Poetry falls upon hard times ...

Dan Chiasson is the author of three books and teaches at Wellesley College. In today's New York Time he wrote an article, condemning a short book of 22 poems by detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He notes, poems that have been cleared for release by the United States military.

He writes, ... reading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience.

In what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.”

He goes on to say, But imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War. The government’s disingenuous resistance to this book’s publication aside (a wooden official statement denounces the book as “another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies”), the Pentagon ought to get an editor’s credit on “Poems From Guantánamo.”