[New-Poetry] politics and poetry

[Anny Ballardini]

I agree with many beautiful statements and probably most with Billy Collins' one:
to keep my mouth shut.
On the other hand there is an on the other hand for me that does not want to be that quiet and it is a side of me that sees other things and the complexity of what is happening which is so complex that I cannot even give a glimpse of it in words _I should need books.
I think it is too easy to complain and to accuse that is fundamentally what I want to say, yes I think that is it.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 5:45 AM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] politics and poetry


  http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4482
  On Political Poetry
  Farideh Hassanzadeh–Mostafavi | August 17, 2007

  The poet Samuel Hazo, at his installation as the first state poet of Pennsylvania in 1993, declared that “we should learn to listen to our poets here and now -- and not wait for history to confer on them their already earned validity.” Poets like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Lorca, Yeats, Whitman, and Frost, he continued, would be remembered long after their contemporaries – the military leaders, political officials, industrialists, and celebrities – have been forgotten. “One reason for the unforgettability of poets is that they somehow speak for more than themselves,” Hazo continued. “Day by day we are so used to hearing voices that speak for individual constituencies or institutions that we tend to be deaf to those voices that speak from and to our common humanity.” 

  Believing in Hazo’s idea that the star of poetry is our only guide, I asked several well-known poets about their views concerning the relationship between poetry and politics, particularly foreign policy. Here are their responses.


   



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