The question of whether anti-war poetry is any use is really the question of public poetry at all. In fact so engrained is the idea of the lyric, so necessary even to the simple business of sitting down to write, that it isn't easy to grasp (though you may know it as a book-datum) how poetry has started, in every place & time, as only public poetry. But now it just seems rude, or deranged: like someone who stands on a streetcorner & yells at the passing crowd. We think rather: press conference, cameras & microphones. Or at least a representative of the media (to make sure the dumb questions get asked). Michael Moore at the Oscars: it wasn't that people didn't agree with his views, they were embarassed by the way he said them. (How much more embarassing, if they had been in verse!) --I think of Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, as not only a key moment in 20c art (i wrote a term paper on it in college) but also a touchstone for art as public speech. By using his virtuosity to paint a sonic picture of the Vietnam War at the largest corroborree yet of the nascent counterculture, he was at once affirming the power of the people (even if defined by somewhat arbitrary criteria such as hair-length) & the right of Rock as their chosen artform to address that power in a meaningful way. (I can't think of Woodstock without that other fateful & symmetrical juxtaposition: the Moon Landing--.)

"Bedlam is the lodestone of every man who thinks and shakes mountains with a book." --Edward Dahlberg

Things have changed radically in the last few decades in America; changes which can only be understood through the introduction of new concepts. For instance, the Vietnam War was experienced (by noncombatants) through photos in Life magazine, & secondarily through television & newspapers. (What differed then was how you responded to the same images.) By the time of the first Gulf War, though CNN appeared to have subsumed that role, the images of war were already being filtered through a variety of subcultural exegetes, whether right-wing talk radio or left-wing small press; & quite divergent views of reality, each kept in purdah-ish seclusion from any alternative, had taken hold. In sum, what you believed depended on whom you listened to. (I call this infaith.) This is still more true with the internet. I miself almost completely disregard television, for instance; & along with a million other Westerners, find myself looking at things like the Arab News website, when i want to know what's really going on over there. (But what does this do to democracy --as if we had it!--when consensus reality dissolves?)

All this is preliminary to a consideration of my own particular involvement, viz. (as "graywyvern"): "100 Poets Against the War". I deliberately wrote as plainly as possible, because i knew very well that those who are progressive in politics are by no means guaranteed to be likewise in literary tastes. As it turned out, the book was downloaded some 48,000 times (though scant numbers of the hardcopy edition have sold); the war happened anyway.

But what i didn't expect (in hindsight i should have--) was that this phenomenon, along with Sam Hamill's collection (which garnered most of the offline press), should become the object of bilious vituperation from certain reviewers & even a smattering of poets: as if the real crime were not war but to object to war. Poetry from being a Stealth subculture (Hollywood could say what it liked about Poetry, as in "Dead Poets Society", & no one knew the difference) had entered the realm of public discourse; this having been dared, some people immediately tried to shout it down.

I saw this at first hand on the NeoFormalist poetry board at Ablemuse. Poets whose opinions i respected on matters of scansion, suddenly uncloseted themselves as moral Neanderthals on a subject outside their area of expertise: & it was really brought home to me how, if only you pick your conduits of "infaith" with enough prejudice, it is entirely possible for an intelligent person to be persuaded that our president is a brave leader & a paragon of statesmanship.

Quel horreur! And i think i was most disturbed when a leading NeoFormalist & scholar of some note, Dr Frederick Turner (whom i had met & exchanged friendly views with, once upon a time), attacked the anti-war poets in a dreadfully spluttering "Reply to the Five Thousand" (sic--it soon swelled to 13,000), in the March edition of Expansive Poetry & Music Online.

I could only do one thing: reply with a poem of my own (which you can find on Hamill's page under my real name, or at Ablemuse--where NOT ONE PERSON dared comment on it--here).

But what was my dismay when, not long after, he replied with a further poem on that site: "Basic Training Graduation Day, Fort Leonard Wood, 7/11/02 (on my son's graduation from Army Basic Training)". I had to admit, we were just not in it for the same stakes...

And in large part the poetic dialogue--had reverted to an unpublic mode.

I lost all taste for our wager
On how this war would go,
Reading his poem that day
Of his son, the fledgling soldier.