Eleven Poets, Including College's Parini, Alvarez, Stage Anti-War Reading

Author: Claire Bourne

D. E. Axinn Professor of Creative Writing Jay Parini and Writer-in-Residence Julia Alvarez joined forces with nine other poets Sunday at the Congregational Church in Manchester, Vt., to protest the proposed war against Iraq.
"We honor tonight not merely the right, but the duty, to protest and dissent," said Ed Morrow, owner of the Manchester-based Northshire Bookstore that sponsored the reading.
The cancellation of a literary tea to be hosted by First Lady Laura Bush last Wednesday prompted Morrow and his wife Barbara to organize Sunday's event. The White House "indefinitely postponed" the forum set to honor Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman after learning that some of the invited poets, including Parini, intended to voice their opposition to military action versus Iraq.
"I would like to thank Mrs. Bush for being so thin-skinned," said Southern Vermont poet Jamaica Kincaid as she took to the podium. "If she weren't so thin-skinned, we wouldn't be here today.
"To think that a woman who goes to bed at night and sits down to dinner with a man who is the lord and master of weapons of mass destruction and who plans to use them could not stand to hear some poets disagree with him," she continued.
Alvarez touched on a similar theme in a poem she composed following the "disinvitation."
"Were they afraid the poets might persuade/A sensitive girl who always loved to read,/A librarian who stocked the shelves with Poe and Dickinson,/Or was she herself afraid to be swayed/By the cooing doves that have to live at odds with the screaming hawks in her family," she read, triggering a burst of applause from the 600-person strong crowd.
Alvarez, who had cancelled a trip to the Dominican Republic to participate in the event, also expressed hope. After witnessing both the overflowing chapel and thousands of people in cities across the world take to the streets in protest this weekend, she said, "Suddenly the world seems savable."
Parini was not so optimistic. "We have a damn president who's about to kill, to burn, to dismember tens of thousands of Iraqi children, mothers, fathers, innocent American soldiers who don't know what they're doing," he said. "We're paying for this with American dollars which they're borrowing from my children and my children's children, and it's going to come back on us for generations to come."
He turned to two American poets to express the reasons why he and the other poets had gathered to protest. He first evoked Walt Whitman who said that poetry was the conscience of the people before quoting Auden who wrote, "All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie."
"That's what we're working for," Parini said. "Poets resort to language to solve problems."
William O'Daly, one of two out-of-state poets present, read a poem entitled "To the Forty-third President of the United States of America" in which he asked, "Mr. President ... What if Kuwait grew carrots,/what if Iraq's main exports were chick peas and cotton shawls/destined for American women longing for the exotic?"
Interspersed with original work, the poets read pieces by Dickinson, Whitman and Hughes. Whitman's poems were the most widely read. His anti-war verse, they said, was appropriate for the occasion. "[Whitman's] bitterness is not because he was a bitter person or because he was anti-American or unpatriotic," said Pulitzer Prize-winning Vermont poet Galway Kinnell. "It was because he loved America so much that he was continually disappointed."
The politically charged reading featured recitations and personal comments from Parini, Alvarez, Kincaid, Kinnell, O'Daly, incoming State Poet Laureate Grace Paley, Donald Hall, Greg Delanty, 2002 National Book Award winner Ruth Stone, David Budbill and Jodi Gladding.
The evening's program will be compiled in an anthology to benefit the National Booksellers Foundation for Freedom of Expression, and according to Zachary Marcus, the Northshire Bookstore's marketing director, a similar reading is planned for early April.