A Plague of Poets

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Bawer, Bruce

POETS AGAINST THE WAR is AN ESSENTIAL DOCUMENT in the history of one of the most cynical and corrupt conflicts of our time.1 I am referring, naturally, to the Poetry Wars-that ruthless struggle for grants, awards, teaching jobs, book contracts, reading engagements, and, most of all, attention that rages incessantly on creative-writing-program battlefields from Honolulu to Halifax. The book was the brainchild ofand has given the career boost of a lifetime to-Sam Hamill, a previously rather obscure poet who, after being invited by the First Lady to a White House symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" scheduled for February 12, 2003, recognized the invitation as a spectacular opportunity to improve his strategic position on the poetry scene. Not that he puts it quite this way himself: In his introduction, he says that after hearing from Mrs. Bush, he "asked a few fellow poet-friends to send me poems speaking 'for the conscience of our country'" against the planned invasion of Iraq. Eleven thousand friends responded (and Mrs. Bush cancelled the event). The poems went up on Hamill's website, www.poetsagainstthewar.org; some 175 of them are included in this book, which is intended "to represent our collective voice." Never before, brags Hamill, "have so many poets spoken in a single chorus." But should a poet want to be part of a "chorus"? The answer here is clearly in the affirmative: Peter Levitt, introducing his poem, underscores his solidarity with "my poetry brothers and sisters"; Stanley Kunitz addresses President Bush on behalf of "the poets"; and Julia Alvarez tells Mrs. Bush that "we [poets] bring you tidings of great joy- / not only peace but peace on earth"-thus equating herself and her "fellow poetfriends" (to coin a phrase) with the heavenly host.

Kunitz and Alvarez aren't the only familiar names in Hamill's stable; among the other notables on hand are Marvin Bell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Rita Dove, Marilyn Hacker, Galway Kinnell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Mark Doty. But Hamill plainly wants his anthology to have a democratic flavor, so there are plenty of folks here you never heard of-including several children, whose contributions are scarcely worse than those by many of the adults. Here's a quick test. Read this poem: "Wet bodies of those who have fallen / Afghanistan blown to pieces! / Right on target-the men, the women, / the children, crying, mommy, mommy!" Now read this one: "I'm sorry that your mom was killed / When a missile struck your home / You were only three, and innocent / Your mother too was innocent." One of these works is by an eleven-year-old; the other is by a woman of thirty-five. Guess which is which. And while you're at it, ask yourself this: What does it mean to profess the inestimable value of the poet's role in society ("there are things learned from poetry," Hamill insists, "that can be learned no other way") and then to suggest that even an eleven-year-old can fill that role?

Not only this book's table of contents but its poems, too, are populated by children. Indeed, many of Hamill's contributors seem convinced they've done their job as antiwar poets just by typing the word "children." In a "statement of conscience," Canadian poet laureate George Bowering points out that "killing children is wrong." Connie Wanek writes: 'You say don't worry about the children of Baghdad; they're not like our children. They / won't make a fuss." (Just curious: exactly who said this?) Needless to say, there's nothing here about the discovery of children's corpses in Saddam's mass graves or the liberation of children from Saddam's prisons. But then, if the American children in these poems are real children-usually the children of the poets themselves-the Iraqi children are merely tropes whose purpose is to alert us to the presence of that exquisite entity, The Poet's Conscience. And make no mistake, it's that Conscience, and not Iraq or its people, that's at the center of most of these poems. Tess Gallagher entitles her contribution "I Have Never Wanted to March"; Len Edgerly, in his poem, tells a friend, "I'm against the war, but not ready to wear a button," then changes his mind. This book is a riot of first-person singular pronouns; inconsequential autobiographical anecdotes abound (Hamill writes in his introduction of the poet's "obligation to assay the human condition from an intensely personal, often subjective perspective"). What few images there are of life in Saddam's Iraq, meanwhile, are idyllic and rich in atmosphere that feels derivative of National Geographic photos: "She rises in the glow of a red sun / to make strong coffee. . . . She sits / drinking slowly, beneath her lime tree" (Patricia Monogham, "The Woman of Bagdad").

Yes, there are a few poems here (by Alfred Corn and C. K. Williams, to name two) that not only aren't bad but even strike notes of decency, maturity, and humility. Yet most are uniform not only in their puerility of perspective but in their stale language and ideas (not to mention the distance they keep from any hint of meter or rhyme). One after another of Hamill's poets alludes piously to our "blue planet," scoffs at the term "collateral damage," and witlessly disparages George W. Bush (whom Geoff Brock dubs "our unelected king" and Willis Barnstone calls "our mindless caesar" and "subnormal emperor"). The idea that America is in any way preferable to Saddam's Iraq is repeatedly ridiculed: Ruth Stone refers to "the myth of democracy"; Marilyn Nelson asks, "Who are the Good Guys now? Who are the bad?"; for Matthew Shenoda, America is "this place that has spit on everything I know to live"; William Irwin Thompson slams not only Bush but also FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln ("our first Imperial / Bismark [sic]"); and, last but not least, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, a "Pakistani-American scholar, professor, poet, memoirist, classical singer, actor, writer, mother of two" and author of Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel and The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, chimes in with a poem that begins: "Osama / Sam A / Uncle Sam."