More Dangerous Poetry

Sailpoet has more details about the American Thinker/Campus Watch dangerous poet feint in the culture wars:

According to The American Thinker … [Marilyn Hacker and Alicia Ostriker,] these middle-aged Jewish ladies (who, incidentally, are widely-respected intellectuals and artists) are propagating anti-Zionism and supporting terrorist activity by writing dangerous poetry…

What is particularly chilling is that this self-appointed “watchdog” of what is poetry names specific poems that do not pass the imprimatur of its far-right politburo, particularly Ostriker’s “Daffodils” and “Elegy Before the War,” which ran in LogosJournal. I don’t believe Uncle Sam would think too highly of such censorship.

I suggest that you go and read the poems to see for yourself what this is all about.

Added Friday morning: I don’t mean to iimply that I consider these poets innocent victims or that their poetry is not, in fact, dangerous. That attitude would diminish both the poets and the poetry. When poets decide to speak, they should do so with the full awareness that speaking has consequences and has had since Augustus banished Ovid a couple of millennia ago.