This poem is so bad that even the most scathing of replies seems to grant it more merit than it deserves, but oh well. . .

Last I heard, there were 8800 plus poets on poetsagainstthewar.org and each one of them is represented by his or her particular poem and/or statement, so it is hardly a monolithic "manifesto." Except for the essential agreement of being against the war in Iraq, there is a great diversity of opinion, which is the same thing that might be said of the rallies against the war in the last couple of days,  a diversity of view and background and yet a common sense of being against the war.

I don't know who these "honest officers of the State" are? Is this the State that I've grown up in? so noted for its honesty? and why is it the State, with that capital? the State that consigned most of the Western states to guineapigdom for aboveground nuclear testing, with horrifying results, as for instance in Terry Tempest William's "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," which is about the decimation of her traditional Mormon family who were too obedient to ever question the government or what those nuclear bombs flashing in the distance might do to their own bodies and children?  Is this "dear dear America" that so "hauls the world into decency" the same one of slavery, of the extermination of the Indians, of reservation life, of the use of the enforced boarding school to break the culture and families of those Indians that reminded, of the Japanese internment camps, of Jim Crow laws that replaced slavery with segregation, of the School of the Americas where every dictator a!
nd torture chief of Latin and South America was trained? Whoops, that's probably anti-American to mention those various realities which suggest that we have had to haul _ourselves_ into decency.

And what sort of idea of poetry is this? of the poet as a drunken vomiter at readings who insults his hosts and who is not properly grateful for his "just primae noctis with the prettiest budding poet." Am I supposed to lament the passing of this particular world? though truthfully I think it went out with Robert Lowell in his manic phase. I don't think this guy has been invited to any poetry readings lately.

Well, more seriously, what I note is that this poem is more concerned with the 'murder" of a word, of a bankrupt idea of the poet (which does not seem desirable to me in any sense), than it is with the deaths of thousands that occur in any actual war. It is all very well to say "where can I go, but with the soldiers to battle." So convenient to say for one who will surely not go. Only someone who is lamenting what he might call himself now that his idea of jus primae noctis has faded into twilight would want "to place my spirit in the bright eye of the bomb." Well, perhaps that would be a good place for it.

As for those that are actually going, they are most likely like the son of a conservative Catholic couple, he's in the Marines in Kuwait, and his parents were out with their signs yesterday, the last people in the world I would have expected to see at such a rally. Or like the two nephews in the boat steering toward the Gulf whose aunt was out with her daughter waving another sign. It's like the sign says: Support our troops. Bring them home.

I think it is precisely my no to this war that is a yes to America. America has long had this traditional sense of itself, and, yes, I'm not unaware that in some cases it has been more illusion than fact, as not going to war unless it is absolutely necessary. Of going to war only in self-defense. To argue as Rumsfeld does that this is an outmoded tradition, no longer suited for the new threat of terror, and that we need a policy of pre-emptive strike seems to me un-American and to establish a policy of war based upon whim.

All I can say is that Mr. Turner flatters himself if he thinks to give up a name which judging from this doggerel was never his to relinquish.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com




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