By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:26:24 +0000

Dear Mark,
It’s eerie to read your post on the day after the FBI cited the poetry of Bruce E. Ivins as part of its “proof” that he was the perpetrator of the anthrax poisonings. This is quite the opposite, I know, of using poetry to document government executions. But nonetheless, poetry and the government and suffering tangle once again.
The Internet and your post are also bizarrely tangled. A phony (at least as far as I can tell) anti-war blog called “Stop US Wars” posted a link to this “I Fought the War” post . The sole purpose of the blog appears to be to aggregate ads for Google. So your writing and thinkingabout poets such as Reiznikoff and Jill McDonough have become the source of profits for Google and for the organziations that chose to advertise with it. Many of the organizations most likely have no idea where their ads were placed, nor does Google likely know. Only some programmed web spider knows. The Stop US Wars blog does serve to aggregate leftist writing but in your case, it did so without correctly attributing your writing.
Here is the text without the links that appears on the http://blog.stopuswars.org/ blog:
“I Fought the Law
David wrote an interesting post today on…. Here’s a quick excerpt…..
… as “an important anti-Bolshevist voice…” In 2005, New Hampshire based poet Jay Surdukowski–who is also a practicing attorney and scholar in the field of international law–published a legal brief entitled “Is Poetry a War Crime? … Read the rest of this great post here”
[The "here" links to this post]
Emily

By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:59:07 +0000

I didn’t want this post to go completely unheralded in the midst of our ongoing debates on duende, post-post-postmodern theory, and Ph.D. programs.
Thank you, Mark, for your efforts here on Harriet: particularly for bringing an important collection like SEEDS OF FIRE (and its wonderful UK publisher Smokestack) to light, but also for taking up here Chiasson’s wholly ridiculous dismissal of the Guantanamo collection. He says the language of one poem sounds like it could have been written at one of many dark points in history…but, like Miklos Radnoti’s last letters or Neruda’s exile poems or any shout by any human being in a government-induced darkness, it was not. No, these poems were written at a very specific time, for a very specific reason. This is always missing from critiques of political poetry, isn’t it?
Funny how we must recall our history lessons, be “sensitive to the time,” whenever some do-gooder dares to critique the language Wallace Stevens or James Wright or someone similarly situated, but the language of a Guantanamo prisoner doesn’t merit the privilege of historical context. But the present has always been a privilege, hasn’t it?
I particularly appreciate the legal-literary crossroads you bring up, as I once considered a career in law, and two friends of mine are lawyer-poets. I was scared that law school might eat away all my creative energies, but like them, I suffer from insomnia, so I wonder if I should have just bitten the bullet and gone to law school anyway.
To Reznikoff, I go!

Comments on: I Fought the Law

By: Emily Warn

By: Rich Villar