Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Remembering Poets Not Fit For The White House

I found this broadcast on the Freespeech TV website in 2003 and recorded it as an mp3. Seeing Amiri Baraka got me in a bit of a spoken word mood so I was listening to everything spoken word I have. Poets Not Fit For The White House was a project started after Laura Bush invited Sam Hamill to a poetry symposium at the White House celebrating the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson and Langston Hughes. In response, Hamill put out a call for anti war poems and received an overwhelming number of poems to send to the symposium in his absence. After attracting a bit of press about Hamill's plan the White House canceled the symposium. Then, on February 17, 2003 an event was held in New York City for poets to share their dissonance for the war.

The list of those who participated is as follows:
Ammiel Alcalay, Lee Ann Brown, Steve Colman, Robert Creeley, Martin Espada, Jorie Graham, Andre Gregory, Sam Hamill, Suheir Hammad, Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell, Youseff Komanukaa, Stanley Kunitz, Ann Lauterbach, Arthur Miller, Mos Def, Odetta, Sharon Olds, Willie Perdomo, Robert Pinsky, Peter Sacks, Sapphire, Wallace Shawn, Mark Strand, Anne Waldman, C.K. Williams, Saul Williams


More here
DOWNLOAD MP3 HERE

1 comment:

teagirl said...
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