Sherry Chandler

Voices in Wartime

[I got hit by spammers today and, trying to get rid of the spurious comments, I accidently hit the wrong button and deleted this post. So I am trying to reconstruct it here and it will be a bit different.]

You will find here an interview with Sam Hamill, who in January 2003, as an act of protest against the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, refused to attend Laura Bush’s poetry symposium. As the wardrums were beating for the invasion of Iraq, Hamill formed Poets Against the War, which received and published 7000 poems of protest. Now Hamill has resigned his post with Copper Canyon Press to devote his whole energy to Voices in Wartime. The interview is from their film.

Poets tend to be humanists and they tend to see things from angles that other people don’t pause long enough to look at. I think that one of the major functions of poems in particular is to develop sensibility, and I think that means sensitivity to those who are oppressed, to those who have no voice.

One of the most important things I have done in my life as a poet is the twenty years I spent working with battered women and children, and the years I spent teaching in American prisons. Not because it puts me in a position to speak for children or on the racist role of law that that treats people so differently in our judicial system, but rather because it is made me understand who has the power and who sees and knows what and how it gets handled

The poem I posted this week, “Bombed Wedding,” was written during that first, now apparently forgotten war – the one with Afghanistan. It was originally posted on Poets Against the War and will be included in Pax Christi’s forthcoming Poetry for Peacemakers.

Possibly related posts:

Voices in Wartime

The Other Voices International Project

Wartime Agenda

Terroristic Poetry

Finishing Line New Women’s Voices

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