Sherry Chandler » More Dangerous Poetry
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.
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1 Comment
1. t r williams replies at 18th March 2005, 11:27 am :
“Real” poets are always dangerous–that’s why Plato would have banned them from his dystopic wil’ Wepublic. Terry Jones has asked the literary question WHO MURDERED CHAUCER?–did his satire of the more corrupt church officers not accord well with the new political correctness after Richard II was deposed? Maybe Catullus met a footpad or two courtesy of Caesar–the satiric jabs in his poetry did the dictator more political harm than any other attack, at least according to Julie Hissownself.
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