The Canaries Are Dead
Fast moving events have overtaken your organization. Everything you believed in and stood for has been proven wrong. Your resistance has been proved futile and you can no longer stem the tides of history that are changing your world forever. You are dispirited and aimless, unsure of what the future holds in store. Even the name of your group has now been rendered irrelevant and useless.
A Baath party member?
No.
One of the Saddam Youth?
No.
Try being the founder of Minnesota Poets Against War in Iraq today.
Poet and editor Richard Broderick asked and answered that question Sunday night at an event held by Minnesota Poets Against War in Iraq, a group he founded in February. The reading was held at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis.
"In the past year and a half, we Americans have witnessed a concerted assault in this country on language itself," he said. It's an assault, he said, in which "words have been violently sundered from their normal meanings and assigned new definitions."
So "disarmament" comes to mean "killing the leadership of another country" and "liberation" means an "illegal war of aggression," he said.
"In this poisoned verbal atmosphere, poets are the canaries in the coal mine," he said. "Language is the raw material of our art."
Let's hope they didn't order too much stationary.
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