Review:  Dialogue Through Poetry and UNESCO's World Poetry Day (3/19)

by Bill Kushner

For that very night, irony of ironies, Bush, the Bush regime, began to bomb Iraq, and the war began. Even as Amiri and Amini Baraka stirred an audience of fellow poets and students and ordinary citizens to huge applause with their calling out, "Impeach President Bush! Impeach President Bush" our President and Commander-in-Chief was on TV telling us that his war had been declared.

As a poet myself, since 9/11, I have often wondered whether the delicate act of creating a poem, a thing of beauty, in this angry world is not but another form of madness. Coming home from that lovely evening and turning on the TV to hear the awful news that the bombing and destruction of our ordinary lives had already begun, I thought the same thought. What is the value of poetry in a world gone mad?

And I saw the faces of hese poets again—Schulman, Creeley, Hacker, Seshadri, the Baraka'. I heard their voices, their poems, again. Almost all of them are close to or around the age of senior citizens. These are poets who truly know life and who truly sing life. They sing of their children, as Seshadri did in a poem trying to explain the cruelty of war to his son. They sing of friendship, as Hacker did in a great poem to the great poet June Jordan. They sing of love, as Creeley did; who was introduced, indeed, as "the poet of love." They sing of parents and parenting as did Schulman, in a lovely song to her mother.

And so I have to think of myself and these poets and all of us poets, troubadours, roustabouts, as not mad, no, not mad at all. We light our candles against the darkness, our poems do, our lives do, as the winds of war do blow. That is what we poets do. That is all we can do. Even as bombs fall, may our songs sing on.

(This annual event, held this year at Mason Hall, Baruch College (Lex & 3rd), was organized by Rattapallax Press, Ram Devineni, publisher. Bill Kushner's collection is He Dreams of Waters, from Rattapallax.)