Showing posts with label Sam Hamill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Hamill. Show all posts

Saturday, February 15, 2003

What does Peter Coyote have in common with Marvin Bell? The same thing that Clayton Eshleman has in common with Anselm Berrigan, Bill Berkson with Maxine Kumin, Ursala LeGuin with Julia Vinograd, and Stanley Kunitz with August Highland. All have participated in Sam Hamill’s still-growing poets protest against the war.

As hokey as the official chapbook of Poets Against the War might be, the website’s database of more than 5,000 poets is a remarkable collection of the diversity of American writing, an amazing statement in opposition to a war in which the shooting has not yet begun. While The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball might not recognize these names, here (based on the most perfunctory scroll through the website’s index) are a few that might be familiar to you:


Not all of these links lead to poems – several are statements of conscience. And I’m sure that as my eyes literally glazed over the table of contents, I missed a lot of other obvious “name brand” poets. The list above represents less than four percent of what can be found at the website and I heartily recommend scrolling through & reading widely. One way to start is to read everything from your neck of the woods. Collectively, it has that mind-numbing, awe-inspiring overwhelming quality I will always associate with the AIDS Quilt.

Given the balkanization of American letters & Sam Hamill’s own less-than-innocent role in same – the site’s chapbook itself underscores the problem perfectly – I think it takes an enormous amount of goodwill & sense of urgency to send a poem or statement to this project. That so many American (& a few Canadian) poets have done so is a testament to the lateness of the hour & the importance of the idea. If/when this war begins, these writers are on record that George W’s assault on the people of Iraq is not being conducted in our name.