"The Poet's Novelist":  Michael Hulse on W.G. Sebald at Poets House (2/26)

Women on War, with editor Daniela Gioseffi, Molly Peacock, D.H. Melhem, Pwu Jean Lee at the Graduate Center (3/4)

"What Part of Me Could They Come From?":  Kinnell Leads Anti-War Reading Conceived by Bly at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square (3/6)

An audience of about forty gathered on March 4 at the CUNY Graduate Center to mark the release of and hear contributors read from Women on War:  An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present, a 416-page volume edited and with an introduction by Daniela Gioseffi. A major reading is planned for April. The book's underlying premise, naturally enough, is that women's experience of war is quite different from, or at least adds something unique to, that of men, who have traditionally been the sole combatants in the field.

Referring to her thirty-page introduction, editor Daniela Gioseffi, a long-time activist, confided that she had become more politically "hard-nosed" since her first compilation. This second edition, from The Feminist Press, adds, she said, a good deal of new material since the book first appeared in 1988 from another publisher. Gioseffi praised Jean Casella, her FP editor for encyclopaedic knowledge of the world and of the women in it.

Neither had anticipated how timely the new edition would be now in March, as the United Nations struggles with a dogmatic Bush administration eager for peace through invasion and with Saddam Hussein, another implacable, iron-fisted tyrant in a succession of same whom the U.N. has confronted since its charter first saw light in San Francisco in 1945. The central governing precept of that document, and thus the first principle of international law, appears right away in Article 2, Section 4:  "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

Contributors Molly Peacock, Pwu Jean Lee, and D.H. Melhem read and offered interesting background on the state of women who have sought a place at the peace-making table, if not in the situation room. Artist Käthe Kollwitz, was the first woman to head the German academy of arts, and a pacifist. "Daughter" in Chinese is "female son." Muriel Rukeyser once asked, "What would happen if one women told the truth about her life? The world would split open." A treatise is appearing soon which may help dispose of the question of whether Rukeyser was a 'real' poet. Denise Levertov, an opponent of the Vietnam War, may have gotten more respect. She was quoted:  "The poets must give us the imagination of peace, not just the absence of war." In her nightmare, the world will burn through the hole in the being of the guy on the controls who was unloved by his mother—"Of all the men whose hands you'd hoped to be in…" An upcoming event at the Cornelia Street Café will return Mother's Day to its true origins:  the honoring of women who lost their sons in battle.

The work gathers together writings by more than 150 women, including renowned poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, and activists, as well as non-writers with first-hand experience of armed conflict as survivors, refugees, rape victims, nurses, and soldiers. Spanning the globe and traversing more than two centuries, the pieces in this collection range from an ancient verse by Sappho to an essay by Arundhati Roy about the meaning of September 11. It is intended as a portrait of war that has "too seldom been seen," and a plea for peace that has "too seldom been heard."

Contributors to the anthology include:  Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Barbara Ehrenreich, Carolyn Forché, Nadine Gordimer, Kimiko Hahn, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Kumin, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, and Christa Wolf.

(ISBN: 1-55861-409-5, Paperback $19.95, available through Feminist Press at CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave., Ste. 5406, NYC 10016, phone:  (212) 817-7920 fax:  (212) 817-1593, and at better bookstores. Event sponsored by The Center for the Study of Women and Society.

Broadly acclaimed for poems from his Vietnam War experience (though not only), Yusef Komunyakaa learned "the wisdom of camouflage, / not to stand out. . . . Let them think I am / a shadow of a doubt." [See his contributions to 'Only the Dead,' the magazine's Jun '01 Vietnam issue.] It took him a long time before he was able to write about it. In "You and I Have Disappeared," he watches a burning girl "glo[w] like the fat tip of a banker's cigar, . . . like a burning bush driven by a God-awful mind." (Many in the room were audibly shaken by that close.) He read "Thanks" ("for the tree between me / and the sniper's bullet"), with its image of the monarch butterfly he saw suspended as though in air, but in fact on the otherwise invisible wire of a booby trap. He closed with "Facing It," his moments at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the wall etched with names, "half-expecting to find my own," and sees reflections in the marble, a woman brushing a boy's hair.

Tracy Morris offered three experimental poems ("Buildings are people with Quasimodo humps / and spires like dousing forks"), the last, a sound poem called "Heaven." Originally written about women victims of spousal abuse, she said she sensed it related to the feeling which we have [the millions of us, perhaps, who cried 'No' in the streets and were regarded by George W. Bush, he said, as little more than 'focus groups'], namely, that we "do not accept it." Ms. Morris sang, she babbled, she wheezed, Heaven, I'm in—, as her hands fibrillated rapidly over her chest like the heart of a terrified bird.

The words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech, given at the Riverside Church, were evoked by Rose Stein, who also called on Osip Mandelstam who spoke of Joseph Stalin as "the Kremlin mountaineer," went to prison and died for it. Most striking, though, were the lines she read from "Ogres," a new poem by W.S. Merwin. After a lyrical opening on a wakeful night, listening to the room's sea ("this unspoken favor"), his mind drifts back to those "frauds in office," and he asks himself, "What part of me could they have/ come from were they made of my/ loathing itself and dredged from/ the bitter depths of my shame". As we all will ask ourselves repeatedly this month and for many. She also offered Neruda's "Dictators" and her translation of a poem from the 80's by a Palestinian writer who conceived a sultan at the end of his patience who orders, "Execute this poem!" Ms. Stein let Czeslaw Milosz close with "Child of Europe," which reveals our nature that, we who enjoy April "are better than those who burned," that we, given a choice, will prefer that the other die, and will say, "Let it be done quickly."

Galway Kinnell chose poems about the suffering of children in wars, real and imagined, including his own Fergus ("The Olive-Wood Fire"). Neruda, in Kinnell's round voice, addressed Lorca, mourned him and their time in Spain, his own house of flowers there, geraniums spilling off the balcony. He imagines that friends back home in Chile will ask why his poetry speaks no more of volcanoes, but rather, of "jackals" and "vipers." "Come see the blood in the streets," he says. "Come see the blood in the streets." The President told lies in a second piece Kinnell read by another, had "private information" about which of two cities is the capital of Wyoming. His was the thrill that thrives, the "deep longing for death." This speaker, fearing, then seeing the worst, would drop on all fours, screaming his vocal chords blue. And it would be days before he could hold his own children again.

Gerald Stern and Sharon Olds also presented. Robert Bly and Grace Paley were both in ill health and could not appear.

—MH