Sherry Chandler

Green River Writers is sponsoring a reading by California poet Richard Beban at Carmichael’s on Frankfort Avenue in Louisville. Reading to begin at 5 p.m.

If you miss this reading, you can catch Richard at the InKY Reading, along with Maurice Manning and Eleanor Lerman. Open mic at 7, featured readers begin at 8.

From Poetry Thursday:

For those of you who are doing NaPoWriMo, we will be sharing mini-prompts each day throughout April. These prompts will simply be a word or a phrase, but we hope they will be enough to serve as a jumping off point for your writing.

The April 13 prompt is bluff.

More on this site later.

HT to Heraclitean Fire, who is doing NaPoWriMo.

Talking With The Cat About World Domination
The Day George W. Bush Almost Choked On A Pretzel

Now that pretzel’s gone and done
something an expert like you never would
- loosening its hold a split-second too soon -
I think it’s time we revised our strategy.
Just sitting back waiting for the big collapse?
Face facts. It isn’t happening.
If there’s a job to be done, why not us?

This time tomorrow we’ll be in Washington
telling Bush to come out with his hands up.
Faced with me and you, Puss, I bet he’ll just crumble.

—Kevin Higgins, from 100 Poets Against the War

Kevin Higgins, born in 1967, grew up in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. His first collection The Boy With No Face is available from Salmon. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine, and with Susan Millar DuMars, is co-organiser of the Over The Edge series of readings for emerging writers at Galway City Library.

In an essay written before George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, Poetry, Politics And Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray, Kevin had this to say:

Paradoxically, the fact that opposition to the Iraq adventure is now so widespread has made writing poetry about it very difficult; poetry and consensus make bad bedfellows. At least that’s been my experience. In the aftermath of 9/11 I found it easy enough to write poems about the attack on the Twin Towers, the War in Afghanistan etc. Lately I have found it impossible to address the Iraq issue in poetry. Back then one was taking a risk by saying anything about the War On Terror; and risk makes for good poetry. Now, all one is doing when one writes a straightforward anti-war poem is agreeing with the old woman in the launderette, and pretty much everyone else on the planet. When the whole world is saying the same thing the words get used up and jaded, and we start to sound like newscasters rather than poets.

I also stopped writing head-on protest poetry about this Iraq war sometime in 2004, but I’m not so sure it was because the language had been co-opted or that the risk was gone. Whether or not it made for good poetry, Kevin is right in pointing out risk as an element of the writing in that time. Voices were being silenced in those days and it seemed like an act of courage, of solidarity, just to speak out. I agree that that feeling of putting yourself on the line has abated.

Still, I am just as appalled, angry, outraged as I was from the beginning. But since the re-election of Bush and company, my poetry has become elegaic. I am in mourning for something irrevocably lost. My last shred of innocence, perhaps.

A collection of Kevin’s poetry, Lone Voice in the Wind, can be found at The Other Voices International Project. You can learn more about Kevin at his website.

The Poet’s Pick today is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” perhaps the best known of the WWI poems, with an exegesis by Martin Espada. You can sign up here. Says Espada:

Wilfred Owen is a “Cassandra poet:” a neglected prophet. This World War I poem is still relevant today, as we mark another anniversary of the war in Iraq. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a well-known work, yet its warnings continue to be ignored. Like Cassandra, Owen has been heard, but not heeded. Thus, the poem bears repeating here and everywhere.

…

This is a poet’s wrath: He is outraged at the corruption of language itself, by Jessie Pope but also by a ruling elite inciting the majority to cooperate in their own destruction. Instead, as Owen said in the preface to his collection of poems, “the true Poets must be truthful.”

Read the poem here.

We should never stop writing against war.