'CRY HAVOC!'
Poetry of War and Remembrance, 1968 – 2008
Lannan Literary Symposium & Festival
Georgetown University: March 30-31, 2009
Listen to Recordings from the Symposium
When the story of the massacre at My Lai, Vietnam, in March 1968 was finally revealed in the press, everything changed. Public opinion swung against the war, activism raged, and America began to withdraw from a fight that had lost all legitimacy. Poets, artists and activists remind us that all war is a failure of the moral imagination, and teach us through their language and social practice to guard against forgetting. Poetry restores to us the horror of conflict and offers paths toward its transcendence. Poets, critics, journalists and visual artists will converge to recall the lessons of war over this violent half century, and to plot new strategies for peaceful futures.
Click on author names for biographies, literary excerpts and other supporting materials.
| Siah Armajani | A Tribute to Daniel Berrigan | James Fenton |
| Carolyn Forché | Amy Goodman | Seymour Hersh | Yusef Komunyakaa |
| Harry Mattison | Khaled Mattawa | Ken McCullough | Dunya Mikhail |
| Khmer chanting of U Sam Oeur | Brian Turner | The Poetry of Saadi Yousef |
Free and open to the public
Click for event schedule
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Schedule
MONDAY, MARCH 30
7:00 – 9:30 PM (Gaston Hall)
SYMPOSIUM I: Cry Havoc! Resisting Power in a Half Century of War
Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman in conversation
(With a Tribute to Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J)
Moderator: Henry Schwarz
Forty years ago, Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. entered the offices of the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland along with his brother, Father Philip Berrigan and seven other activists. They carried the files of young draftees outside and burned them in a trash bin using homemade napalm. From that fire arose an invigorated resistance to the war that inspired generations of pacifists and war resistors. Tonight the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University confers on Father Berrigan the award of Honorary Peacemaker.
Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman, two of our most trusted and courageous journalists, address us on our perilous times and the power of the word.
9:30 Reception and book signing: Healy Hall, 2nd floor
TUESDAY, MARCH 31
10:15 AM – 12:15 PM (ICC Auditorium)
SYMPOSIUM II: Terror and Image: Poetry, the Built, and the Visual from Cambodia to El Salvador to Fallujah
Ken McCullough presenting the poetry of U Sam Oeur; Harry Mattison; Siah Armajani
Moderator: Andrew Rubin
Ken McCullough presents the poetry of U Sam Oeur, a Cambodian poet who was imprisoned under the regime of Pol Pot and who bore witness to genocide. McCullough will read his translations of the poetry and show video of U Sam Oeur chanting in Khmer. This poetic singing memorializes those who survived the reign of terror in Cambodia since 1975.
Photographer Harry Mattison will present “Some Things We Can Learn from Images of War,” an electronic exhibition of photographs from El Salvador taken between 1979 and 2009. Mattison addresses some of the fundamental questions regarding the relationship between photography and suffering, violence, and armed conflict. What purposes do the images of violence serve, and what roles can the photographer, the subjects, and the viewer be assigned in the interpretation of such documents? What does it mean to be an “eye-witness”? Does the photograph convey meaning, and if so, how and for whom?
Sculptor Siah Armajani draws from American architectural visual elements found in bridges, barns, farm houses, log cabins, silos and grain elevators in his public art. He has been building since 1968, and his work includes bridges, gardens, reading rooms, lecture halls and components for the Olympic torch at Athens in 2004. Themes of freedom and democracy are drawn from Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey and Walt Whitman. His sculpture Fallujah (2004-2005) memorializes the American demolition of the Iraqi city to uncover insurgents. It is a pointed echo of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a protest against the Fascist bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War.
1:45 – 3:30 PM (ICC Auditorium)
POETRY READING: Sorrows of Baghdad: Poetry of the Shattered Home and the Troubled Soldier
Brian Turner, Dunya Mikhail, Khaled Mattawa
Moderator: Carolyn Forché
A reading by exiled Iraqi poet, Dunya Mikhail and the work of her compatriot in exile, Saadi Youssef, presented by his translator Khaled Mattawa, who will also read his own poetry. They are joined by Brian Turner, a veteran of the current American war in Iraq. Armed conflict has a profound effect on soldiers, whether defending the homeland or engaged in offensive operations in foreign countries. Equally, conflict animates the home and the civilian, survivors and refugees. Contradictions manifest as epiphanies; memories clarify the past as present chimeras. These poets capture the absurdity and profundity of war in both its domestic and cosmopolitan modes.
4:00 – 5:30 PM (ICC Auditorium)
SYMPOSIUM III: War and Remembrance: Surviving with Language and Memory
All participanting artists
Moderator: Jennifer Natalya Fink
In the midst of war and in its aftermath, poets and their languages are marked by an extremity of violence and ruin that all but destroys the capacity of lyric art to bear witness to what has been endured, and yet poets continue to write the war into presence for us, their readers. How do poets come to write about the wars we have experienced, the wars that haunt our hearts and dreams, and destroy our countries physically and spiritually? Is war a special knowledge, possessed only by those who have lived in its midst? Is it possible to convey a moment, an hour, a year of war in a work of literature? And what of war’s memory as the years of agon and agony recede into the past? Of what importance is language, written and voiced, for the survivors? Or is it even possible to speak of surviving? When war is over and peace declared, does peace begin or is war conducted by other means? What is war to poetry? What is poetry to war?
8:00 – 9:30 PM (ICC Auditorium)
POETRY READING: War and Remembrance: Poetry of War and Memory, 1968- 2008
Yusef Komunyakaa, James Fenton, Carolyn Forché
Moderator: Mark McMorris
Poetry gives us a world we may have experienced, but not in the way revealed by the poetic process. Through evocation the poet restores memories that may have never occurred, yet once we live them it becomes impossible to imagine the world differently.
Yusef Komunyakaa has been called the preeminent poet of the American experience in Vietnam. Blending his memories of Louisiana with the civil rights struggle and his service in the war, Komunyakaa produces a syncopated verse of virtuosic remembrance that brings into being a new reality. James Fenton expresses “an unmatched range of subject matter - war and revolution, the dementia of collective passions, reflections on fate, and love - he has written some of the most beautiful love poems of our times.” (Ian McEwan) Carolyn Forche’s poetry has been described as “the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half-century of atrocities that has yet been written in English. She embodies “a sort of bedrock of acquaintance with human misery, as of memory's capacity to witness it,” that “emerges in lines that are each peculiarly forlorn." (Calvin Bedient)
9:30: Reception and book signing: ICC Galleria
Gaston Hall and The Bunn Intercultural Center (ICC) are located on Georgetown’s main campus, 37th and O streets, NW. All events at Georgetown are free and open to the public.
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