THE GALL WAY:

Laura Bush doth protest too much (Jeff Guinn, Feb. 15, 2003, Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

And just what, exactly, did Laura Bush expect?

When the first lady announced a Feb. 12 White House symposium honoring poets Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, that trio of honorees included two avowed social radicals and one closet disdainer of government. Among the modern-day poets invited to be part of the program were Sam Hamill, an outspoken pacifist, and Galway Kinnell, whose resume includes both a Pulitzer Prize and prominent 1960s and '70s opposition to U.S. war policies in Vietnam.

President George W. Bush is about to lead the nation into war with Iraq, though opinion polls indicate there's growing public opposition to such an act. In both modern and ancient history, there's a tradition of poets, playwrights and authors leading protests against war. [...]

Had the event been held as scheduled, though, Kinnell believes the three or four poets who agreed to host the program would have stuck to the White House agenda of reading some works by Whitman, Dickinson and Hughes and discussing their lives.

"Somewhere along the line, a question about the war might have come up, but it would not have been the travesty that the Laura Bush reaction made it appear it would be," Kinnell said. "It's very unlikely the day would have turned into a rant of anti-war poems."

Kinnell says he turned down the invitation to participate because, "from one point of view, what Laura Bush is doing with literary symposiums is a good thing. But I also think these literary events are an attempt to put a human face on the Bush administration and its questionable policies, and I can't separate that." [...]

A side benefit, Morrow said he hopes, will be "reminding people of the force poetry can have, causing them to read it a little bit more."

Here are a couple of things Mrs. Bush might have expected: (1) that poets, having been summoned to an event to celebrate their betters, might not choose to turn the event into a solipsistic wallow; (2) that they might have decent manners, and not try to embarrass their hosts. That she should have known better is amply demonstrated by the comment of Mr. Kinnell, who apparently thinks the Bush administration is not "human", but that poets are and by Mr. Morrow's belief that this will get people to read more poetry.

President Bush's new head of the National Endowment for the Arts happens to be a poet, Dana Gioia, who has famously (infamously if you're a left-wing poet) asked: Can Poetry Matter?. In his essay he suggested that the world of poetry has become an insular subculture that no longer interacts with the larger society. This little contretemps with the White House perfectly illustrates the point. Given an opportunity, with White House imprimatur, to celebrate poetry, these poets sought instead to turn the event into a denunciation of the American government and people, who contrary to the author's assertion, support the coming war in record numbers. Little wonder then that so few of us think modern poetry is intended for our ears, but is instead the mental onanism of an effete, ivory-towered, intellectual elite.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2003 12:13 PM