WHAT POETRY IS FOR
About Us Subscribe FAQ Guidelines Links Contact Us	From After the Fall: Poems Old and New WHAT POETRY IS FOR in homage to Ernesto Cardenal Back in the seventies when a Nicaraguan poet came to the Poetry Center in New York and read his poems about the United Fruit Company with the help of the U.S. government robbing his people and terrorizing with death squads, most of the audience of poetry lovers walked out. I was there, I saw it-- they just didn't want to listen. Or were brainwashed. They were probably scared because he was a communist and they'd be accused of being subversives, so it was safer not to listen to what we were doing in Latin America, practice for what we're doing a hundred times over in half the world today. But his poetry, spoken out of the anguish in his heart, was trying to make us hear-- even if the truth is ugly. And dangerous. It was also beautiful that he told us, flat out, in the simple language of truth, what we were doing to his country. Now, too, what else for a poet to write about except the devastation and misery our so-called democratic country is causing, not only at home, with a government turning the economy into a grab bag for the wealthy, but abroad, where we've become the Evil Empire, sending pirate armies to the ends of the earth to take over governments, seize their assets and control markets, leaving anarchy behind us, creating hatred wherever we go, and dangerous enemies who can fly planes with breathtaking accuracy into our arrogant towers, who devote themselves to wrecking our lives as we've wrecked theirs. ________________________________	One poet I know is saying it plainly like the Nicaraguan did. Richard Vargas in Albuquerque writes about the war in Iraq, "...we're going to be paying for this for a long time probably way past my lifetime. we've screwed generations to come," (here he's talking about the soaring national debt) "and i wouldn't be surprised if they let us starve in the streets in our old age...." That's how poets should be writing in this critical time. And about the pathology of our leaders who call everyone who opposes them a terrorist, even if the cause is just-people fighting against the occupiers of their lands, against our armies of corporate greed. And if any of us says No! No more of this!, we're reminded of their awesome power-- "if you're not with us you're against us." We know what that means-- there's a Guantanamo Bay in our future. Vargas, my poet friend, says the most important thing right now. "if we elect [that chickenshit] bush again the world community will shun us for the fucking idiots we are." But how to get rid of this gang if the voting machines are rigged? And why aren't more poets shouting from the rooftops? Or at least from the stages of all the Poetry Centers? As a British diplomat said, "If this continues all we can look forward to is unending war." The stark reality. The warning. What a poet's for.           Edward Field ________________________________