The book is still on - it's become a website.
Here, a quote from that link, ChicagoPoetry.com:
Hamill (a Zen Buddhist who ran for the California State Assembly in 1968 on an anti-war, socialist ticket) reminds the poetry community of the irony of the situation: "We closed the Bush poetry symposium on Whitman by 'politicizing literature.'" He goes on to say, in the newspaper The Globe And Mail: "These people wouldn't let Walt Whitman within a mile of the White House -- the good gay gray poet! I don't believe anybody there has ever read Whitman." In the Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald (which called poetry the "first casualty of the war"), Todd Swift, the editor of the e-book 100 Poets Against the War, said: "The idea that you could have a non-political event celebrating the work of Walt Whitman, a gay poet writing about what America could be during the civil war, is absurd."
There's a link to Hamill's poetry page on the site and, goodness!, right here.
Hamill has apparently been inundated by submissions - the list includes Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hayden Carruth, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, and W.S. Merwin (who wrote "an incredible indictment of Bush"). Over 1900 in four days.
And they still want to hear from YOU.
Dig the NY Times coverage. |
