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Doug: You're of course right--it wasn't a poem that was asked for, but the presence of "poetry" to lend class to the affair. I'm always troubled when poetry is bent to that use. And I don't think it hurts to speak out against the sad reality. Mark At 09:17 AM 2/3/2001 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote: >Mark > >I take your points, all of them, & agree the poem is far too generalized (& >does not represent Page at her best). > >BUT: >> >>3. One must have absolute loyalty to the practice. As poets it's what we >>live and die by, and we don't have much else to hang on to. Any poem that >>shirks that responsibility is an affront to all of us. Worth getting hot >>under the collar about. Chill out if you don't really care. > >With such a loyalty, our only choice in this matter is to not get involved. >Or just do our best at the local level, by getting some good poets to come >out & read locally, where the bureaucratic demands won't be felt. As I & >others have argued, it seems more than likely that what was wanted was a >'nice,' general, poem that wouldn't offend anyone (except perhaps some >poets who 'have absolute loyalty to the practice' -- the one group they're >not too worried about. As your choices showed, & many of them I'd say >hurrah to, the poems we might want won't fit into the box set up by the UN. >How many of us on this list sent in poems (our own or some other we liked) >for Hacker to choose? (I admit I thought she was chosen to choose, but had >been given the go-ahead to choose from her own personal 'archive'.) > >Douglas Barbour >Department of English >University of Alberta >Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5 >(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521 >http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm > > surely when they fell > it was into grace > bpNichol > >