The Poet’s Eye–Poetry Slammer (first draft)

by Lightning Rod

Posted to Poetry and Politics on 2004-05-29 16:03:00

Poetry Slammer

Bill Nevins, a tenth grade Humanities teacher at Rio Rancho High School was placed on administrative leave as a teacher and coach/sponsor of the Write Club and Poetry Slam Team for allowing a student to read an anti-war poem. Nevins is one of seven teachers suspended in New Mexico for taking an anti-war stance.

The California Supreme Court is deciding whether to throw out the conviction of a 15-year-old boy who served 100 days in juvenile hall for writing a poem that included a threat to kill his fellow students.

Attorneys for the San Jose boy, identified as George T. in court records, described the poem Thursday as youthful artistic expression. One passage says: “For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school.” Another reads: “For I am Dark, Destructive & Dangerous.”

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Laurence replied: “The First Amendment doesn’t protect against criminal conduct.”

Since when is writing a poem considered to be criminal conduct? Oh, I know poets that I think should be prosecuted for their poetry or even executed, but that’s just my opinion and luckily I don’t wield the powers of the State.

As some pundit said, we have a system that was designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots. One of the main strokes of genius rendered by the Framers was called the First Amendment. It was intended to protect free expression. In a police state, poets will be the first to go. The idiots are building prisons faster than they are building schools.

They’ll have a special prison for poets. It will be the deepest, dankest dungeon. There will be novel tortures beyond imagination. We’ll call it the Poetry Slammer. It’ll have an official name like Unit Orange to prevent the inmates from making subversive rhymes about the institution. They’ll put me in the darkest hole.

Recently, in the fifty-first state, a group of Palestinian students were arrested by Isreali police for performing a play called “Assume the Position” about interrogation and prisoner abuse.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2723.shtml

Repressive governments always express themselves by going after the weakest targets first. The Nazis started with the mentally ill in Germany before getting around to the Gypsies and the Jews. Young people are members of the nigger class. We call them minors. It’s only predictable that repressive measures such as censorship would be first tried on them. What more wonderful and illustrative way can we teach the joys of constitutional government to our children than by arresting them for writing a poem or performing a play?

Words are powerful things, otherwise the State would not be so concerned with them. Racial cleansing sounds like such a sanitary thing. Control can be described as protection, occupation as liberation. Newspeak is a kind of poetry. It is no wonder that a regime based on lies should be frightened by words. The next thing we will see is the establishment of an agency with a Newspeak name like Department of Free Speech which would, according to its tastes, arrest dramatists and comedians and poets and singers and columnists. All of us will end up in the Poetry Slammer. I’ll share a cell with Al Franken and Howard Stern. We’ll make Garrison Keillor our wife.

I don’t mean to paint a sinister picture as from Kafka or Camus, but what do you do when minor poets, high-school poets, are thrown in the clink for describing their hearts? Poetry is not a symptom of adolescent angst and frustration, it is the remedy.

A memo written on January 25, 2003 by White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales documents that President Bush personally made the decision that the Geneva Conventions would not be followed.

Gonzales argues that the new global situation requires “a new kind of war” (or a Newspeak kind of war) and ignoring international law would enable the U.S. president to “preserve his flexibility.” Gonzales ends with this sentence: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

The Poet’s Eye sees that the First Amendment will soon be rendered as “quaint” as the Geneva Conventions. After all, as the president keeps reminding us, this is a new kind of war. We can’t be hindered by such niceties as The Bill of Rights or International Law.

“For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school
For I am Dark, Destructive & Dangerous”.–George T