July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Other Voices: Some Reflections on Poets Against the War

Poets Against the War, edited by Sam Hamill, Sally Anderson, et al, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003, $12.95

Fred Marchant is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Suffolk University in Boston and Chair of the Freedom to Write Committee of PEN New England. His latest book is House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems, from Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland.

It was the worst of times by and large, but it did bring with it an abundance of poetry written against this war they say is over but which we all know has not ended yet and will not be ending soon. Perhaps now is a good time to assess some of that poetry, and reflect on what it tells us about the American psyche and society now at the dawn of a new aspect of American empire.

Octavio Paz—the great Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate—once argued that what poetry offers to us is always the “other voice,” the voice that is denied, suppressed, banished, or otherwise absent from prevailing discourse and thought. This can be the other voice within the individual—the voice of things we would rather not think about because they make us frightened. The “other voice” is also inevitably one of the many voices in society that get somehow marginalized or repressed. The poem thus articulates uncomforting and unpalatable truths, especially the truths that unmask self-serving and brutalizing lies. Powers-that-be quite typically go out of their way to discredit such voices in society, and within the individual. Those in charge would not have listened to the other voices anyway, but their active contempt for such tells us that they recognize the other voice as a threat. It is the voice that wonders why, and who is responsible, and what are the real consequences. The poem then is the voice that is the polar opposite of the daily Pentagon Briefer.

Even if our present president couldn’t care less about what poets say about his war, his operatives recognized “danger” in gathering of some of the nation’s best poets at the White House during the days when the administration was preparing for pre-emptive war. The First Lady had wanted to sponsor a symposium celebrating “The American Voice,” specifically as it could be heard in the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. She had invited a couple of dozen poets, one of whom was Sam Hamill, director of Copper Canyon Press, a premier independent literary publishing house from the Seattle area. As Hamill tells the story in his introduction to Poets Against the War, he asked a few of his poet friends for some poems to bring with him and present. He wanted poems that would speak for “the conscience of our country.”

The White House quickly and quietly cancelled the symposium, but Hamill kept collecting poems, and something utterly remarkable began to happen. With the help of a website to receive them, it turned out that at least 11,000 Americans sent Hamill approximately 13,000 poems, many if not most of them newly composed and in protest against the imminent bombing and invasion of Iraq. The website (poetsagainstthewar.org) was open to everyone in the country. For three or four weeks, twenty-five editors were downloading hundreds of new poems every day. Then on February 12, the day when the symposium was scheduled, there were over 200 poetry readings explicitly against the war throughout the country. On March 5, Hamill presented to several congressional representatives an electronic document containing all the poems submitted to the website. It took a ream of paper just to print out all the names of the poets who had sent in poems.

The war happened anyway, and continues, tempting one to think that poetry really never stops a war machine from grinding on. It is perhaps naïve to think that poems and poets could stop a war, but it is even more naïve to think all that poetry (and the implied thought and feeling of its writers) was meaningless. In this book, Poets Against the War, we have a selection of poems from the website which will be forever part of the landscape of American conscience. It is not only an historical record of the opposition during the past winter, but also something that permanently records the “other voice” that was so alive and profoundly active at the dawn of this new and destructive phase of American history.

The book collects fewer than two hundred poems from the 13,000, but, as Hamill says, it is intended to represent “our collective voice.” Some of the poems were written long before the present war, but most of the anthology consists of work written during this past winter of discontent. There is a nicely democratic, egalitarian feel to the book as a whole. There is new work by well-known and highly accomplished poets such as Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Martín Espada, and Adrienne Rich, to name just a few. Their work rubs shoulders with poems by lesser-known poets from all across the country and some from abroad. Some are being published for the first time. Pamela Hale says in her biographical note, for example, that she is just “an ordinary person from an ordinary place.” It should also be said that not all the poems are equally accomplished works of art. But there is no doubt that each of the items Hamill selected is a genuine poem, artful and expressive. There are, for example, a few poems by young people in elementary school. Here is one short enough to quote in full. It is by Reba Crawford-Hayes, age 11, from Oakland, CA.

War

Wet bodies of those who have fallen
Afghanistan blown to pieces!
Right on target—the men, the women,
the children, crying mommy, mommy.

The virtues in this poem are many: the sense of a single image evoking an entire scene, the broken but urgent syntax of exclamation, the hauntingly true sound of “mommy” being repeated. But as I look longer into the poem I love most of all that little comma after “children.” It is a comma that tells me this young poet really wanted us to imagine the men and the women—the adults—as well as the children, all of them crying out “mommy” in that terrible moment when the bombs are right on target. It gave me a chill to read that comma and all that it implied about what this child in her empathic imagination had grasped and found a way to express.

There are many other poems in this anthology that will give one a chill, and not surprisingly, many of those poems imagine the fate of children under the “shock and awe” bombardments. Pamela Hale—the “ordinary person” I mentioned earlier—writes about an “Iraqi Child in a Forgotten Newsclip.” And in a reversal of parental authority, she sounds like a child when she apologizes to the Iraqi child for “letting” this war happen. Maxine Kumin also imagines children while she writes during a blizzard in “New Hampshire on February 7, 2003.” The schools are closed for snow, and the poet cannot keep from imagining the “blizzard” that had burst on the children of Viet Nam thirty years ago, and she cannot help but imagine the next round of collateral damage among Iraqi schoolchildren. In “The School Among the Ruins,” Adrienne Rich imagines Iraqi school rooms under fire, the quotidian chores of life that must go on, even during bombings. She closes the poem with children spending their nights in the classroom, the teachers “rolled close” around them.

The sense of our broad, systemic complicity in this war, the sense that this recent war was in some fundamental way related to the imperialism in our national history, and above all the sense that we somehow need desperately to imagine the victims of our national might, these related themes run through the anthology as a whole. As Pulitzer Prize winner C.K. Williams writes in his poem, there are “fearful burdens to be borne, complicity, contrition, grief.” If we take this collectin of poems as representative of our collective voice, then complicity, contrition, and grief are the components of our “other voice,” both individually and collectively. They are certainly indicative of just what is largely missing in the public discourse of our politicians and news analysts alike.

You can hear this other voice whispering throughout this book. W.S. Merwin, for instance, in his poem “Ogres” wakes in the placid night of his own home to the sound of rain falling through the leaves, the sound of his partner’s breathing next to him, what he calls

“this breathing peace.”
      . . . and then I
think of the frauds in office
at this instant devising
their massacres in my name
what part of me could they have
come from were they made of my
loathing itself and dredged from
the bitter depths of my shame

As with 11-year-old Reba Crawford-Hayes, so too with the award-wining, seventy-five-year-old Merwin. Here is an expressive use of punctuation—the lack of it. There is in Merwin’s run-on sentence a panicky realization that the near-cliché of “not in my name” has much more truth-carrying capacity than even he would like to admit. Are these war-planners human? If so, what is there in them, and in him, or in any of us, that is willing to contemplate and concoct the massacres?

Poems do not exactly provide the answers to such questions, but they make the questions real, more real, and most real: they get under our skin, and make us feel the questions in our bones. In so doing they restore us to a sense of reality, both in language and in our selves. So consistently do those who make war debase and distort language and discount suffering that the act of poetry and its evocation of the other voice becomes in effect the creation of a countervailing weight on the scales. Tess Gallagher in her “I Never Wanted to March” tells us that poetry “doesn’t pretend to know answers and speaks best/in questions, the way children do/who want to know everything, and don’t believe/only what they’re told.” In this sense Poets Against the War is invaluable, for it teaches us that the “other voice” in opposition to our recent war of empire might in some fundamental way be the voice of a child.

Some supplemental poems from Poets Against the War Selected by Fred Marchant

The War
The sand and crumbled rock
pocked with caves, scorched
craters, the boy with one eye
tending a goat, the old woman’s
leather face, age forty-two
the caption reads, the city
with walls the color of sunshine,
the bloody crowd screaming
curses at the naked body
twisting like a piece of meat
on a pole, the tiny newspaper
map, the place names carved
of hard consonants, the arc
of black arrows pointing
fingers at the whole idea.

—Tom Chandler (Poet laureate of Rhode Island)

Trying to Write a Poem Against the War
My daughter, who’s as beautiful as the day,
hates politics: Face it, Ma,
they don’t care what you think! All
passion, like Achilles,
she stalks off to her room,
to confide in her purple guitar and await
life’s embassies. She’s right,
of course: bombs will be hurled
at ordinary streets
and leaders look grave for the cameras,
and what good are more poems against war
the real subject of which
so often seems to be the poet’s superior
moral sensitivities? I could
be mailing myself to the moon
or marrying a palm tree,
and yet what can we do
but offer what we have?
and so I spend
this cold gray glittering morning
trying to write a poem against war
that perhaps may please my daughter
who hates politics
and does not care much for poetry, either.

—Katha Pollit (Poet, and columnist for The Nation)

stones and bones
here is a country where old men
gather in the capital and
speak their language filled with
stones
their syllables are chips of bone
they speak of lifting up a creed
while cold and still there under
their tongue is somebody else’s child
or mine
bones and stones
our ears bleed
red and white and blue

—Lucille Clifton

Untitled
Snow so fluffy and soft.
I like to run and jump into it.
It leads to peace and love.
Snow stops war
and fights
that lead to killing.
So snow come today.

—Alexandra Indra Sanyal
(8 years old, Cambridge, MA)

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