I really don't like the Bush administration. While I appreciate Copper Canyon Press, I don't think much of the recent actions of its founder Sam Hamill, who, planning to hijack a White House symposium on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes, had this to say: "What idiot thought Sam Hamill would be a good candidate for Laura Bush's tea party? ... Someone's going to get fired over this." And I'll dance when Saddam Hussein is dead.
Besides, perhaps, Laura Bush, about the only admirable person consistently linked with the story is Marilyn Nelson, who planned to attend the now-postponed conference but to wear a scarf with peace signs (well, that might be worth a snicker). Ms. Nelson's father was one of the Tuskegee Airmen, and she has taught at West Point. She's often considered one of the New Formalists (she was in the anthology), but the book I have, The Fields of Praise, probably has more free non-metrical than metrical poetry. Poems selected there from her book The Homeplace tell the story of a family born in slavery. Here's a frightening sonnet from that section:
CHOSEN
Diverne wanted to die, that August night
his face hung over hers, a sweating moon.
She wished so hard, she killed part of her heart.
If she had died, her one begotten son,
her life's one light, would never have been born.
Pomp Atwood might have been another man:
born with a single race, another name.
Diverne might not have known the starburst joy
her son would give her. And the man who came
out of a twelve-room house and ran to her
close shack across three yards that night, to leap
onto her cornshuck pallet. Pomp was their
share of the future. And it wasn't rape.
In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.
7:35:27 PM 
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