01/15/08
Poems Against War
says artists must raise their voices to inspire change. In U.S. literary magazines today, few are
published who dare to speak about war and other pressing social issues facing
people in the 21st century.
In this way these publications create a fiction that people can live
their lives outside of cultural and social changes, though in fact most cannot
escape. Such silence endorses the
status quo.
In February 2003, U.S. First Lady Laura Bush
invited a number of writers to a White House conference on the topic of Emily
Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes.
Neither Hughes nor Whitman would have come to that symposium on the eve
of a war and remained silent. When it
became rumored that invited West Coast poet Sam Hamill might mention his
opposition to the then-brewing 2003 Iraq invasion, Mrs. Bush cancelled the
symposium. The U.S. went to war with
Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Soon enough Hamill gave birth to a ‘Poets Against the War’
movement. He created a website allowing
over 11,000 poets in a matter of months to contribute their poems from the U.S.
and around the world. This movement
exposed a swell of U.S. sentiment against the war. Poems Against War: A Journal of Poetry and Action put out
its first issue in May 2003. Poems
Against War Volume 6: Music & Heroes is available today from Wasteland
Press. The seventh issue will be out in
Fall 2008. The entire Poems Against
War series is archived at the University of Wisconsin, Madison library,
special collections department.
This
journal and Web site take its cue from Hamill and Langston Hughes and Walt
Whitman. The Web site offers a survey
of 12 poems culled from the first seven issues of Poems Against War.