Wednesday, February 05, 2003

At the late great "brendancalling" blog, I included a link to Poets Against the War, an ad hoc group that got together in response to Laura Bush's call for poets to participate in a White House Symposium called "poets and the American Voice."
Really the whole thing is pretty funny, if you think about it. The title of the Symposium was to be ""Poetry and the American Voice", and was to focus on work by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. This online beat article in the Nation is pretty funny. Not only have the writers in question bought ad space in the New York Times (and you can bet I gave 'em $25.00 toward that), they are publishing a book of their work. And great god almighty, I love W.S. Merwin.
This whole story reminds me of the time Eartha Kitt was blacklisted in the US, because her comments about the Viet Nam war at a White House dinner made Ladybird Johnson cry