Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Early in 2003, Sam Hamill, poet and editor of Copper Canyon Press, was one of a number of writers invited by the President's wife Laura Bush to a symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice.” Mrs Bush intended the gathering to discuss and celebrate the “American voices” of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson. Hamill wasn't alone in the disgust he felt at the timing of this event so soon after the President's announced policy of “Shock and Awe” against Iraq. He quickly composed a letter to “Friends and Fellow Poets” in which he asked writers to register their opposition to the war by contributing a poem to his website. In the space of not more than a month, he had received 13,000 poems. From his huge electronic manuscript, Hamill quarried the contents of a condensed anthology, Poets Against the War, published later that year. As it happened, Hamill wasn't the only one to enlist poetry for this purpose; the same year saw the publication of Todd Swift's 100 Poets Against the War of which its publisher, Salt, claims that it “holds the record for the fastest poetry anthology ever assembled and disseminated; first planned on January 20, 2003 and published in this form on March 3, 2003.”These two projects alone tell us a lot about the level of animus directed against Bush and his bellicose supporters, but they also raise some interesting questions about the means adopted ... log in or subscribe to read full text