Versus verse: Poets Against War.

It [language] recovers its simplest function and is again an instrument serving a purpose; no one doubts that the language must name reality which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness. (1)

--Czeslaw Milosz

In February of 2003, Laura Bush planned a Poetry and the American Voice" session to honor the literary legacies of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman. She invited prominent American poets to come and read at the White House. When Sam Hamill, editor of Copper Canyon Press, received his invitation, he decided to use the forum as a place to express his opposition to the upcoming war against Iraq. He vehemently opposed President Bush's proposed use of "saturation bombing" of Iraq which would result in the deaths of countless civilians. He invited poets, via e-mail, to send him antiwar poems which he would collect into an anthology and present to Mrs. Bush at the reading. He wrote: "I believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam. I am asking every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war." (2)

Hamill received 13,000 poems by early February--and the promise of poets around the country to organize readings for "A Day of Poetry Against the War" on 12 February 2003. As a result, Laura Bush cancelled her event, commenting, "It would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." (3) Unwilling to be silenced, Hamill and the Poets Against War volunteers compiled a paper anthology of the 13,000 poems submitted to the site (along with a smaller, in-print edition of selected poems from the site, also called Poets Against War) which was presented to the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration on 5 March 2003. Still active in 2005, now with 18,256 poems archived on the site, Poets Against War actively publishes critiques of current U.S. global policies. (4)

TEACHING IN A TIME OF WAR

In many ways, this article serves as a companion piece to Leonard Vogt's "Teaching in a Time of War" from issue #72 of Radical Teacher, since we both teach at LaGuardia Community College; this article provides another snapshot of teaching about the war within the same institution, calling on different material but using similar pedagogical approaches. In the classroom, I situate myself as a materialist feminist teacher, working to help students understand the ways in which ideology and history are powerfully connected forces in their own lives. This lesson is particularly important at a community college where many of our students live their lives on the edge of "have to." Their complicated lives often leave little room for anything other than work, family life, and study. Often, the combination of those three proves overwhelming because they simply do not have the time to be full-time parents, full-time students, and full-time workers. Accordingly, I believe the classroom is a crucial activist space in my students' lives, opening up time where they can make the connections their busy lives sometimes eschew.

I begin this particular class by sharing with students that our class is based on four premises: everyday life is political; our individual, governmental, and collective actions impact society; art and literature play a crucial role in the history and conscience of a nation by recording "alternative" histories and imagining different possibilities; and that the very best writing comes from a context where students are generative and not reiterative in responding to the ideas presented by texts in the course.

My own work with the Poets Against War website is also situated in a Liberal Arts Cluster, LaGuardia's innovative learning community structure for incoming liberal arts majors. While Leonard Vogt's course focuses on "Truth, Lies and Videotape," I am teaching the Poets Against War website as one of the texts for my "Fighting for Our Rights: Students, Workers, Citizens and the Promise of American Democracy" Liberal Arts Cluster. The cluster is comprised of four courses which share the same cohort of twenty-eight students. I teach the Composition I and Introduction to the Research Paper courses and my co-teacher, Lorraine Cohen from Social Sciences, teaches the Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to Social Movements courses. Once a week, we teach an additional shared hour, where we make the connections between the four courses explicit. The course also often ns the opportunity to put our shared pedagogy into action. We both believe that the classroom is a site of dialogue and, often, collective action as we urge students to begin to think about acting on their beliefs and create spaces for that to happen.

For the students who enter our Liberal Arts cluster, the fall of 2005 offers a unique opportunity to continue our work in connecting the history of social movements in the United States to the current war in Iraq; this fall, I will use the Poets Against War site as a powerful articulation of current events and the crucial role of the poet in commenting on society. At the same time that I see the war as a critical "teachable moment," many colleagues across the country continue to believe that there is a dear divide between the war in Iraq and life in the United States.

At the 2004 session of MLA, Michael Berube presented to the Delegate Assembly on the Executive Council's decision to reject the Assembly's 2003 antiwar resolution which asked for "the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and reallocation of funds to reverse inattention to, and grave deficits in, funding of education and other human services." (5) The Executive Council's decision stems, in part, from the belief that it was inappropriate for the MLA to take an official stand against the war because the current war in Iraq didn't impact our literature classrooms. (6) I beg to differ. Teaching about the war in Iraq has become an increasing imperative on our community college campus. The current war in Iraq significantly interrupts our community. Students disrupt their studies to serve out commitments they made to different branches of the U.S. military in order to fund their education; veterans return from service and begin to assimilate to student life; our large Arab and Arab-American populations regularly confront new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidelines and restrictions on immigrants, including the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS); our foreign students rigorously abide by their F-1 visa requirements. Additionally, recruiters for the armed services come onto campus trying to sign our students up for military duty; in May 2005, our college hosted a day long conference entitled "Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki," (7) demonstrating the role of the university in analyzing war and its effects; and our 2005-2006 common reading for first year students, Art Spiegelman's Maus, was selected by the faculty committee in part because it would serve as an historical measure of our contemporary times. Ours is a bustling community of 13,000 students for whom the war does not serve as an abstract exercise in evening television viewing. Instead, ours is a community seeking to make meaning out of a war and the way it has affected lives here and abroad.

Learning Community Context

This fall will be the third time that "Fighting For Our Rights" has been offered. In many ways, the texture of the course changes based on events in New York City and contemporary global events. The cluster has a strong social justice emphasis because the two social science courses serve as the introductory courses for students in the new Labor and Community Organizing Option for the Liberal Arts AA. degree, a program which Lorraine Cohen created and directs. The larger vision of the duster is to prepare students for the intensive work in their major.

We have worked to align our syllabi around major themes in both courses, looking intensively at the women's, labor, civil rights, and antiwar movements. While Lorraine Cohen teaches the history of social movements in her courses, I select "moments" from social movement history and create units around texts that respond to those movements. We use our shared hour to take group field trips to local events like the 2003 Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride Rally and the Whitney Museum's 2004 documentary exhibition, War: Protest in America 1965-2004. We show films which further enrich students' understanding of social movements such as the Eyes on the Prize (1987) series, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and And the Band Played On (1993), and we share two research papers which students write using the research paper skills they learn in my class and apply them to the history of social movements.

This fall, I will be using some new texts, including the Poets Against War website paired with Spiegelman's Maus. In addition to the unit on war, I will also include units on the food industry, using Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) paired with the documentary Super Size Me (2004); on AIDS, using Sapphire's Push (1996) paired with And the Band Played On (1993); and on labor organizing, looking at migrant workers through Raymond Barrio's The Plum Plum Pickers (1984).

I ask students to present the information they have learned in their Introduction to Social Movements class in order to set up the historical background for the historical and cultural moment we will examine and the goals of that particular movement. In addition, we sometimes revisit primary documents (which students can then use later in their research papers); sometimes I offer students additional readings to supplement what they have already read in Sociology. Finally, I remind students that we will use the literature to extend our discussion of social movements and to discuss how literature works to support or detract from the larger social movement.

Situating the Poetry of War

Whenever I teach the poetry of war, I do considerable work setting up the theoretical vocabulary that will guide our discussions, calling extensively on Carolyn Forche's work, in particular her "Introduction" to the anthology Against Forgetting as a means to establish a shared vocabulary about the poetry of war and to provide students with a language they can use in discussing the poetry they read. This semester, I plan to use Forche's analysis of "poetry of witness" as a fundamental theoretical construct for approaching the poetry of war. Forche defines this witness as "a third term, one that can describe the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. Let us call this space 'the social.'" She continues, "the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice." (8) Forche's definition of the social intersects nicely with the vocabulary the class will have created over the semester. When teaching this course, I work hard to create an understanding that the literature and art of conscience provides another way to interrupt and understand dominant cultural discourses. Forche suggests that Americans neither understand nor remember war in the same way as other countries because of our historical distance from the physical reality of war. For students reading the poetry of war, this background is an important component in understanding both the poetry and the controversy that surrounds it.

Forche's concept, the "poetry of witness," advances an understanding of the word "political" in the context of a social sphere that gives voice to the particular cultural and historical moment. Forche maintains that: "The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion." (9) While I believe that Forche's comments provide a useful lens for examining political poetry, particularly with undergraduate students, I also believe her 1993 analysis of the United States is somewhat dated in a post-September 11th world; for the first time since Pearl Harbor, serious acts of aggression have taken place on American soil, claiming thousands of lives in what was previously perceived as a "safe" nation. Accordingly, in addition to Forche's "Introduction," this semester I also plan to use three recent essays from the Poets Against War site (the newsletter section and the press archive): Martin Espada's "Seers Unseen: Poets of the Vietnam War," Rebecca Solnit's "Acts of Hope," and Robert Pinsky's "Poetry and War, Again."

Martin Espada writes, "the language of poetry is powerful precisely because it is not the language of power. Phrases such as 'weapons of mass destruction,' and their devious uses by our government to rationalize war, bleed language of its meaning. These poets restore the blood to words. They understand the relationship between blood and words only too well." (10) Espada's essay will provide the basis for understanding the language of poetry differently from the language of everyday political rhetoric. In the assignments related to the Poets Against War website, this is an important tool for evaluating the poetry of War.

Rebecca Solnit posits the antiwar poems as "Acts of Hope" that can create "pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination." (11) Solnit's discussion of "collective imagination" will prove particularly useful in drawing a direct connection between the direct actions students will study in Introduction to Social Movements and the artistic work they study in the Poets Against War site. Solnit describes the importance of social transformation, an explicit part of the larger social movements students will engage this term. As students think about abolishing the legacies of racism, classism, sexism, ablism, and homophobism, we encourage them to consider how these changes might take place in ali four courses across the duster; I will posit that one important tool is the ability to change the language of our world and to create new ways to talk with one another.

Finally, I plan to use Robert Pinsky's "Poetry and War, Again" to challenge the controversies around the poetry of war. Pinsky's essay proves useful in historicizing both Hamill's initial creation of the Poets Against War site and demonstrating the historical relationship of poetry and war. Additionally, Pinsky's former role as Poet Laureate sends a powerful message about the social responsibility of the poet. He writes:

   When poets declined Mrs. Bush's
   invitation last month, many
   observers referred back to Robert
   Lowell's refusal to attend a reception
   at Lyndon Johnson's White
   House, in protest of America's role
   in the war in Vietnam. Robert
   Lowell remains, many years after
   his death, one of those figures who
   attracts public attention, who
   seems to focus energy partly
   through some mysterious personal
   quality or fate. But Lowell was also
   an extraordinary poet, and, beyond
   personality, he commands attention
   because he was able to write
   about public matters with moral
   vision, though never moralistically.
   He could write dearly about uncertainty
   and grandly about anxiety.
   He could even write definitively
   about political ambiguity. (12)

Too often, the debate around Poets Against War has treated the site and its poems as if they were an anomaly rather than the newest iteration of poets commenting on their society. In preparation for working with the poems on the Poets Against War site, I am interested in helping students to connect the current Poets Against War project to a larger timeline of literary history where literature has served as a powerful tool in raising social awareness.

TEACHING POETS AGAINST WAR

I teach in a highly digital environment. Of the seven hours I meet with students a week, we spend four hours in a computer lab, making extensive use of our Blackboard 6 platform. I use Discussion Board as a regular feature of our class, collecting our discussions online. On the days that we do not meet in the computer lab, I teach in a "smart" classroom with access to the Internet so that I can bring online resources into the classroom.

In approaching the Poets Against War site, I plan to begin by establishing connections between political poetry and the poetry of war. Before introducing students to the site itself, we will discuss the Forche, Solnit, Espada and Pinsky pieces. I will ask students to create a lexicon of new vocabulary about the poetry of war and to create a list of expectations they bring to the poetry of war, based on the claims in the four essays we have read. This work will be stored on our class Discussion Board so that we have easy access to this information in our upcoming discussions. Next, I will take students on a guided tour of the site, showing them the poems and the essays on the site. On the first day of working with the Poets Against War site, we will do explications of two poems.

As this is the first time many students have encountered poetry in a college classroom, I generally like to begin by discussing poetry and imagery. For this class, I plan to use "Stone Clock," by Iranian poet Alireza Ghazveh because the images are very accessible and provide students with an immediate understanding of the poem on several levels. I ask students to "draw what they hear" as I read this long poem that questions the role of poetry in a time of conflict, recording their visual interpretations on the board in the smart classroom. I repeat the poem several times until each student has finished drawing the poem. In a section of the poem Ghazveh writes:

   What time is it by stone-time
      now?
   And until when I should write the
      wrath and stone poetry?
   And until when the stony rain
      should fall?
   And until when the dock is to
      wait for these butchers? (13)

When I have used this poem in other classes, the board is filled with various images of time passing and docks, from alarm clocks to Grandfather clocks to school clocks. Next, I ask students to explain what they have drawn. As each student talks through the images on the board, I keep a list of the recurring images and themes that students have used. We then use this to explicate the poem. Ghazveh's poem, and the imagery it uses, also allows for a longer discussion about the role of poetry in a time of war. I anticipate that this will prove a useful opening to our other discussions about the poetry of war, and the particular cultural differences between Muslim countries and the United States.

Next, as a large group, we will examine "The Price of Tomatoes" by poet Hayan Charara, an Arab-American poet and former LaGuardia faculty member, whose note about his poem says, "I, for one, would love for the First Family to read my work--my way of repaying the visit from FBI agents who have, twice already, visited my home since September 11th."

Charara's poem, and his articulation of his relationship to the events of September 11th, provide a useful entry into a discussion of the poetry of witness. Charara uses the price of a tomato he holds in a grocery store, "1.99," as a way into challenging his readers to consider what a "price" really is. Like many LaGuardia students, Charara's meditation on the tomato evokes his own complicated relationship with an international family who live far from the privileges of the United States as the poem turns, subtly, into a meditation on the value of dean water. As he decides not to purchase the tomatoes, we imagine his grandfather far away, connecting the dirt on the tomatoes to the dirt on a soldier's shoes. He writes,

   My grandfather, whose stomach
   shrank to almost nothing,

   smaller than a clenched fist,
   wanted only clean water,

   but the soldier
   who spoke Hebrew and Arabic,

   refused. Instead,
   he washed his shoes (14)

I ask students to identify the following: Who is the speaker of the poem? Where is the speaker of the poem? Who is the speaker talking about? Where is that person? What political situation is the poet describing? How does this poem work to situate "the social"? Why do you think Charara contributed this poem to the Poets Against War site? How does this poem relate to the current war against Iraq?

In the subsequent class meeting, I plan to have students work in small groups, examining two groups of poems: poems that imagine the war abroad and poems that respond to the war here. The first pairing is Adrienne Rich's "The School Among the Ruins" and D.H. Melham's "Delivering the Mail in Fallujah." The second pairing is Penelope Austin's "War Breaks Out Again" and Ruth Stone's "Be Serious." (15) Students are asked to consider the following questions: How do these poets imagine war abroad? Do you trust their creative renderings of war? Why or why not? What is each poet saying about the war? In considering poems that respond to the war at home, I am interested in having students identify how these poems relate to their own perceptions of the war. Guiding questions include: How do these poets' interpretations of contemporary society coincide with your own understanding of the war abroad? How do these poets suggest that the war affects people living in the United States? After the small groups have had ample time to discuss the poems, this session will end with a large group discussion comparing the two types of poems. In particular, I am interested in having students identify which poems are most effective in supporting an antiwar movement and why.

Once I have created a classroom environment where students are comfortable with the vocabulary of the poetry of war and with the Poets Against War site, I will next ask them to spend intensive time exploring the Poets Against War site. Over the next several computer lab sessions, I will ask students to write online as part of our class Discussion Board. When students write these low-stakes assignments, they generally have thirty minutes to prepare to write by exploring the sites we are discussing that day; they have thirty minutes to prepare a 200-300 word response to the prompt; then they have thirty minutes to write to other members of the class in response to their posts. We spend the last thirty minutes of class in a large group discussion, connecting what they have written to the larger themes of the class.

Sample Written Assignments

Low-stakes online assignment: Dialoguing with a Poet Against the War

Thinking about the claims of the Pinksy, Espada, Forche and Solnit essays, I would like you to create a list of questions you would like to ask a poet from Poets Against War. As you read the poems on the site, what do you want to know about the act of writing poetry? What do you want to know about the intersections between poetry and antiwar activity? What would you like a poet to explain further? As a class, we will read through the questions you create and we will make a master list of questions. We will e-mail the class's list to a local poet who will write back to us as a class.

Low-stakes online assignment: Is Poetry Against the War misguided?

Critics like poet Barry Casselman, J. Bottum, The Weekly Standard's Books and Arts editor, and Roger Kimball, managing editor for The New Criterion, all published statements decrying the surge of antiwar poetry as an inappropriate subject matter for American poetry. Kimball, speaking on NPR's All Things Considered, commented that the national "Day of Poetry Against the War" readings inspired by Hamill's work and the online anthology itself are "misguided." Kimball continues, "actually it does a disservice to the cause of American poetry by tarring American poets with a political brush that many of them would resent. If these readings are a kind of reprise of what we saw in the '60s, with people like Allen Ginsberg and so on chanting 'Make love, not war' and so on, I'd think it does a great disservice to poetry." (16) Please explore the articles I have linked for you below. These articles serve to explain the ways in which some American poets believe that poets should not write about political topics. After you have read the articles, please write your own response to today's guiding question, is Poetry Against the War misguided?

Low-stakes assignment: Poetry and Social Movements

In what ways does the poetry of war connect with the antiwar movement? How do you think that poetry contributes to the antiwar movement? Use your historical understanding of the antiwar movement in connection with Vietnam and compare it to the Poets Against War project.

Culminating writing assignment: (This is a take-home essay, not an online assignment)

1. Choose one poem from the Poets Against War site that you would like to write about. Then, using the four guiding essays we have read about the poetry of war (by Forche, Pinsky, Solnit, and Espada), please evaluate the poem for its efficacy in addressing what Carolyn Forche calls "the social." The large question guiding your paper is, can poems make a difference in a time of war?

2. We briefly discussed "milblogs," the increasing trend of soldier-authored blogs written by men and women serving in Iraq. Choose one milblog and one poem from the Poets Against War site. Using Carolyn Forche's idea of the "poetry of witness," compare and contrast these two sites of witness about the war. Who are the authors? Does authorship and location affect the blog or poem's authenticity? Which piece do you find more powerful? How might each of these pieces work as a witness to the "social"?

3. Creative Option: Write your own poem about the war in preparation for submitting it to the Poets Against War site. After you have written a poem--of any length--provide a 500 word artist's statement on the poem you have written, explaining what you were trying to achieve with your poem. In your statement, you will need to make use of the four articles we read on the poetry of war.

4. Comparative Assignment: This semester you have explored direct actions as a significant form of protest in your Introduction to Social Movements class. Choose a direct action that you believe was effective. Compare that direct action to the Poets Against War project. In your paper, you will need to present the goals and the results of each endeavor. You will also need to articulate the criteria you will use to measure the efficacy of each endeavor.

Conclusions

We will spend three weeks on the Poets Against War unit in class. In addition to online writing assignments and discussions like those listed above, we will also have large, "face to face" group discussions in the Smart Classroom and view the Voices in Wartime documentary about the Poets Against War project. One of the interesting things about the Poets Against War site is that it will accept poems from anyone. Unlike the anthology, or the online chapbook, the larger archives for the site are fully participatory: anyone can write a poem. I'm interested in engaging students in a discussion around what that kind of participation embedded within a social movement means.

In a recent newsletter on the site (2005), Poets Against War founder Sam Hamill writes:

   The best any of us can do is to--as
   the old Chinese inscription
   advises--"look deeply; see clearly."
   And practice our arts with devotion
   to craft and vision. Poets
   Against War is a house that stands
   strong because we stand together,
   putting other grievances and arguments
   aside ill order to present a
   persuasive argument for nonviolens,
   for compassionate action--in
   order to speak as a conscience.
   In poetry, there is civilization. (17)

If the 1980s and 1990s saw contemporary American poetry's divide over the role of "political poetry" emerge in a widely public struggle to define poetry, then the war in Iraq has provided a powerful opportunity for many poets to again argue for peace, against the insistent war drum. Teaching Poets Against War offers the ultimate Freirean moment: the world outside of our classrooms today impacts our classrooms more than it has in any moment since the Vietnam War. Poets Against War offers students an opportunity to understand literary production--and the power of poetry--in the context of social change.

POETS AGAINST WAR RESOURCES

Poets Against War website: www. poetsagainstwar.com/default.asp

Poets Against War online chapbook (prominent poets): www. poetsagainstwar.com/chapbook.asp

Poets Against War "Poem of the Week" archive: www.poetsagainstwar.com/ poemsoftheweek_archive.asp

Poets Against War print anthology: Hamill, Sam and Sally Anderson. Poets Against War. New York: Nation Books, 2003.

Poets Against War press archive: www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ news_archive.asp

Voices in Wartime website: www.voicesinwartime.org/VoicesInWartime/Fi lm/Movie.aspx

Voices in Wartime anthology: Himes, Andrew and Jan Bultmann. Voices Against the War. Seattle: Whit Press, 2005.

Voices in Wartime DVD: Cinema Libre Distributors, 2005.

USEFUL ON-LINE RESOURCES FOR TEACHING THE POETRY OF WAR:

Christensen, Linda. "Entering History Through Poetry." Rethinking Schools OnLine. www.rethinkingschools.org/ war/ideas/entel173.shtml

Peterson, Bob. "Teaching with Protest Songs." Rethinking Schools On-Line. www.rethinkingschools.org/war/ ideas/song173.shtml

Poets Against War On-Line Chapbook. Poets Against War. www. poetsagainstthewar.org/ chapbook.asp

Pratt, John Clark. "Poetry and Vietnam." Modern American Poetry. www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ vietnam/poetryandvietnam.htm

Starbuck, Harvey. "The Literature of War. "The American Academy of Poets. www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/ prmMID/17109

World War I poetry tutorials and archives geared toward undergraduate students

Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature. Oxford University. www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/

High School and College

Voices in Wartime Education Project. Voices in Wartime. voicesinwartime.org/ VoicesInWartime/Education/ VIWEducationProject.aspx

NOTES

(1) Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983): 80.

(2) Sam Hamill. "An Open Letter from Sam Hamill." www. poetsagainstthewar.org. 17 February 2003.

(3) Associated Press. "Poets to Protest White House Action." Boston Globe. 10 February 2003.

(4) Poets Against War. www. poetsagainstthewar.org/ findpoem.asp. 21 June 2004.

(5) For a more extended discussion of this, please see Michael Berube's 11 January 2005 blog post, "MLA Out of Iraq," www.michaelberube.com/index. php/mla_out_of_iraq/

(6) Ibid.

(7) See LaGuardia Community College's "Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki" website for teaching resources and art and poetry. www.laguardia.edu/ctl/peace/ default.htm.

(8) Carolyn Forche, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993) 31.

(9) Ibid, 45.

(10) Martin Espada, "Seers Unseen: Poets of the Vietnam War," Poets Against War website. www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ newsletter/news_espada.asp

(11) Rebecca Solnit, "Acts of Hope," Alternet, www.alternet.org/story/ 15952/

(12) Robert Pinsky, "Poetry and War, Again," Slate, slate.msn.com/id/2080074/

(13) Alireza Ghazveh, "Stone Clock," Poets Against War website. www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ displaypoem.asp?AuthorID = 16695#453078340

(14) Hayan Charara, "The Price of Tomatoes," Poets Against War website. www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ displaypoem.asp? AuthorID=672

(15) All of these poems are available on the Poets Against War website. Adrienne Rich's "The School Among the Ruins": www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ displaypoem.asp?AuthorID= 5457#453062879, D.H. Melham's "Delivering the Mail in Fallujah": www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=2289 6, Penelope Austin's "War Breaks Out Again": www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ displaypoem.asp?AuthorID= 6663#453064434, Ruth Stone's "Be Serious": www. poetsagainstwar.com/ chapbook.asp#Stone

(16) "Poets Mounting Anti-War Protest." All Things Considered. 11 February 2003. Marcie Sillman reporting.

(17) Sam Hamill, "Op-Ed," Poets Against War website, www. poetsagainstwar.com/newsletter/ news_hamill.asp