Frontline poets
Back in January, an extra fifteen seconds of fame were granted to the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion for a 30-word anti-war poem in which he questioned President George Bush's motives. Motion suggested that oil, greed and his father were driving Bush junior to war. Here's the verse:
Causa Belli"They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad;
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad."Reaction to Motion's ode was predictable; the anti-war bloc cheered it, and the anti-Saddam confederation jeered it. Motion's no Larkin, of course, but who is anymore? Still, versifying for the smoked-salmon set is much more enjoyable than being beaten with iron cables across the legs or having your back smoothed with a hot iron — liberties regularly taken by Saddam's thugs when rebellious Kurds fall into their hands. In his "Letter from Northern Iraq" in this week's New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg talks to those who pray for Saddam's demise. Poets, including Andrew Motion, might find inspiration in this paragraph:
"It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Kurdistan who is opposed to the war against Saddam's regime. People on street corners ask for American flags or photographs of George Bush; the appreciation of the United States extends to the intellectual class. Sherko Bekas, who was described to me as Kurdistan's unofficial poet laureate, was particularly upset by the well-publicized efforts of American poets to stop the war. 'Saddam is the god of war,' Bekas said, when I saw him in his office at a publishing firm in Sulaimaniya. 'He is the killer of poetry.' He went on, 'I say to these poets that if they lived for two weeks under Saddam's rule they would write verse in reverse. They would write poems asking Bush to attack Saddam sooner.' "Verse in reverse. I like it.
