When It Comes to Poets, Politicos Blow It
Feb. 18, 2003 — -- Why, when it comes to poets, do politicians so often blow it?
Case in point:
Laura Bush had hoped to hold a symposium of poets at the White House this past Wednesday to honor Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes.
But when she learned that some of them intended to use the occasion to voice their opposition to a war in Iraq, she canceled the event — giving the anti-war poets a far better platform and more publicity than they ever could have hoped for.
Instead of having a small gathering at the White House on Wednesday, poets by the hundreds held dozens of readings at universities, bookshops and cafes from coast to coast, kicking off a long-term campaign that was to include a major performance Monday at New York City's Lincoln Center.
"[The first lady] misunderstood what probably would have happened and she got a little panicky," said Galway Kinnell, who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and is a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
"She may have thought the poets would have come in like Weathermen [the radical group that was active in the 1960s]," he said. "That probably wasn't going to happen."
Some might say she misunderstood from the very start, if she thought that poets could be expected to play the role that authorities wanted them to play, but it's a mistake that politicians often make.
New Jersey officials found themselves embarrassed last fall when their poet laureate, Amiri Baraka, read a poem entitled "Somebody Blew Up America" that seemed to say he thought Israel or Jews were behind the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Even more disturbing to the state officials was the discovery that they did not have the authority to fire Baraka.
Later in the year, Harvard University rescinded an invitation to the poet Tom Paulin to give a lecture on literature when it was revealed that he had made statements to an Egyptian newspaper that compared Jewish settlers in the West Back to Nazis and said they should be shot.
