Poetry in a time of war

The first shots of this newest war against Iraq were televised on Wednesday, March 19th, when bombs were dropped and Tomahawk missiles fired on what the president called "targets of military opportunity" in Baghdad, but a significant though less audible volley was fired against poets by Laura Bush two months earlier. In late January the First Lady invited essayist, prize-winning poet, and founder of Copper Canyon Press Sam Hamill to participate in a February 12th White House symposium called "Poetry and the American Voice." According to Wallace Baine of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Hamill was "outraged by the Bush administration's plans to attack Iraq [and]...knew he couldn't go quietly into Laura Bush's drawing room." Instead, he began gathering anti-war poems, which he intended to compile in an anthology and present to Mrs. Bush at the symposium. When the president's wife caught wind of this, she canceled the event and said through a spokeswoman that "it would be 'inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.'"
None of this should surprise us since G.B. Jr. is just one of several recent presidents who simplify, demonize, and polarize, and who divide the world into two parts-the Evil Empire vs. A New World Order, the Dark Days of Communism vs. A Thousand Points of Light, The Axis of Evil vs. the Leader of the Free World, the Bad Guys vs. the Good Guys-and who point out to anyone who opposes their political agenda, whether it's the Germans, the French, the Russians, the Canadians, the Mexicans, or thousands of American poets, that "if you're not with us, you're against us." And now even Laura Bush, a former librarian, argues for her own convenient little dichotomy-we can have literary events and we can have political forums, but it would be "inappropriate" if-God forbid-the two should merge, particularly in their White House. Any introduction of dissenting views, any suggestion of ambiguity or shades of gray, any blurring of the lines between moral good and political expediency would send our president, not to mention the public, into a spin from which he and they might never recover, and then who would run the war?
This is not to say that the president and his little gang of warmongers wouldn't have benefited from the poetry symposium. Clearly, they're aware of the effects of language and are capable of using or have used techniques often associated with poetry (but which in their hands bear more resemblance to cheerleading). In the weeks and days leading up to the start of the war, George W., Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell sang the same refrains: "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Gassed His Own People," and "War on Terrorism." They used repetition: "noncompliance," "severe consequences," "Liberate Iraq"; "noncompliance," "severe consequences," "Liberate Iraq." They used the catchy alliteration of "Butcher of Baghdad" and, when the war started, the terse little slogan "Shock and Awe." They hammered away with the same phrases, knowing that through sheer repetition, the American public and even the press would eventually be lulled into accepting and even repeating them, regardless of their truth, accuracy, or completeness.
And so when the president and the First Lady realized that they had invited to the White House people with more poetic skills and a different political outlook, it was time to place blame on the poets, accuse them of doing something out of the ordinary, and focus the public's attention on the inappropriateness of what those poets intended to do during a time when American Unity, not American Voices-particularly those expressing dissenting opinions-was most important. So they cancelled the event.
That little fiasco, while hardly noticed by the average American, set an ugly precedent and encouraged "patriots" to bash and gag anyone opposed to the war. When the Dixie Chicks' lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," people soon demanded that their songs be pulled from juke boxes, their hits dropped from radio playlists, and their CD's and other items be destroyed. Similarly, Michael Moore's "Shame on you, Mr. Bush" Oscar speech condemning U.S. aggression in Iraq and pointing out that the president sent "us to war for fictitious reasons" was audibly booed; as a result, he may be better remembered and condemned for what he said than for winning the Oscar for his anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine. Even here in Laredo, letters to the editor regularly and enthusiastically blame war protestors for providing "terrorists ...[with] an easy time in destroying what others have built," for forgetting "all those memorials to honor our dead soldiers," for being "motivated by...hatred of America." In all these cases the intent of people is to quiet dissent and to gag anyone who disagrees with the decisions made by our government.
Was there an outcry and furor over poet Sam Hamill's behavior? Did "patriotic" Americans demand that libraries pull books and journals containing his work from their shelves, that he not be allowed to read in public, or that people bring copies of his books to their local coffeehouse and have a nice little book-burning in support of our troops? Of course not, but only because the majority of Americans don't read poetry or because they believe-as Laura Bush apparently does-that poetry is and should be benign, harmless, pretty, and polite. It should focus on love and beauty, departure and sorrow, memory and remembrance, not on politics, morality, foreign policy, or war. It should reveal and revel in the personal, not the public; the intimate, not the indecent; the discretionary, not the imprudent. Herein lies not only the great misunderstanding about poetry, but also its strength and enduring value.
Writing against war-but not necessarily against soldiers-is nothing new. Aristophanes did it in Lysistrata almost 2,500 years ago as have modern and contemporary writers, such as Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front, Anatoly Kuznetsov in Babi Yar, Joseph Heller in Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried, and countless other writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
And today one need not search far to see how first the prospect and now the reality of this new war with Iraq has provoked and inspired poets and how sadly naive Mrs. Bush is about what literature is and what writers do. In this spring's Ruminator Review are the opening remarks made by Richard Broderick, editor of the Great River Review, on the evening of the Minnesota Poets against War with Iraq reading in St. Paul, MN. In part he said this:
To lead a nation into any war, but especially an unprovoked war of aggression, without first exhausting all other avenues of resolving conflicts, to murder thousands of innocent human beings, to turn our sons and daughters into killers in the name of ego, empire and resource exploitation-surely there is no greater sin any man or woman can commit. To borrow your words, Mr. President, "If this isn't evil, then we don't know what is."
On the back cover of the current issue of The American Poetry Review is Robert Bly's "The Approaching War," a poem that describes the sorrow and dread he feels about what is now upon us: "The weight of history begins / To bend us over once more. It won't be long before / We put our heads down on the chopping block again." And on www.poetsagainstthewar.org, the web site established by Sam Hamill, over 13,000 anti-war poems have been posted, some by such prominent poets as Galway Kinnell, Kim Addonizio, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, William Stafford, Hayden Carruth, and Robert Pinsky. Regardless of what Laura Bush thinks is appropriate, our best literature is often both personal and political.
But I suspect that it's not just taking a moral stance on world events that inspires poets in this time of war but that nearly everything about the war and the way it's reported runs counter to what poets believe and try to do when writing poetry.
Good poetry uses language that is active and accepting of responsibility, but spokespersons for the war often rely on passive language that defers or denies responsibility. On the first night of the war shortly after our military dropped bombs and fired Tomahawk missiles on Baghdad, President Bush appeared on television and explained what we would do "now that the conflict has come" instead of "now that we started this war."
Good poetry utilizes clear, close, personal images whereas what we see of the war is often sanitized or impersonalized by distance. We see from the safety of a cockpit several thousand feet in the air a "target" that suddenly explodes in a small puff of smoke far below or the blurred, ghostlike movement of troops in the night through green-gray night vision lenses. Even our view of the bombing of Baghdad has a surreal, movie-like quality to it, and while war inevitably involves the deaths of people, we see more bodies in an R-rated film than we've seen in the first few weeks of this war.
Good poetry uses sound and form to emphasize the meaning of a poem whereas sound bites and control of information repress and regulate the meaning of war.
Good poetry relies on honest, precise language whereas officials in the military and government soften the harsh reality of war through euphemisms and clichés. Rarely do they say anything about Iraqi soldiers being "killed"; instead we more often hear how our forces "take them out" or "destroy targets" or "eliminate" them.
Good poetry reveals truths, even those-or maybe especially those-that are difficult to accept or consider whereas the truth in a war is relative and both sides are fully aware of the need to propagandize, to try to shift world opinion to their side-Iraq by giving numbers of civilians killed by U.S. missiles or bombs and the U.S. by suggesting that the Iraqis fired on their own people in order to blame us for it.
Good poetry requires emotion and clarity of thought; wartime relies on sentiment and rarity of thought.
Good poetry strives to examine and expose the complexity of the world to show how people all share a common human experience. But in a time of war, everything is simplified: freedom and tyranny, patriot and protestor, ally and enemy, life and death.
April is National Poetry Month, an annual celebration established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. This month, while the racket of war has tried to drown out and silence our voices, I'm reassured that poets are a people's conscience, whether we choose to hear them or not.