English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Of War and Poetry: How Poetry Matters Today

Ed. Edward Morrow. Cry Out: Poets Protest the War. George Brazilier, 2003. 120 pp.  $14.95.

Eds. Sam Hamill and Sally Anderson. Poets Against the War. Thunder’s Mouth, 2003. 260 pp. $12.95.

By Brian J. Norman, Rutgers University

Contemporary poetry is in danger. Contemporary poetry is always in danger. In recent years, especially in the wake of the boom in MFA programs and writers’ conferences, critics and detractors have condemned contemporary poetry’s increasing isolationism and insularity. From poeticrat Dana Gioia’s tirades against artsy poetry in the early 1990s to recent New York Times editorials and letters belittling Poet Laureate Louise Glück’s assertion of the preeminent importance of “voice,” contemporary poetry has been once again censured, criticized, and declared either dead or irrelevant.

But the unprecedented hubris of President George W. Bush’s preemptive war strategy and his pernicious quashing of domestic dissent have provided another story. In this story, contemporary poetry is a prime site of deliberate, reasoned, and creative resistance to unjustified war and monolithic statements of national unity. The story begins in the drawing room of First Lady Laura Bush or, rather, it doesn’t begin there. After inviting poets to the White House to celebrate “Poetry and the American Voice” in January 2003, Mrs. Bush dis-invited the poets when she got wind they might have the audacity to bring anti-war sentiments into her parlor, and into the nice realm of poetry. The Bush Administration has inspired many poems by both known and unknown writers. The Laura Bush poetry reading debacle in particular birthed two important anthologies in which poets gather to contemplate—and demand—the importance of poetry in times of war.  

Cry Out: Poets Protest the War both documents and enacts an angry, beautiful, and informed response to war and a political culture of anti-dissent. The collection is a scantly edited transcript of a reading in Manchester, Vermont, at which long-time poet-peace activists (eleven well-known and regional poets, including Donald Hall, Jamaica Kincaid, Galway Kinnell, and Grace Paley) not only protested the war, but claimed dissent as an important American tradition—both political and literary. A tradition of protest, moreover, in which poetry has played—and can continue to play—a central role. Because it records an actual poetry reading, Cry Out includes prefatory remarks and follows the chronology of the reading. The anthology carries the urgency of the actual moment and performs the public role that poetry can play. Though some also read their own poetry, the majority read only works of famous writers since passed, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes, those originally slated for honor at the White House reading. The resulting pairing of tradition and protest both gives new fervor to familiar poems and lends weight to a contemporary poetry scene often deemed self-referential and inconsequential. Kincaid introduces Whitman’s poem “Proud Music of the Storm” with a sardonic thank you to Mrs. Bush for being “thin skinned” enough to remind Kincaid to decline future invitations from those in power to discuss great works of literature. In her reclaiming of Whitman, Kincaid lends new meaning to his verse: “You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry…/Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me?” (33). Whitman’s apostrophic address to a distant war not only calls out to his own countrymen during the Civil War, but to the Poet and the President of the present. If it is the dreadful grip of combat that seizes Whitman’s speaker, it is poetry’s beautiful response to war that seizes Kincaid who serves solely to channel Whitman into the present.  

Other poets in the collection call on their personal histories as peace activists to provide anti-war poetry with a literary history. Paley adds her Vietnam-era poem to verse by Whitman and Hughes. Amidst a heightened tenor of despair in a country at war, Paley finds the political protests of early 2003 “encouraging” and “hope-making.” The reading in Manchester becomes a reprise for Paley’s 1971 poem about Vietnam, also written from a green hill in Vermont. In “Connections: Vermont Vietnam,” Paley opens, “The generals came to the president/We are the laughing stock of the world/What world? he said.” (95). As Paley repeats the phrase “What world?” throughout the short poem, the echo not only enacts the unilateral determination of those in power who refuse doubt or deliberation, the repetition also enacts the harrowing reoccurrence of history—and the redemptive reoccurrence of poetic resistance. While some decry the too-transcendent nature of lyric, Paley relies on poetry’s penchant for ahistoricism to keep us one foot out of the present in order that we can participate fully in it. 

Into this tradition of poetic resistance, newly active poets pen verse specifically responding to the wars in the Middle East, and addressing President and Mrs. Bush directly. Jay Parini introduces his new anti-war poetry with a nod to Whitman and a poetic dictate: “Poets are always the conscience of the people; poetry is the conscience of the people. Not individual poets, they don’t matter. Poetry matters, the conscience of language which has been distilled and made pure by thought and care and love” (108). Parini’s subsequent poems, “In Time of War” and “After the Terror,” become more than armchair political bombast because they meditate on poetry’s place not only in times of war, but in public debate generally. Parini opens, “We all move easily within our borders;/you could almost not believe a war/was really going on” (109). The line refuses the border between poetry and the public sphere, and calls for poets to become not only accountable to each other, but to those who live beyond the borders of contemporary poetry. And with this call to cross from the land of poetry to the land of politics, the writers see anew the dire importance of the role of poetry in people’s lives. Donald Hall, for instance, read not only from Whitman, but from his late wife’s work, Jane Kenyon, who died too early of cancer in 1995 at age 48. Hall presents poetry as a private, intimate space connecting people, a connection made all the more dear and necessary at a reading or in a collection demanding dissent and deliberation in times of war.

Sam Hamill, one of the original White House invitees and editor of Copper Canyon Press, launched a website in early February 2003 soliciting anti-war poetry in direct response to Mrs. Bush’s dis-invitation. The response was overwhelming (Hamill reports 11,000 responses by March 2003) and he collected some of the submissions in Poets Against the War. Unlike the transcribed reading in Vermont, the anthology is a rather hulking compendium of poems and “Statements of Conscience” arranged alphabetically, with each author identified by age, hometown, or poetic accomplishments (many of the poets represented are recognizable names). The endless litany of anti-war poems aims to collect disparate and diverse voices into one unified rejection of war, so that Mrs. Bush would fail to “quell the rising tide of voices joining Poets Against the War” (xviii). 

The inaugural poem is by Virginia Adair, a blind poet first published in her eighties. Adair begins her terse five-line poem, “Fear arrived at my door/with the evening paper” (1). Adair’s announcement sets in motion the rest of the collection as a response to such domestic invasion. Rather than a coherent ethos of a poetry-based anti-war response as in Cry Out, Poets Against the War compiles a numerically significant group of poets as political agents. Historically, the anthology form has proven tremendously pivotal in starting a movement or announcing its presence, such as the women’s liberation poetry collection No More Masks (1971). But poet-peace activists are not new, as Cry Out argues and demonstrates. Rather than documenting a new anti-war movement, Poets Against the War documents a new anti-war moment.  

And the collection announces a new podium for poetry as harbinger of peace. Included is a short poem by Alexandra Indira Sanyal, eight years old, near a poem by Adrienne Rich and a Statement of Conscience by W. D. Snodgrass. Sanyal writes, “Snow so fluffy and soft./I like to run and jump in it./It leads to peace and love./Snow stops war/and fights/that lead to killing./So snow come today” (204). Sanyal’s incantation of peace via an apostrophe to snow may not have directly resulted in a change in the Bush Administration’s war proceedings, but she found a medium in which her seemingly childish dreams of unfettered commune with nature enter a public platform called contemporary poetry. If Sanyal’s lines are breathtakingly short, the sizeable length of the table of contents gives breath to those who would join the world of contemporary poetry as the best available means of making the snow come. 

Though many have chided Poets Against the War for masquerading irresponsible political rantings as poetry (sometimes the Statements of Conscience are five times longer than the poems), these two collections address the long and loud history of declaring contemporary poetry’s irrelevance. Their response: it may take war to make poetry matter, but it takes poetry to make peace matter.

Works Cited

Chaplin, Stephen. Letter. “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a…” New York Times. 7 Nov. 2003: A26.

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. 1991. St. Paul, Minn., Graywolf Press, 2002.

Howe, Florence and Ellen Bass, eds. No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973.

Johnston, Andrew. “Poet Laureate: Louise Glück and the Public Face of a Private Artist.” Editorial. New York Times 4 Nov. 2003, late edition: A24.