{"id":318,"date":"2003-02-08T19:19:56","date_gmt":"2003-02-08T23:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=318"},"modified":"2007-10-07T11:52:04","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T15:52:04","slug":"bad-poets-against-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=318","title":{"rendered":"Bad Poets Against the War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Hamill was right. He had no business at “Laura Bush’s tea party”<\/a> — not because of his fatuous politics, but because of his fatuous poetry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

State of the Union, 2003<\/p>\n

I have not been to Jerusalem,
\nbut Shirley talks about the bombs.
\nI have no god, but have seen the children praying
\nfor it to stop. They pray to different gods.
\nThe news is all old news again, repeated
\nlike a bad habit, cheap tobacco, the social lie.<\/p>\n

The children have seen so much death
\nthat death means nothing to them now.
\nThey wait in line for bread.
\nThey wait in line for water.
\nTheir eyes are black moons reflecting emptiness.
\nWe’ve seen them a thousand times.<\/p>\n

Soon, the President will speak.
\nHe will have something to say about bombs
\nand freedom and our way of life.
\nI will turn the tv off. I always do.
\nBecause I can’t bear to look
\nat the monuments in his eyes.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how you repeat cheap tobacco, I’m quite sure I don’t want to investigate the question, and I’m 100% sure that’s not what Hamill’s repeating here. This is actually worse than Andrew Motion<\/a>, worse even than Harold Pinter<\/a>: those were still possible to parody. Give me the actors against the war. Some of them can actually act.<\/p>\n

(Update:<\/b> Emperor Misha<\/a> and Cinderella<\/a> comment. Frederick Glaysher<\/a> protests to The New York Times<\/span>, which predictably sided with the poets<\/a>, and maintains a useful list of links on the whole sorry affair.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Hamill was right. He had no business at “Laura Bush’s tea party” — not because of his fatuous politics, but because of his fatuous poetry. State of the Union, 2003 I have not been to Jerusalem, but Shirley talks about the bombs. I have no god, but have seen the children praying for it […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-politics","category-2-id","category-22-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}