Meet The Real Minnesota Poet Laureate
Posted by Andy on March 1st, 2008
Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) appointed the state’s first Poet Laureate this week. The winner is none other than Robert Bly.
No one really seems to have dug into the guy on the blogs, and heck, I hadn’t either til I received an email from an RF reader. It turns out Robert Bly is a lefty, a big time anti-war lefty.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance.
The Light Around The Body was a Fonda-esque slap to the face of America’s veterans.
And don’t for one second think this was in his past. His website has him appearing at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival March 20th to 23.
Split This Rock? Glad you asked. Here’s why leftist activists are gathering in DC.
Poets have long played a central role in movements for social change. Today, at a critical juncture in our country’s history, poetry that gives voice to the voiceless, names the unnamable, and speaks directly from the individual and collective conscience is more important than ever. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the centrality of the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.
As we head into the fifth year of war in Iraq, our country faces a crisis of imagination. Most Americans agree that we need dramatic change: to end the war, reorder our national priorities to meet human needs, save our planet. How we address these challenges is a question not just for policy makers and strategists. It is a question for all of us. We believe that poets have a unique role to play in social movements as innovators, visionaries, truth tellers, and restorers of language.
For crying out loud Pawlenty. You can’t say you support the troops and then honor someone with such a prestigious position who has a history of undermining them. Just what the heck was he thinking, or didn’t he even bother to Google the guy or the anti-war group he founded and funded?
But this isn’t the first time Pawlenty has given an official soap box for anti-war leftists.
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March 1st, 2008 at 1:53 am
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March 1st, 2008 at 10:32 am
So did you actually try to read “The Light Around the Body”, or did you partake in the right’s devoted tradition of reviewing stuff you haven’t read or seen? Can’t wait to see your list of right-wing, pro-war poets.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
They tried interviewing all the non-leftist non-anti-war poets. His phone was disconnected.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:46 am
[...] by the ebudy god of Indo-Iranian times, and the sound-hole also is cut off injournals.aol.comMeet The Real Minnesota Poet LaureateMeet The Real Minnesota Poet Laureate Posted by Andy on March 1st, 2008 Governor Tim Pawlenty R [...]