Poetry and Politics: The Art of War

Next to photocopied pictures of Billy Collins and his poems, my high school poetry teacher stapled an op-ed written in response to Sam Hamill’s decision to not attend Laura Bush’s symposium about poetry. It was supposed to make us, students at a public arts high school, think about the artist’s role in political dialogue: should he have accepted the invitation, eat finger food off napkins embossed with the White House’s crest, and posed for pictures? I’m sure Hamill made the right decision, spawning a movement complete with 13,000 poems from like-minded authors, press coverage, and an eighteen-dollar T-shirt.

I pondered this question again when I attended Poetry Against War, an event held at Brown on March 12, featuring poet cum professor Robert Creeley. The Poetry Against War event was of course nothing more than a literary pep rally, with megaphones and pompoms being replaced by jazz music and spoken-word artists. It won’t amount to anything more than paperback anthologies sold on amazon.com. And President Bush certainly won’t invite Galway Kinnell to Crawford, Texas for a barbeque and a discussion on healthcare or stand next to Eavan Boland at summits.

But the event did remind me of the problems raised by the intersection of poetry and politics. It would be hard to get Hillary Clinton and George Bush into a room, let alone fit them in a couplet. “No blood for oil” is a precise and powerful phrase, but if over-used its potency quickly fades. Rhyme, however, is no problem. The anti-war movement has always come up with clever slogans, like “hell no, we won’t go.”

The real problem is that anti-war poetry represents all that is lamentable about contemporary political discourse-poetry being nothing more than a collection of images and claims presented to an audience, without supporting facts or numbers. Indeed, politicians ,and their legions of consultants have crafted the current political debate into a similar art form. Images of army-green flight suits and two-second sound bites have truly superseded reflective analysis and reasoned debate.

Or perhaps I am just jealous. The Right doesn’t appear to have anything close to this other than Charlie Daniels’ songs with lyrics like, “This ain’t no rag, it’s a flag/Old glory red, white, and blue.” I want a professor in a tweed coat with a grayed beard to read his poems to me, letting the lyrical lines melt into a hymn about the virtues of private property. Maybe I should write political poetry, finding a metaphor for school vouchers or making an argument for privatized social security in iambic pentameter. I will start with one describing my personal philosophy on the government’s proper role in my life knowing it would fit perfectly in a haiku.