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RSVP: Invited to the White House, poet and publisher Sam Hamill sought antiwar verse to send instead. He got 3,000 responses, including contributions from Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 2, 2003
Somewhere the ghosts of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes are smiling wryly. Even Emily Dickinson's shade may be wearing a ladylike smirk.
The three poets were to be celebrated on Feb. 12 in the latest of a series of symposiums on American literature at the White House. First lady Laura Bush, a former librarian and champion of literacy causes, has hosted several of the events.
For this one, her office sent invitations to a number of American poets. Apparently the selection process was nonpartisan.
One of the invitees was Sam Hamill of Port Townsend, Wash. The founder of Copper Canyon Press and author of 40 books of poetry, Hamill had been reading a report on the bombing that would accompany war in Iraq when his invitation arrived.
His response: "When I picked up my mail and saw the letter marked 'The White House,' I felt no joy. Rather I was overcome by a kind of nausea as I read the card enclosed: Laura Bush requests the pleasure of your company at a reception and White House Symposium on 'Poetry and the American Voice.' . . .
Hamill didn't just decline the invitation. The lines above were part of an open letter he e-mailed to 50 friends and colleagues asking for antiwar poems or statements to be compiled and given to the White House at the symposium. "Speak up for the conscience of our country," he urged other poets.
He got definitive action on two fronts. By Wednesday he had received more than 1,500 responses to his request, so many he set up a Web site, www.poetsagainstthewar.org, to accommodate them.
The same day, the White House got wind of the protest plans. Mrs. Bush postponed the event indefinitely.
Her press secretary, Noelia Rodriguez, said, "While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum."
Walt Whitman, who volunteered in military hospitals during the Civil War and wrote poignantly of the futility of war, and Langston Hughes, one of the clarion voices of the early civil rights movement, might have found the controversy ironic.
In To a Certain Civilian, Whitman wrote:
Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?
. . . go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.
Emily Dickinson was not a political poet, but she did write about what can happen to those who swim against the mainstream:
Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much sense -- the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous -,
And handled with a chain -
Living poets have plenty to say as well.
Li-Young Lee, who will be one of the speakers at the Suncoast Writer's Conference in St. Petersburg this weekend, believes that poetry cannot be separated from politics.
"It's impossible for poetry not to be political," the 45-year-old writer said from his home in Chicago. "Every time I write a poem, it's a political act."
Does he think that soliciting antiwar poems was inappropriate? "The way I understand poetry, all poems are antiwar poems," he said. "I can be talking about potato chips or flowers, anything, but the underlying order of a poem, regardless of its subject, proposes universal harmony."
Born in Indonesia of Chinese parents, Lee is no stranger to political upheavals. When asked where he grew up, he replied, "In my father's heart. I don't feel at home anywhere."
His father worked as Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung's physician until he was forced to flee to Indonesia, only to be imprisoned there during a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment. The family left Indonesia just after Lee's birth. He spent his early years in exile in various Asian countries, moving to Seattle when he was 6.
"What's so strange," he said, "is that Laura Bush doesn't want these poets to use the forum for politics, but her negating them is itself a political act."
David Kirby, a poet and a professor at Florida State University since 1969, said, "I must have gotten 50 forwards of the e-mail. It spread like wildfire."
He hadn't responded to it yet himself Friday "because I was considering what would be the most effective response. I'm certainly proud of my fellow poets. . . . This may be a big loud gong."
The Bush White House, Kirby said, "doesn't realize the extent of opposition to this war. There's a kind of arrogance; they seem to think they can just let life go along and encourage arts festivals while racing into war."
And he called it appropriate that poets are on the front lines of the opposition. "The value of poetry is it can say what is true in a really quick, concise way."
By Friday, according to Hamill's Web site, almost 3,000 poets had submitted poems or statements. The plan is for all of them to be posted on the site by Tuesday.
Hamill has already posted several poems by nationally known poets. Adrienne Rich, a National Book Award winner and enormously influential poet, writes in The School Among the Ruins in the voice of a teacher trying to answer the questions of children trapped in their school by bombing:
One: I don't know where your mother is
Two: I don't know why they are trying to hurt us
Three: or the latitude and longitude of their hatred
Four: I don't know if we hate them as much
Galway Kinnell, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and one of the lions of contemporary American poetry, contributed this.
When Fergus woke crying at night
I would carry him from his crib
to the rocking chair and sit holding him
before the fire of thousand-year-old olive wood.
Sometimes, for reasons I never knew
and he has forgotten, even after his bottle the big
tears
would keep on rolling down his big cheeks
-- the left cheek always more brilliant than the
right -
and we would sit, some nights for hours, rocking
in the light eking itself out of the ancient wood,
and hold each other against the darkness,
his close behind and far away in the future,
mine I imagined all around.
One such time, fallen half-asleep myself,
I thought I heard a scream
-- a flier crying out in horror
as he dropped fire on he didn't know what or whom,
or else a child thus set aflame -
and sat up alert. The olive wood fire
had burned low. In my arms lay Fergus,
fast asleep, left cheek glowing, God.
-- Times book editor Margo Hammond contributed to this report.