There's no way you can drop bombs only on military people and the civilian casualties are going to be astronomical.

War is the problem, not the solution. And to make a solution possible, it begins with a personal commitment to nonviolence. Without that commitment to nonviolence, we vote again and again and again for the annihilation of innocent people. It's as simple as that.  


Discussion Questions: Starting Poets Against the War

  1. In your opinion, how is poetry a political act?
  2. Hamill indicates that poetry may be easy to write when we are confused by an issue. However, once we have clarity, it is more difficult. How does this apply to your own writing?
  3. Hamill in his interview talks of social lies. How would you define social lies?  
  4. Albert Camus speaks of “silence as the beginning of death.” How does this reflect how many people choose to relate to current history. 
  5. How would you define compassion? Hamill implies that he “will not let these people make compassion a bad idea.” What does this mean to you as it relates to the administration, war and taking care of the poor in this country?