Ezra Pound said, "Poetry is news that stays news." The news in these poems isn't always "good news," but the poems offer an essential voice of conscience in a troubled time. Read them for their courage and vital compassion.
-- Sam Hamill, editor of Copper Canyon Press and founder of Poets Against the War

It is easy to shock and awe with bombs. It takes talent to shock and awe with words. These poets are the shock troops of the peace movement, piercing our conscience with the ferocity of their passion, their pain, their insights, their dreams. Breathe deeply, read slowly and savor their words.
-- Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange

Several of the voices lifted here are those of distinguished contributors to our poetic scene. Among these older voices there are new ones, too, pleasurably startling for their energy, yet sobering in their urgency and clarity. This collection is a strong response to a dangerous time.
-- Henry Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Flying Change

Let's make these poems the lesson for every classroom, the copy for every newspaper and the sermon in every house of worship. They gently but forcefully touch both the heart and mind of the listener, shattering the doublespeak of "democracy and liberation" and exposing the real politics of greed and domination. You will be moved to tears and rage, but also to hope by the beauty and power of these truth tellers. No wonder the conservatives won't let DC have a voice in Congress. Living in the belly of the beast gives too clear a picture of the truth.
-- Deborah Menkart, Executive Director of Teaching for Change: Building social justice, starting in the classroom

Angry, reflective, deeply empathic and every one unique, these poems remind us of what we have to lose.
-- Libbie Rifkin, Director of the Folger Poetry Series

Politics and Prose welcomes and embraces DC Poets Against the War : An Anthology. In these pages many poets forming a single chorus meditate on their formidable feelings evoked by the war in Iraq. In the vacuum created by Laura Bush's cancellation of her planned Washington symposium on Poetry and the American Voice, we are blessed to have this wondrous volume.
-- Barbara Meade, Owner of Politics & Prose Bookstore

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contributors' notes

Naomi Ayala makes a living as a teacher, education consultant and freelance writer and translator. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Teaching for Change. Her book of poetry, Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone, 1997), was selected by the New York City Public Library as one of 1999's Books for the Teen Age. Her poetry has appeared widely, including in Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Caribbean Writer, and The Massachusetts, Red River, and Potomac Reviews. She received the 2001 Larry Neal Poetry Award from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Luis Alberto Ambroggio is the author of seven poetry collections published in Spain, Argentina and the United States, most recently El testigo se desnuda (Puerta de Alcala, Spain, 2002). He was recently appointed Member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. His poetry has appeared in anthologies in Latin America, Europe and the U.S., among them Cool Salsa, a collection described by Publishers Weekly as "hot as jalapeños and as cool as jazz." His poems have been included in literature textbooks such as Passages and Bridges to Literature and were selected for the Archives of Hispanic-American Literature of the Library of Congress

Rei Berroa (Dominican Republic, 1949) is the author of Book of Fragments (Calcutta, India, 1992), Libro de los fragmentos (Buenos Aires, 1989), Los otros (Santo Domingo, 1983), En el reino de la ausencia and Retazos para un traje de tierra (Madrid, 1979), Ideología y retórica (México, 1988), and co-author of Literature of the Americas (Dubuque, 1986). Many publications in Europe, the United States, and Latin America have featured his poetry. He teaches at George Mason University.

David Brescia-Weiler is ten years old and lives in Washington, DC, with his brother Jacob, his sister Maria, his mom, dad and dog. He goes to Oyster Bilingual Elementary School. He enjoys reading, writing, playing sports, hanging out with his friends and collecting sports cards. He is totally against the War and has gone to many marches in the past two years protesting U.S. imperialism. He hopes our government won't take over the world.

Richard Blanco's City of a Hundred Fires received the 1997 Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has received a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a Florida Artist Fellowship. Blanco's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2000, and has been read on National Public Radio. The poem in this anthology is from his book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead. Blanco now lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches at Georgetown and American University.

Sarah Browning was a finalist for the New Issues Prize in 2002, and won Third Prize in the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities' 2003 Larry Neal Poetry Competition. Recent poems have appeared in The Literary Review, The Seattle Review, and New York Quarterly. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute -- creative writing workshops for low-income women and youth -- and advocates and raises money for women theatre and film artists at The Fund for Women Artists.

Kenneth Carroll is a native Washingtonian. His poetry, stories, and plays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Black Literature Forum, Catalyst Magazine, African Commentary, Hungry As We Are, Weavings, In Search Of Color Everywhere, Bum Rush The Page, New American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poets On 9/11, and Beyond The Frontier. His book of poetry is entitled So What: For The White Dude Who Said This Ain't Poetry (1997 Bunny & The Crocodile Press). He is executive director of D.C. WritersCorps and a creative writing teacher at Duke Ellington High School for the Arts in Washington, DC. He was awarded a 2002 literary fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and received the Mayor's Award for Service to the Arts and the Washington Independent Writers President's Award. He is married and the proud father of a daughter and two sons.

Grace Cavalieri has authored 13 books of poetry and numerous plays. Her latest book of poetry is Cuffed Frays (Argonne House Press). She has written texts and lyrics performed for opera, stage and film. Her recent book Pinecrest Rest Haven (WordWorks) became a play in New York City, 2001, marking her 18th production on the American stage. Her current play, Quilting the Sun, was read by its New York cast at the Smithsonian in 2003. She produced "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio for 25 years.

Jahayra Corrales is ten years old and attends the Children's Studio School in Washington, DC, Jahayra loves to read books and write. She especially loves to write poems, which she's been doing for three years.

Charlie Cray is a writer and activist who has lived in DC for almost four years. Originally from Chicago, he first experienced poetry as a popular outlet for political expression when he traveled to Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. He sometimes publishes in the Multinational Monitor, where he was once an editor. The poem is a reaction to a Clear Channel billboard ("United We Stand") spotted off the highway in New Jersey when returning from the February 15 anti-war rally in New York City. Clear Channel owns 1,200 radio stations in the United States.

Katy Didden was born and raised in Washington, DC, where her family has lived for five generations. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College Park, in May 2003. She believes poetry is a powerful tool for peace, and that our voices are one of our strongest alternatives to violence in making peace possible.

Scott J. Ecksel lives in Cleveland Park, where he spends his time writing and cooking and visiting the National Zoo. Currently, he is working on a novel for young adults. More of his work may be seen online at The Cafe Irreal and NetAuthor's E2K.

Zein El-Amine was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived there for most of his childhood. He also lived in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and moved to the US in 1987. He now lives in Washington, DC, and works in Virginia. He is a civil engineer by profession and an activist by passion. He has published four poems in the US. He also had a short story published in Uno Mas magazine and several articles in Left Turn magazine. He won first prize in the Tallahassee Writer's Association Annual Poetry and Haiku Contest for the poem "Sittu."

Michele Elliott is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. She is currently living in Washington, DC, teaching writing for DC WritersCorps, Young Playwrights' Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theater and the Corcoran College of Art and Design. She is a freelance grantwriter and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.

Wade Fletcher is a student at George Mason University, studying Creative Writing and Special Education. He also spends much time on community and global justice activism in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

Yael Flusberg's writing has appeared in Gargoyle, Lilith, Travelers Tales, and Wind. She is a co-founder of Sol & Soul, a DC-based arts organization that acts as an incubator and presenter for established and emerging artists of conscience. "Mother's Milk" is a meditation on the sometimes overwhelming legacy that inspires much of her work, namely growing up the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and using her voice to contribute to social change.

Martin Galvin, in the last few years, has had poems published in Poetry, Orion, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best American Poetry 1997, among others. His first book, Wild Card, won the Washington Prize, judged by Howard Nemerov, in 1989. He has two chapbooks, Making Beds (Sedwick Press, 1989) and Appetites (Bogg Press, 2002). Recent anti-war poems have appeared in Poets Against the War, ed. Sam Hamill, and the British e-book Times New Roman.

David Gewanter is author of In the Belly, winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and The Sleep of Reason (both from University of Chicago Press), in which this poem appears. He is co-editor, with Frank Bidart, of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (Farrar Straus, Giroux, 2003). He teaches at Georgetown and lives in Washington.

Jomo K. Graham came of age in sunny San Diego, California, where his parents, siblings, nephews and niece still reside. He has written poetry for the past 25 years, though only recently became a poet. One day soon, Jomo will finish paying off student loans to Stanford University. In the meantime, he is working on his first book, to be published in Fall 2003 with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Patricia Gray's poems have appeared in Poetry International, Poetry East, The MacGuffin, Potomac Review, WordWrights!, and Minimus, and in the e-zines www.forpoetry.com and www.poetrymagazine.com. In 2002, she received an artist fellowships in poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a grant to attend Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She lives and works on Capitol Hill.

Leah Harris is a spoken word poet and agitator for peace and justice in the Middle East. Her work has been published in Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, The Washington Peace Letter, and DC Indymedia. She was a recipient of the American University in Cairo's 2000 Madlyn Lamont Literary Prize for the Short Story in Arabic.

Roberto (Bert) Ifill is an economist doing independent research on Higher Education finance who moved to DC in 2001. He is an amateur poet, singer, composer, and golf hack, who has done the first two activities for almost all of his 49 years, the third activity for half, and the last for the previous year. Among his favorite poets are Wallace Stevens, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Diane Glancy and Lawrence Raab.

Esther Iverem is a cultural critic, journalist and poet whose film reviews regularly appear on BET.com, Africana.com and SeeingBlack.com, a web site she founded in 2001 for Black critical voices. She is a former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post; a recipient of a National Arts Journalism Fellowship; and the author of a book of poems and photographs, The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home. She is a contributor to numerous anthologies and a few albums, and is at work on a book about Black aesthetics.

Peter Klappert is the author of six collections of poems, including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1971), The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (Carnegie-Mellon University Press) and Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems 1966-1999 (Orchises, 2000). He has taught at Rollins College, Harvard University, New College (FL), The College of William and Mary and The Graduate Writing Program of George Mason University.

Ann B. Knox has two books of poetry, Staying Is Nowhere, winner of the Writer's Center/SCOP Publishing Prize, and Stonecrop, winner of the Washington Writers' Publishing Prize, and a collection of short stories, Late Summer Break. She teaches at the Writer's Center and has been editor of Antietam Review for 20 years. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Poetry, and many other literary journals.

Poet, community activist, and fine art photographer Dan Logan's recent credits include a poem in the anthology Above Us Only Sky: Atheist Poems and the opening aria in the chamber opera Urban Arias, performed at the Hirshhorn Museum. In 1997, Dan formed Save Jazz 90, which prevented a for-profit media company taking over the license of Washington's noncommercial jazz station at 90.1 FM, making it possible for C-SPAN to buy the station.

Carmen Lupton is a poet, writer, voice-over artist and literacy advocate. Her poetry has been published in The Washington Review, The Provincetown Paper, The Boston Reader, Cathay, Hungry As We Are: An Anthology of Washington Area Poets, and Mondo Barbie, an anthology published by St. Martin's Press. Lupton's poem "I Fell Asleep Facing the Sea" received second place at the 2003 Larry Neal Awards, given by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.

Mike Maggio has published fiction, poetry, travel and political commentary in Potomac Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, Apalachee Quarterly, The L.A. Weekly, The Washington CityPaper, Gypsy, Pig Iron and others. His latest publication is a collection of fiction entitled Sifting Through The Madness (Xlibris). He has also published a chapbook, Oranges From Palestine (Mardi Gras Press), and a collection of poetry, Your Secret Is Safe With Me (Black Bear Publications). He lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.

Chelsie Miller is a teacher/activist/poet/performer and member of Spoken Resistance, a community group that combines arts and activism.

E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of several collections of poetry. His memoir Fathering Words: The Making of An African American Writer was published by St. Martin's Press in 2000. Miller is a founding member of the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and the host for the television show Humanities Profiled on DCTV. Since 1974 he has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. Miller's ,most recent collection of poems is entitled How We Sleep On The Nights We Don't Make Love (Curbstone Press, 2004).

Samuel Miranda is an English teacher in Washington, DC. He has read at the Kennedy Center, The Arts Club of Washington and as part of the Dreams of America series sponsored by the DC Commission on the Arts and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is the author of the self-published chapbook Tossing Tokens, and is featured in Dropping Dime, a CD compilation of writers and musicians from Washington, DC. He is currently completing his MFA at Bennington College.

Michael Willett Newheart is Associate Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Howard University School of Divinity. His most recent book, Word and Soul, published by The Liturgical Press, is a poetic commentary on the Gospel of John. Michael describes himself as a "poet who has fallen into biblical studies." He lives in Berwyn Heights, MD., with his wife Joy and two daughters Anastasia and Miranda. They are members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Gregory Orfalea is a descendant of the first Arab immigrant family to the United States (1878). The author of several books, including The Capital of Solitude, a book of poems, and Messengers of the Lost Battalion, a history and memoir of his father and his unit in World War II, he is also co-editor of Up All Night: Hard-Won Wisdom from Mothers and Fathers. After several years working for the federal government in Washington, DC, Orfalea has been named Director of the Writing Center and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Pitzer College in California.

Patric Pepper lives in Washington, DC.. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines: WordWrights!, Medicinal Purposes, No Exit, Confrontation, and The Distillery, among others. His chapbook, Zoned Industrial, won the Annual Medicinal Purposes Chapbook Contest in 2000. In 2003, he founded, with his wife Mary Ann Larkin, Pond Road Press, which to date has published Shubad's Crown, by Meredith Holmes and The DNA of the Heart, by Mary Ann Larkin and Patric Pepper.

Kim Roberts is the author of two books of poems, The Wishbone Galaxy and The Kimnama (VRZHU). She is the editor of Beltway: An On-Line Poetry Quarterly. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Humanities Council, and the DC Commission on the Arts, and has been a writer-in-residence at 10 artist colonies. She is Director of Literary Programs for the Cultural Affairs Division of Arlington County, Virginia.

Danny Rose, a native Washingtonian, has published several poems in Wordwrights! magazine, where he has volunteered as an editor since 1997. An advocate for public education and former charter school administrator, he is working on several writing projects.

Joseph Ross lives and writes in Washington, DC. His poetry and essays have appeared in many publications including Sojourners, The Other Side, Drumvoices Revue, The Dublin Writer's Workshop, and The Washington Post. A collection of his poetry appeared in the book, Where Joy and Sorrow Meet, published in 1998. Currently he is a regular poetry contributor to Homily Service and he directs the Writing Center at Carroll High School in Washington, DC.

Kaia Sand co-edits the Tangent, co-curates the "In Your Ear" poetry series at the DC Arts Center, and teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Interval, her collection of poetry, is forthcoming this fall from Edge Books.

Elizabeth Sullam was born in Bologna, Italy, and now lives in the United States. She taught at Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies. A book of poems, Out of Bounds, was published by Scripta Humanistica and the Catholic University Press. A historical novel, A Canossa, was published in Italy and won the Presidential Award and the Premio Lunigiana. She is currently writing a book on World War Two.

Dan Vera is managing editor of the gay culture journal White Crane, founder of Brookland Area Writers & Artists, and cofounder of Vrzhu Poetry Press. His work has been published in the Delaware Poetry Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Konch, Shaping Sanctuary, and Red Wheelbarrow. His poetry has appeared nationally on Pacifica Radio's Peace Watch program. His first collection of poetry The Space Between Our Danger And Delight will be published in the Fall of 2008. For more information about Dan see www.danvera.com.

Rebecca Villarreal is a writer, visual artist and creative writing instructor. Her poetry has been published in Washington Review, Beltway, California Quarterly, Tiger's Eye, E: The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, WordWrights!, 100 Poets Against the War and Gargoyle #46. Her fiction has appeared in The Silver Quill Anthology and her non-fiction in Voces: A Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies. Her poetry chapbook, First Come, First Served, was published in 2001 by Mama Chelo Press.

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list of poems

Ann B. Knox "This Moment"
E. Ethelbert Miller "First Poem"
Kenneth Carroll "A Poet's War"
Sarah Browning "Sunday Morning, Spring"
Naomi Ayala "Adentro / Within Me"
Samuel Miranda "Greetings from the War"
Michele Elliott "names of fishes"
Bert Ifill "Warning"
Mike Maggio "Weather Report"
Kaia Sand "forecast"
Katy Didden "Letter from Washington, D.C."
Jomo Graham "oasis of bones"
Grace Cavalieri "Fateema"
Scott Ecksel "Dear Laura,"
Leah Ida Harris "noises of the coming days"
Joseph Ross "the most important word"
Patricia Gray "Human Intervention"
Rebecca Villarreal "The Paloma's Lament"
Charlie Cray "Clear Channel"
Rei Berroa "Tres Varaciones Sobre El Tema de la Paz y la Paloma / Three Variations on the Theme of Peace and the Dove"
Patric Pepper "Food Court"
Chelsie Miller "Cinnamon Boys"
Martin Galvin "March 3, 1998"
Peter Klappert "Boy Walking Back To Find His Father's Cattle"
Jahayra Corrales "I Imagine Fear"
David Gewanter "A Lie-Awake Dirge"
Michael Willett Newheart "shok & aw shuk & jive"
Carmen Lupton "I Fell Asleep Facing the Sea"
Gregory Orfalea "The Bomb That Fell On Abdu's Farm"
Zein El-Amine "Afternoon in Deir Keifa"
Wade Fletcher "Unmovable"
Esther Iverem "Genetic Memory"
David Brescia-Weiler "La Guerra / War"
Yael Flusberg "Mother's Milk"
Elizabeth Sullam "Lament for the Winged Bulls of Ur Destroyed in April, 2003"
Dan Vera "Place Poem - Washington, D.C."
Dan Logan "Final Exam"
Kim Roberts "Patriotism"
Richard Blanco "Hyakutake"
Luis Ambroggio "Futuro / Future"
Danny Rose "A First Protest"

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