caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Causa Belli They read good books, and quote, but never learn I do, occasionally, ponder more serious matters than what's on tv. Random musings on such: I was listening last night to Mitch Albom and the callers to his radio show debating whether protesting the war is patriotic. Is it our duty and our right to question the nation's leaders? Or are those damn peaceniks actually traitors � as one caller so succinctly put it, "I didn't see no American flags out there." Taking that logic to its extreme end, Albom questioned him whether it would be ok, then, for marchers in white sheets to take over the Mall as long as they waved the flag while they spouted their vitriol. "Uh, I couldn't go that far," the caller mumbled. It started my brain down a path it's been trying to avoid, that of current political rhetoric. And lately various blogs and journals and news and conversations at work have set me thinking about war poetry, and anti-war poetry. How ironic that a poetry forum at the White House was cancelled for fear some of the invited poets would dare to promote peace. Our First Lady � a librarian by training, I'm ashamed to say � temporized that it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum. One of the poets due to be celebrated at the canceled event was Walt Whitman, who I seem to recall was just a tad political and controversial himself in his day. But no big deal, just another casualty of war, right? Because, you know, writers � poets in particular � almost never have opinions on current events, and certainly wouldn't want any opinions they might have expressed in public. That's why a google on "anti-war poetry" only turns up a meager 17,000 hits. (That noise? It's just my overly sarcastic meter alert going off. Pay no attention.) War poetry of any political leaning does not of course necessarily equal quality literature. Anyone can spout sentiment and rhetoric. There's a lot of terrible anti-war poetry around. But how pathetic that, in response to Poets against the War, this was the best the Wall Street Journal could do when they called for "pro-American, pro-freedom, anti-Saddam, anti-idiotarian poems." War is sometimes necessary. Bad poetry is never called for.
WWI seems to have produced the most readable, most remembered, war poems. Fortunately, for every self-conscious and sentimental paean to the glorious fallen, there the truth of mud and death. For "Flanders Field," we still have "Dulce et decorum est." One hopes that schoolchildren occasionally still have to read both. Women's WWI poetry runs the gamut from traditional and sentimental, bravely and gladly sending off sons and sweethearts to be cannon fodder, to bleak and experimental (I'm still looking for a link to the one I'm thinking of).
I'm not na�ve enough to think new poetry, or peace demonstrations, will stop this juggernaut. Or that anti-war poets aren't sometimes as guilty of overblown rhetoric as Bush and Blair are. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't try, or that poetry doesn't have a place in this.
There is 'great rejoicing at the nation's capital'. So says the morning's paper. 4:21 p.m. - February 18, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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