Voices In Wartime

Little did Laura Bush realize that organizing a January 2003 symposium to celebrate the great American poets Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman would open a can of worms that would soon lead to the abrupt cancelation of the entire affair. The guests were to include widely published poet Sam Hamill who, like so many others, could not believe the first lady planned to celebrate three so politically charged writers at the very moment when her husband was gearing up to "liberate" Iraq. Hamill forwarded the invitation to some 50 fellow poets with the request that they contribute short, to-the-point verses protesting the coming war, which Hamill intended to ...