NEWSgrist: *DELVE... ‘Ready for War’ * Vol.4, no.3 (Feb. 10, 2003)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 4, no.3 (Feb.
10, 2003)
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* DELVE – the Transportation Issue
- *Quote/s* Art Spiegelman; Laura
Bush’s poetry; Guernica
- *Url/s* Elout De Kok; CABINET; Errata Erratum
- *On Target* Barry Blinderman acts locally in Normal Illinois
- *All’s Fair?* Mirapaul on
<wartime> activism
- *Babel Territories* Architectural layers of conflict
- *The Non-Conformist* Spiegelman quits The New Yorker
- *Shock + Awe* Laura
Bush cancels poetry symposium
- *Mapping
Empire* Julian LaVerdiere looks up, again
- *Book Grist* Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science
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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net
‘fighter bomber’
by renee schacht
‘colorado municipal airports’ by kevin cooley
featured in
DELVE Vol.1, no.2
(WINTER 2002)
THE TRANSPORTATION ISSUE
produced by paul lombardi , new york city
splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Lombardi.html
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*Quote/s*
“Our media choose to ignore news
that in the rest of the world
receives wide prominence; if it
were not for the Internet, even
my view of the world would be extremely limited.”
-- Art Spiegelman (see *The Non-Conformist* below)
"While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the
right of all
Americans to express their opinions," Ms.
Rodriguez said
today," she, too, has opinions, and believes
that it would be
inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a
literary event
into a political forum."
(see *Shock + Awe* below)
“Mr. Powell can't very well
seduce the world into bombing Iraq
surrounded on camera by
shrieking and mutilated women, men,
children, bulls and horses.”
--Maureen Dowd, NYTimes 2/5/03:
“Powell Without Picasso”
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/opinion/05DOWD.html
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*Url/s*
1) Self Portrait by Elout De Kok
http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/wartime/gow06.html
(produced for <wartime> project – see *All’s
Fair?* below)
2) Announcing the web launch for CABINET MAGAZINE
A Quarterly Magazine of Arts & Culture
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org
(see excerpt in *Babel Territories* below)
3) Errata Erratum @ LA MOCA
http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=pmiller
...allows you to create your own
remix via Marcel Duchamp and
Paul D. Miller [DJ Spooky] by
manipulating rotoreliefs by
Duchamp and tags by Miller...
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*On Target*
"READY FOR WAR" IN
ILLINOIS
Artnet Mag Jan 29, 2003
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews1-29-03.asp
The University Galleries of Illinois State University in
Normal,
Ill., has put out a "call for entries" for a
show titled "Ready for
War," Feb. 18-Mar. 18, 2003. Among the suggested
targets for
this esthetic combat are "terrorism, poverty,
environmental
protection, privacy, racism, civil liberties, drugs and
reproduct-
ive rights." All works are
accepted; high-tech artists must
provide their own equipment. The
show is "my way of 'acting
locally'," said gallery
director Barry Blinderman, "offering as
many artists as possible a forum
for expressing their sentiments
about the grave state our
country is in at the moment." The
show is to be posted on the
gallery website http://www.orat.ilstu.edu/cfa/galleries/
and exhibited in the museum; for
more info, contact gallery@ilstu.edu
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*All’s
Fair?*
Political Points in the World's Fair of Technology
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes - ARTS ONLINE Jan. 3, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/arts/design/03ARTS.html
Guernica," Picasso's great antiwar painting, was
first shown at
the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. More than 31 million people
attended. Russell Martin, author
of a recent book about
"Guernica," said in a
telephone interview, "In an age that was
not given to instant
communication, it was a way in which the
painting very soon after its
creation was able to be seen by, for
its time, a gigantic number of
people.'`
Today artists with a political
point to make merely put their work
on the Internet, which is truly
a world's fair of technology and on
occasion compelling art. Andrew
Forbes, an Internet artist in
London, has even opened a
virtual gallery for some of these
projects. In November, with talk
of an attack on Iraq continuing,
Mr. Forbes issued a public call
on the Internet for digital
artworks created in reaction to
past, present and future wars.
He has received 83 projects from
around the globe. He exhibits
them on the Wartime Project, a
Web site that he put online last
month at http://offline.area3.net/wartime
With only a month or two to create their works, most artists
submitted what might be deemed
miniatures: simple interactive
scenes, small animations or
short videos. As one would expect
from an open-call project, the
quality of the works varies widely.
Still with its variations on a theme,
Wartime provides a snapshot
of the ways that digital artists
approach the Internet as a
creative medium.
In a telephone interview from his studio in the Brixton
neighbor-
hood in South London, Mr. Forbes
said, "Wartime was never
designed to be specifically
against the war against Iraq." Yet
many contributors have focused
on the imminent attack and pro-
duced work that is closer to
being propaganda than effective art.
And given the overuse of images
of jet fighters, exploding bombs
and wounded victims, clumsy
propaganda at that.
Mr. Forbes said the site's goal was "to get young
people who
haven't experienced war to think about its
destructiveness."
From the high level of response he appears to have
succeeded.
But Mr. Forbes also has a
cultural agenda. Although outsiders
might view the Internet-art
world as a small, secret society, its
insiders are familiar with all
the major players and their essential
artworks.
So by encouraging everyone to submit work, Mr. Forbes
said, he
hopes to extend the genre's borders beyond the usual
suspects.
"I'm kind of fed up with
the in-ness of the Net-art world," he
said. Josephine Bosma, a critic
in the Netherlands, said
Wartime's openness to
submissions could "lead to the discovery
of new artists outside the now-institutionalized
Net-art world."
New faces are responsible for some of the site's better
works.
For instance Miguel Mendoza, a Mexican artist, contributed
an
interactive scene that is
surreal. Within a post-nuclear
landscape, the viewer is
encircled by mushroom clouds. As an
onscreen button is repeatedly
clicked, the clouds are trans-
formed into a bicycling herd of skeletons with
disturbing grins.
Elout de Kok, a Dutch artist, contributed an animated
self-
portrait that is dynamically "painted" on
a grid of small squares.
As the viewer's cursor moves
across the screen, Mr. de Kok's
head is revealed in silhouette.
A self-portrait is not an obvious
choice for a site about war. But
Mr. de Kok explained that the
software generating his image
had been programmed so that
each square must do battle to
determine if it will be black, white
or gray.
Mr. Martin, author of "Picasso's War: The Destruction
of
Guernica and the Masterpiece
that Changed the World" (Dutton,
2002), said the actual
painting's "nonspecificity with regard to
the bombing of that town at that
time allowed its message to be
readily universalized." And
in general Wartime's most success-
ful works are those that are not linked to a
particular conflict.
Several works on the site adapt the language of technology
to
comment on war. For instance the veteran digital artists
Auriea
Harvey and Michael Samyn, identified on the site as E8Z!,
created the gamelike
"Aliens." In this amusingly subversive
work a blue-suited businessman
is threatened by advancing
rows of sheiks. As soon as the
viewer shoots at the aliens,
though, the game ends. The artists have distilled the
entire
computer-game experience into a
single click. The only way to
win is not to play.
Similarly "System," a clever piece by the
British artist Yara
Elsherbini, purports to be the White House version of a
Microsoft operating system for a
computer. So the software is
plagued with politically oriented error messages.
Parodies of Microsoft products seem rather retro now, and
many
of the site's works will feel familiar to Net-art
insiders. Mr.
Forbes said he was pleased that
Wartime had "drawn in people
who are pretty new to the medium and don't know the
back-
ground to the development of Net art." As a result, though, the
overall site suffers from a certain navet. The most
exciting
digital artworks made in the last several years have
been those
that rely upon the Internet for their existence, not
stand-alone
pieces. While it is true, as Mr.
Forbes asserted, that Wartime
could not have been assembled
without the Internet, the
majority of its contributions
could just as easily be published on
a CD-ROM or projected in a
movie theater.
This is not the first time that current events have
inspired an
online collection of digital
art. In 1999 the Balkan conflict
prompted the German artist
Reiner Strasser to open Weak Blood,
which included more than 50
topical works. The site remains
online at http://netartefact.de/weakblood Several small sites
also appeared after 9/11.
Mr. Forbes said he did not know if the Wartime site's
virtual art
would lead to actual political action. Peter Weibel, on
the other
hand, says it might.
Mr. Weibel is director of the Center for Art and Media
Tech-
nology in Karlsruhe, Germany, as well as co-curator
of "M_Ars:
Art and War," an exhibition at the Neue Galerie
in Graz, Austria.
One of the questions that the
controversial show poses is
whether art can be a platform
for brutality as well as for human-
itarian ideals.
But Mr. Weibel suggested that virtual art lends itself to
ex-
pressions of compassion. Because
the Internet's fluidity
encourages people to explore other
points of view, positions do
not harden and become
contentious. He said, "It could be a
positive space for artists and citizens to fight
against war."
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*Babel Territories*
The Wall and the Eye: An Interview with Eyal Weizman
Jeffrey Kastner & Sina
Najafi [excerpted]
CABINET MAGAZINE – Issue 9 Winter 2002/03
full article:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/wall.php
[Eyal Weizman is an architect, based in Tel-Aviv and
London,
who has conducted research on behalf of the human rights
or-
ganization B’tselem on the planning aspects of the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank.
Weizman is currently developing
his doctoral thesis “The
Politics of Verticality: Architecture
and Occupation in the West Bank”
into a TV documentary film
and a book to be published next
year.]
A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of
Israeli Architecture, a
catalogue and exhibition originally created
by Israeli architects
Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their
country’s official entry to
the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in
Berlin, is a ground-
breaking examination of the character of
building, planning, and
community in the West Bank. Abruptly
cancelled last summer on
the eve of the Congress by its commissioning
organization, the
Israel Association of United Architects, the
project has stirred
strong opinions in Israel. Although it was
dismissed by the
association’s president as “one-sided
political propaganda,” A
Civilian Occupation was praised as a “a rare
work in its power
and importance for the community of
architects and town
planners in Israel” by the daily newspaper
Ha’aretz. Since the
cancellation, Segal and Weizman have found
other forums for the
work they produced: the catalog is being
reprinted by Babel
Press in Tel Aviv and a version of the
exhibition will be be
mounted at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture, New York, at
the end of January and in the exhibition
“Territories” at Kunst-
Werke, Berlin, in May 2003.
In the following interview, Weizman, a partner in Tel
Aviv-based
Rafi Segal/Eyal Weizman Architects, discusses both the
natural
and built environment of the West Bank – from the social,
political,
and religious history of the area to issues of photography
and
mapping to concepts of strategic building forms and
settlement
growth patterns. He also asks pointed ethical questions
about
Israeli architectural and planning practice and
considerations of
human rights, which he says are central to the research he
and
Segal continue to conduct. Weizman spoke by phone to
Jeffrey
Kastner and Sina Najafi from Haifa, Israel, in October
2002.
Cabinet: Your catalogue cites a 1984
publication by the Israeli
Ministry of Housing that sets guidelines for
the construction of
new settlements in the mountain regions of
the West Bank. It’s
very concrete: it proposes an inner ring and
an outer ring of
houses, discusses the idea of offering the
maximal amount of
views to the maximum number of settlers,
which obviously also
allows a maximum amount of surveillance of
the Palestinian
population beneath, and so on. This is
interesting in light of the
interview in your catalogue with the planner
and architect
Thomas Leitersdorf about towns he has built
in the West Bank,
where you get a sense that sometimes the
government offers no
guideline other than “We need a town built
here,” and the
architect is completely left on his own to do
whatever he wants.
So we have this severe set of guidelines
versus no guidelines at
all, apparently at the same time.
Eyal Weizman: When Leitersdorf
built Ma’ale Edumim in 1977
-78 he was in effect setting the guidelines.
Ma’ale Edumim was
essential in creating a benchmark standard
for building settle-
ments. In general, Israeli architects and
planners had little
experience of building in mountainous
regions. Before the
occupation, the Israeli population was
located mainly in the
valleys, except in Haifa, which is a mountain city, and in
Jerusalem. The typical new Israeli settlements were the
kibbutz
and the moshav, cooperative agricultural and pioneering
settlements built mainly on the fertile plains. It is only
after the
occupation, and following the political changes in 1977,
that
the mountain enters the public imagination – people write
songs
about the mountain, talk about it, lecture on it, research
it.
Architects were starting to think about the mountain too,
but
they had little experience of building there. So this
publication
by the Ministry of Housing was incredibly important
because it
ollected different precedents and for the first time set
guidelines
for how to build in the mountains. The “mountain” is
important in
understanding the ideological transition in Israel after
1977,
when a messianic religious discourse entered the political
debate with the right wing coming to power. Along with it
came
a decreasing emphasis on agricultural pioneering and its
re-
placement with a new typology of the religious suburb,
located
on mountaintops and without agricultural space to
cultivate.
[snip!] full article:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/wall.php
[...]
C: You have written that the geometry of the
occupation can only
be understood in three dimensions. There are
questions of the
underground sewage, archaeology, tunnels,
the water reservoirs,
the air space above, and so on. These are
issues that came up in
the peace talks, of course. But the map you
have produced is two
-dimensional. What would it mean to map this
conflict three-
dimensionally? It’s interesting to look at how, for
example, an
Israeli highway passes over a Palestinian road or look at
how the
tunnels intersect.
EW: I am currently working on a computer-based interactive
three-dimensional map of the West Bank with my colleague,
Reed Kram. The over-complication of the surface as shown
on
our map-the fact that it’s no longer possible to draw a
continuous
line that separates Palestinians from Israelis-made clear
to the
negotiating parties during the peace process that a two-
dimensional solution is no longer possible. Shimon Peres’s
Oslo
proposal was to give the Palestinians limited sovereignty
on the
land but to retain Israeli sovereignty of the subsoil and
the air
over it. So you have a kind of sandwich-Israel, Palestine,
Israel-
across the vertical dimension. Peace technicians-the
people
who are always drawing new maps for a solution-arrive at
completely insane proposals for solving the problem of
inter-
national boundaries in three dimensions. And when you have
Jewish enclaves in Palestinian territory, you have to
build either
tunnels or bridges that connect them to each other. Both
typo-
logies were experimented with and proposed throughout neg-
otiations. The most obvious is the proposed safe passage
between the West Bank and Gaza that has a Palestinian road
with Palestinian sovereignty that goes over Israel’s
sovereign
territory-with the international boundary being the
thermo-
dynamic joint between the column and the road. We get into
incredibly bizarre and dystopian solutions. Jerusalem
itself,
according to the Clinton plan, would have had 64
kilometers of
walls and 40 bridges and tunnels connecting the enclaves
to
each other. Imagine an urban environment that operates
like
that. It would make L.A.’s highway system look flat. This
is the
total collapse of the idea of territory as produced by
maps.
Nationalism and mapmaking were always bound together. You
had a map and you drew a boundary. But what you see in the
West Bank is that sovereign relations are attempting to
play
themselves out three-dimensionally. And that is obviously
an
unworkable absurdity.
We do not think that there is a viable "design
solution" to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The perfect line that
brilliantly
weaves itself through the terrain and answers in its path
both
national demands, the one line that everybody from Ben
Gurion
to Barak was looking for, simply does not exist. Nor does
it
exist in these three-dimensional boundary contortions.
These
just accentuate the exhaustion and the frustration of all
possible
lines on the two-dimensional plane. This territorial
conflict is
such that it must be addressed in a non-territorial and
thus
non-formal way. If you think of similar conflicts between
a
settling nation and a native nation, there is no
historical
precedent for the idea of partition. We think that the way
to
manage this conflict is not through the creation of
another
sovereign state but within the realm of law. Instead of
thinking
of two states side by side, something that our research
shows is
impossible without integration on the planning and
infrastructure
level, we would like to propose the idea of a simultaneous
overlap: two states that are not lying side by side but
overlap
legally across the same territory. This obviously entails
a new
definition of national sovereignty, one in which a choice
of more
than one citizenship is available for the same area.
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*The Non-Conformist*
Interview with Art Spiegelman
CORRIERE DELLA SERRA, January 9, 2003
as noted in France Culture: http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:B2AOcbtGJDgC:www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture2/revuepresse/index.php+art+spiegelman,+Corriere+della+Sera&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
It was termed “a divorce of historic proportions,” of the
kind that
leaves a deep cultural mark, and gives rise to debate
that
continues for months. Art
Spiegelman, the legendary New York
illustrator who for ten full
years put his name to the most pro-
vocative and incisive covers of
the New Yorker, has decided to
leave the prestigious magazine,
in opposition (protest) to what
he calls “the widespread conformism of the mass media in
the
Bush era.”
“The decision to leave was mine alone,” the author of
Maus, the
saga of Jewish mice exterminated
by Nazi cats that won him the
Pulitzer Prize (the first given
to a comic book), explained in an
interview with the Corriere
della Sera; “the director of the New
Yorker, David Remnick, was
shocked when I announced my
resignation. He attempted to
dissuade me. But I told him that
the kind of work that I'm now
interested in doing is not suited to
the present tone of the New
Yorker. And, seeing that we are
living in extremely dangerous
times, I don't feel like stooping to
compromise.”
(Q) Do you also consider yourself a victim of Sept. 11?
Exactly so. From the time that
the Towers fell, it seems as if
I've been living in internal
exile, or like a political dissident
confined to an island. I no
longer feel in tune (agreement) with
American culture, especially now
that the entire media has
become conservative and
tremendously timid. Unfortunately,
even the New Yorker has not
escaped this trend: Remnick does
not feel up (able) to accept the
challenge, while, on the contrary,
I am more and more inclined to provocation.
(Q) What kind of provocation?
I am working on the sixth installment of my new strip, “In
the
shadow of no tower,” inspired both by memories of Sept. 11
-- on
that day, I had just left my apt, a few steps from the tragedy –
and a present in which one feels
equally threatened by both Bush
and Osama. The series was commissioned by the German
news-
paper Die Zeit, but here in
the USA, only the Jewish magazine
The Forward has agreed to
publish it.
(Q) Did you feel snubbed by the refusal of the New Yorker
to
publish it?
Not at all. I knew from the beginning that the tone and
content
of the strip -- what,at this
point in time, is of most concern to
me--were not in harmony with
those of the New Yorker. A
wonderful magazine, mind you,
with delightful and refined covers,
but also incredibly deferential (obsequious) to the present
administration. If I were content to draw harmless
strips about
skateboarding and shopping in Manhattan, there would
have
been no problem; but, now, my inner life is inflamed
with much
different issues.
(Q) For what do you reproach the New Yorker?
For marching to the same beat as the NYT and all the other
great American media that don't
criticize the government for fear
that the administration will
take revenge by blocking their
access to sources and
information. Mass media today is in the
hands of a limited group of
extremely wealthy owners whose
interests don't coincide at all
with those of the average soul
living in a country (USA) where
the gap between rich and poor is
now unbridgeable. In this
context, all criticism of the admin-
istration is automatically branded unpatriotic and
un-American.
Our media choose to ignore news
that in the rest of the world
receives wide prominence; if it were
not for the Internet, even
my view of the world would be
extremely limited.
(Q) Then the Bush revolution has triumphed?
Yes. In Reagan's time, “liberal” was a dirty word and to
be
accused of such an offense was
an insult. In the Bush jr. era, the
radical right so overwhelmingly
dominates the debate that the
democrats have all had to move
to the right just to be able to
continue the conversation.
(Q) Will the New Yorker be the same without Spiegelman?
The New Yorker existed long before I came on board. The
great
majority of the readers who
adore the warm and relaxing bath of
their accustomed New Yorker
(probably, in English, a con-
temptuous illusion to the hot
tub) were very upset by the “shock
treatment” of my covers. These
readers will feel more at ease
with the calm and subdued
(submissive) New Yorker of the
tradition which from the
Twenties mixed intelligence, sophistica-
tion, snobbery, and complaisance
with the status quo. Every
time that I put pencil to paper,
I was flooded with letters of
protest.
(Q) Which of your works caused the most controversy?
The cover with the atomic bomb issued on the 4th of July.
The
one from last Thanksgiving where
turkeys fell from military
aircraft. The only one universally
well-received was the Sept. 24
cover with the Twin Towers in
two-toned black. The censorship
of my work began as soon as I
first set foot in the magazine,
long before the 9th of September.
(Q) What kind of censorship?
Large and small. For the Thanksgiving cover with turkeys
dropped in the place of bombs, I
chose the title “Operation
Enduring Turkey” to mimic
“Operation Enduring Freedom” then
begun by America in Afghanistan.
But David Remnick forced me
to change the title.
(Q) Is it possible that the media is more reactionary than
their
readers?
I don't think so at all, not after reading in the polls
that George
W. Bush is the most admired man in America. The world I
see is
very different from what they see. Those who think like me
are
condemned to the margins because
the critical alternative press
of the Vietnam War era no longer
exists. The NYT chose to
remain silent about the enormous
protest marches that took
place during the summer; and the
readers of The Nation, the
only newspaper with any guts,
are at most 50 thousand: nothing
in a country as large as
ours.
(Q) What does your wife Francoise Mouly, the artistic
director of
the New Yorker, think of all this.
She thinks that I've left her at
the New Yorker as a hostage, but
I don't think she wants to
follow my example. Sometimes, I think
I would like to emigrate to
Europe; and seeing that in America
they won't even let me smoke, the temptation is very
great.
Q) Your plans after the New Yorker
In May, at the Nuage Gallery in Milano, there will be an
exhibi-
tion that covers my ten years at
the New Yorker. Ten is a better
number than eleven and, who
knows, perhaps I left the magazine
simply because it better suited
the book and catalog that
accompany the exhibition.
============================
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*Shock + Awe*
Laura Bush Cancels Symposium on
"Poetry and the American Voice"
Rather than Hear Poems which
Speak Out Against the War
NYFA Current – Weekly Arts News –
Feb 4, 2003
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_current.asp?id=105&fid=6&sid=17#news2
"And
it's madness
to ask poets to celebrate,
when people can't even
breathe deeply
for fear of war's imminence" --
Gregory Orr, "refusing"
PORT TOWNSEND,
WA; WASHINGTON, DC -- On January 19,
Founding Editor
of Copper Canyon Press, poet Sam Hamill –
who had
received an invitation from First Lady Laura Bush to
attend a poetry
Symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice"
scheduled for
February 12, 2003 -- responded by circulating an
email to poets
around the world.
He wrote that
"Only the day before I had read a lengthy report
on George
Bush's proposed 'Shock and Awe' attack on Iraq,
calling for saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing
of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians. I
believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt
and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the
War movement like the one organized to speak out against the
war in Vietnam."
Asking poets to
speak up "for the conscience of our country"
Hamill called for poems to be included in an anthology which he
would present to the White House on the afternoon of the Poetry
Symposium.
"Please
join me in making February 12 a day when the White
House can truly hear the voices of American poets," he
requested. Over 2,000 poets -- including
Hayden Carruth,
Yusef Komunyakaa, W.S. Merwin,
Philip Levine, Grace Paley,
Galway Kinnell, Gregory Orr,
Marilyn Hacker, John Balaban,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and Adrienne
Rich -- sent poems to Hamill in
response to his call.
But
their works will not be heard at the White House. Laura Bush
has
postponed the symposium on the "Poetry and the American
Voice",
whch had a focus on Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes
and
Walt Whitman.
"While
Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all
Americans to
express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and
believes that
it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to
be a literary
event into a political forum." the NEW YORK TIMES
quotes Noelia Rodriguez, the first lady's press secretary, as
saying.
A website -- http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org
-- has been set
up and plans
"to publish every poem by every poet who wishes to
contribute as a
public witness for peace."
"The war
is ours, now, here, it is our republic
facing its own betraying terror.
And how we tell the story is forever after,"
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in "American Wars," the poem she sent
Sam Hamill to
be presented at the White House symposium.
ARGUMENTS +
DIFFERING OPINIONS:
"With Antiwar Poetry Set, Mrs. Bush Postpones Event"
By Elisabeth Bumiller, NYTIMES 1/31/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/politics/31POET.html
"A Song of Themselves"
By LEONARD GARMENT, NYTimes 2/08/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/08GARM.html?pagewanted=1