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Jewish World Review Feb. 13, 2003 / 11 Adar I, 5763
James Lileks
We live in an age where the poet has been cast out from the halls of power --- sob, sob
No more! We live in an age where the poet has been cast out from the halls of power. Laura Bush canceled a White House
poetry event upon learning that some invited guests planned to use the podium to denounce the administration. The disinvited
poets have struck back with their most fearsome weapon - a website of antiwar poetry.
Visit www.poetsagainstthewar.org and you'll find poetry by the cubic ton. Five thousand poems; one or two ideas. It's
poetry in the modern sense - namely, arbitrary line breaks, apocalyptic shrieking, hysterical metaphors, and unmediated
shouts from the sweaty id. If poets are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it's time for term limits.
There's a charming poem about Mother Earth:
"She is gasping for air. She is dying. / She hears the screams, the pain, the sickness, the longing. / She oozes. Black blood.
Purple saliva. / She is covered all over with infectious yellow sores."
Put on your waterproof boots if you're going for a walk, in other words. Then there's this fevered rant:
" . . .the one term worm festering vermin, our words alone can't make you human, our words can only scream for mercy for
the unforgiven and the predetermined. the war on poetry has been declared."
First they came for the poets, and I not only said nothing, I gave them directions to Rod McKuen's house. I can't stand that
guy's work.
Wrote another poet: "Those who think war is a video game and clutch body bags full of quarters don't mind a killing / Young
boys hugged themselves during dim matinees and saw cowboys shoot, ride off on horses, blinked out tryin' to walk 'n' talk
like John Wayne "
Did you know that our current generation of soldiers chose their path because they grew up to Saturday matinee westerns?
True! As for the "Video Game" metaphor, it's been around since the Gulf War, and it's always used by people who don't
play videogames.
Here's a typical example of how the Commander-in-Chief feels about the troops: "Though I fight for the unborn fetus /Their
mothers don't mean a thing / I'll send those boys to fight a war / If they die, bada bada bing!"
Yes, that's Bush's reaction to casualties: bada bing. The poet's belief is shared by most of the website's contributors: the
devout conviction that Bush is not just wrong, but evil. He's a hellspawned imp bent on spreading death to fatten his wallet;
he winks at suffering and exults in destruction. Don't you see his horns and hooves? DON'T YOU?
Let's imagine how these people might have reacted if they'd been invited to the Clinton White House. One could have
attacked Clinton's cozy ties with Tyson Chicken:
Another might have performed that hipster-stream of consciousness thing that damns by piling up unsupported paranoid
nonsense:
"Who killed ron brown, black man down / democracy's impostor / who killed vince foster / warplanes over bosnia raining
death from above on people because they don't like baywatch / haiti bleeds while you raise the tax / does the chinaman tell
you what song to blow on your sax? No Kyoto treaty, whales like Keiko / will die like the innocent children of Waco"
But we didn't hear much noise from the poets in the 90s. Few poets rose up to protest the war in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia,
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan, or any of the other myriad places America saw fit to plant its boots. You'd almost think these
sophomoric bleats and nihilistic screeds have been prompted not by American action, but action initiated by a particular
American - gwb, as ee cummings might have called him.
If the Poets Against the War project proved anything, it's that poetry matters little now. A visit to their website proves it. To
paraphrase the words Shelley put in Ozymandias' mouth: look upon their works, and despair.
02/10/03: Found: League for International Justice and Peace talking points
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