(Click on the logo to return to the main blog.)

Verses on the Other Side: I'm a Poet for the War
02/12/2003

And the battle for the soul of poetry begins.

Charles L. Weatherford has taken up the gauntlet and begun Poets for the War. Of course, the drones over at Poets Against the War will point to their being the "real poets" — ironically, the establishment. So fight the power and send the bloviators a message by reading and/or submitting your voice of truth.

Meanwhile, James Bowman deconstructs some of the against-war crowd:

What planet are these people living on? So far from exhibiting any precision of language, America's antiwar poets appear not to have the slightest interest in precise characterizations of the political and military alternatives actually under discussion in Washington, New York, and Baghdad. They have simply inherited the rhetoric of protest from the Vietnam era — many of them were engaged in protesting then too — and trotted it out again for application to a situation very nearly as different from the Vietnam War as it could be. The result is rhetorical overkill and considerable collateral damage to the language of political debate, which is in the process of being degraded to the point where it will eventually be useless for anything but the expression of outrage. Such nincompoopery as the equation of Bush with Saddam will simply mean that reasonable and moderate people capable of seeing more than one side to a question simply won't bother to read poetry at all — any more than they do now. Maybe that's what the poets really want. It means that "poetry" remains their private domain.

Henry Gould, the Rhode Island poet who is going through an identity crisis of sorts, also makes reference to the lingering poetic cliché of Vietnam:

Yes, as the Platypus of Doom, I find myself increasingly alienated from the poets who circulate in blogworld, so secure in their antiwar sentiments, so certain that they have seen through the conspiracy of Tex & Rummy et al. I want to agree with them, I want to think we are fighting the Vietnam War all over again against the American War Machine...

but then I look at all the facts I can gather & it seems to me a legitimate case can be made that the current Iraqi dictatorship does not deserve to have these mass-killer weapons, and if they are not willing to give them up, they should be removed by force. The arguments from fear are very powerful ("the Middle East is a tinderbox. . .
they will come & take revenge on us. . ." etc), but we should be moved by reason & not by fear. If Islamic extremists decided to massacre thousands of Americans because they were angry that we were taking away Saddam's WMDs - well, are we going to let them dictate the agenda? Because that is what it would amount to if we gave in to them.

Gould is still struggling to reconcile reality with the fantasy world for which he still has an affinity, as indicated by this statement: "(if the Prez were Jimmy Carter we would be defanging al Qaeda by making peace between Israel & Palestinians)." Hey, change takes time.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:55 PM EST