posted on May 20, 2007 11:46:56 AM new
From a Washington D.C. newspaper, sent by a friend today:
Sharon Olds, Poet, declines White House Invitation
Subject: The power of poetry
In a culture like ours, one sometimes forgets the
power of a poet's words. Here is an open letter from
the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush declining the
invitation to read and speak at the National Book
Critics Circle Award in Washington, DC. Sharon Olds is
one of most widely read and critically acclaimed poets
living in America today. Read to the end of the letter
to experience her restrained, chilling eloquence.
Laura Bush
First Lady, The White House
Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to
accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at
the National Book Festival on September 24, or to
attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the
breakfast at the White House. In one way, it's a very
appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a
festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The
possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a
poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire
that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need
the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it
delivers. And the concept of a community of readers
and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a
professor of creative writing in the graduate school
of a major university, I have had the chance to be a
part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in
which our students have become teachers. Over the
years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a
women's prison, several New York City public high
schools, an oncology ward for children.
Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for
the severely physically challen ged, has been running
now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting
friendships between young MFA candidates and their
students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in
their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost
nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic
alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you
have experienced, close up, the passion and
essentialness of writing. When you have held up a
small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is
completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the
eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C,
then D, until you get to the first letter of the first
word of the first line of the poem she has been
composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes
when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with
a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation,
self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the
importance of writing, which celebrates the value of
each person's unique story and song.
So the prospect of a festival of books seemed
wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk
about how to start up an outreach program. I thought
of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and
meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC.
I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your
guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling
that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare
my belief that the wish to invade another culture and
another country--with the resultant loss of life and
limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants
in their home terrain--did not come out of our
democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top"
and forced on the people by distorted language, and by
untruths.
I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live
in the shadows of tyranny and religious
chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance
and diversity our nation aspires to.
I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in
order to bear witness--as an American who loves her
country and its principles and its writing--against
this undeclared and devastating war.
But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with
you, Mrs. Bush. I knew that if I sat down to eat with
you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I
see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush
Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I
would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady
who represents the Administration that unleashed this
war and that wills its continuation, even to the
extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying
people to other countries where they will be tortured
for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our
country now feel anguish and shame, for the current
regime of blood, wounds and fire.
I thought of the clean linens at your table, the
shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I
simply could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS
_____________________
There is more to life than increasing its speed. --Mahatma Gandhi
posted on May 20, 2007 12:36:50 PM new
Thank YOU , Roadsmith!
That was awesome!
Her letter sounds like a poem.
What intelligence and courage! She put in to words what so many feel!
And I bet it wiped that simpering grin right off Shebushit's face
posted on May 20, 2007 01:44:29 PM new
I wasn't aware that this was an older news item. Still good, though.
_____________________
There is more to life than increasing its speed. --Mahatma Gandhi
Linda stated, "Without searching I believe this happened during the last Bush admin. As helen posted it then."
Linda, I don't know when Roadsmith's email was written. I posted about an event in 2003, during the Bush administration. The poetry reading was cancelled at the White House when Laura Bush learned that some poets would recite anti-war poems.
After that snub by the "first lady", American poet Sam Hamill rejected his invitation and asked his friends to send him anti-war poems. He received over 1,500 poems including works by W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Hammill wrote, "So much for democracy, free speech, vigorous discussion. In this most insulated and choreographed of administrations, the "American voice"--note the singular--is welcome only when it says what the White House wants to hear. And yet, as so often, censorship backfired. "They did us an extraordinary favor," Hamill told me. "They revealed that there are many, many poets opposed to the Bush regime. And they demonstrated their fear of the carefully chosen word--their fear of poetry."
posted on May 20, 2007 06:25:05 PM new
For some strange reason, linda reposted my link to the story about Laura banning poets. She probably can't read the Nation.
So Laura Bush will not, after all, be discussing the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes with a selected group of American poets at the White House on February 12. The conference, "Poetry and the American Voice," was abruptly "postponed" after Sam Hamill, editor of Copper Canyon Press and author of thirteen books of verse, responded to his invitation by putting out an e-mail urging invitees and others to send him poems and statements opposing the invasion of Iraq. When I spoke to him on the phone, Hamill described himself as a lifelong radical ("What on earth were they thinking?" he wondered out loud), and said he had planned to decline his invitation but had hoped to compile an anthology that another invitee would present to the First Lady. Within days almost 2,000 poets had responded to his plea. It was almost like old times, when Robert Lowell refused to attend a poetry symposium at the Johnson White House to protest the Vietnam War.
Why was the conference canceled? Hamill expresses himself rather forcefully ("I was overcome by a kind of nausea," he wrote of finding the invitation in the mail)--in fact, he sounds a lot like writers of letters to The Nation. But he didn't urge poets to take off their clothes and pee in the punch bowl, or to stage a reading of the Not In Our Name statement. He merely suggested giving the First Lady some poems. Poets these days are a mannerly crowd, and it's a safe bet that those who chose to attend would have been polite. Marilyn Nelson, poet laureate of Connecticut, said she planned to wear a silk scarf decorated with peace symbols, in hopes of attracting the First Lady's eye. So is that it? The White House, so bold to make war, is afraid of poems and scarves?
So much for democracy, free speech, vigorous discussion. In this most insulated and choreographed of administrations, the "American voice"--note the singular--is welcome only when it says what the White House wants to hear. And yet, as so often, censorship backfired. "They did us an extraordinary favor," Hamill told me. "They revealed that there are many, many poets opposed to the Bush regime. And they demonstrated their fear of the carefully chosen word--their fear of poetry."
Now Laura Bush, a former librarian, likes to read, and that's good. As Texas First Lady she helped start the Texas Book Fair, and as First Lady she has held a number of symposia on interesting historical topics--women writers of the West, the Harlem Renaissance and Mark Twain, whom she calls the "first real American writer," so eat your heart out Bradstreet, Edwards, Franklin, Irving, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau (especially you, Henry, you civilly disobedient antiwar tree-hugger, you). To her credit, she invited to these gatherings serious writers and scholars--Arnold Rampersad, Justin Kaplan, David Levering Lewis, frontier historian Ursula Smith--who she must have known could not, on the whole, be happy with her husband's policies. Still, according to press reports, invitees to these events arrived suspicious, went away charmed. That's how it usually works with the presidency--Bill Clinton beguiled an entire roomful of poets at a 1998 soiree, with only a few refuseniks. Proximity to power, a brush with history, the cachet of exclusivity and, in the case of Laura Bush, a private glimpse of perhaps the biggest contrast-gainer in the history of marriage--say what you like about the irrelevance of poets in today's world, if they're willing to forgo all that, antiwar feeling must be positively rampaging across the land.
"There is nothing political about American literature," Laura Bush has said. But it would be hard to find writers more subversive than the three she chose for her event. Whitman's epic of radical democracy, Leaves of Grass, was so scandalous it got him fired from his government job; Hughes, a Communist sympathizer hounded by McCarthy, wrote constantly and indelibly about racism, injustice, power; Dickinson might seem the least political, but in some ways she was the most lastingly so--every line she wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language, gender, thought. None of these quintessentially American writers would have given two cents for family values (Whitman was gay, as perhaps were Hughes and Dickinson), abstinence education, the death penalty, tax cuts for the rich, Ashcroftian attacks on civil liberties or the other hallmarks of the Bush regime. It's hard to imagine them cheering the bombing of Baghdad.
There will be readings all over the country on February 12. As of this writing some 3,500 poets (who knew?) have sent poems and statements to www.poetsagainstthewar.org. Here's mine:
Trying to Write a Poem Against the War
My daughter, who's as beautiful as the day,
hates politics: Face it, Ma,
they don't care what you think! All
passion, like Achilles,
she stalks off to her room,
to confide in her purple guitar and await
life's embassies. She's right,
of course: bombs will be hurled
at ordinary streets
and leaders look grave for the cameras,
and what good are more poems against war
the real subject of which
so often seems to be the poet's superior
moral sensitivities? I could
be mailing myself to the moon
or marrying a palm tree,
and yet what can we do
but offer what we have?
and so I spend
this cold gray glittering morning
trying to write a poem against war
that perhaps may please my daughter
who hates politics
and does not care much for poetry, either.
posted on May 20, 2007 06:49:26 PM new
It's just as relevant today - maybe even more so because of all that has happened and continues to happen each day.
posted on May 20, 2007 07:02:33 PM new
linduh read a book once 60 years ago and figures she doesn't have to read another.
I mean, once you've read a book ...you've read a book...
