AMY GOODMAN: It’s been a tough year for poets. Two months ago, Laura Bush canceled a White House poetry symposium honoring Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The first lady feared the invited poets might invoke poems critical of the invasion of Iraq. A spokesperson for Bush explained the cancellation at the time by saying, quote, “While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she too has opinions and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum.”

Across the country, thousands of poets protested the decision, and countless poetry readings were held from coast to coast. In Vermont, Grace Paley, 80 years old, took part in one of these readings alongside Jamaica Kincaid, Galway Kinnell and other well-known poets. According to a local press account, only Paley received a standing ovation. One of her poems dated from the 1960s and compared the mountains of Vermont to those of Vietnam. It included the line: “The holes in the mountains are red.”

Grace Paley has been active in the peace and poetry movements since the 1960s. Living in New York, she helped found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961. Eight years later, she went on a peace mission to Hanoi during the war. She attended the World Peace Conference in 1974. She would go on to actively take part in the anti-nuclear and women’s movements. In 1980, she helped organize the Women’s Pentagon Action. And in 1985 Grace Paley visited Nicaragua and El Salvador, after having campaigned against U.S. government’s policies toward these countries. She was also one of the “White House 11,” who were arrested in 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

On the literary front, Grace Paley is the nation’s — one of the most acclaimed writers in the nation. She has received countless awards and glowing reviews for her poetry and fiction. Among her books are The Little Disturbances of Man, Later the Same Day, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. She has received, among other prizes, a Lannan Literary Award, a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She is also a recipient of several awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, including a senior fellowship in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature.

And last week, for the second time, she became an official state poet. She was named the state poet of New York from 1986 to 1988, and now she has been selected as Vermont’s poet laureate. She joins us in the studio today.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

GRACE PALEY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us, Grace. I watched you last night at an event where the readings of women around war took place. Women on War is the name of a new book that includes your writings. But I’d like to start off by you talking about your response to Laura Bush’s poetry symposium and then canceling it, and what happened with you and sister and fellow poets around the country.

GRACE PALEY: Yeah. Well, it was probably the most extraordinary event to happen to American poets, and Laura Bush did it. It couldn’t have happened, though, really, without — you know, when people say, “What can poets do?” I often say, “Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.” You know, one poet is a nice thing, saying no. And, you know, it gets the papers, sounds good.

But then Sam Hamill came along from Copper Canyon Press, and that’s where things began to happen. So I owe — we — all poets owe a great deal to Laura Bush, Sam Hamill and the computer, because, as this happened, within about two days, there were about — I don’t know — 15,000 poets writing letters, writing, sending poems to Laura Bush, poems of protest. But more than that, they were beginning to do readings, which were attended by — you know, if you’re a poet, you can sometimes read to seven people and you’re happy, but these readings had packed houses. It was really quite an extraordinary experience for almost any poet. And this was true not only in Vermont, but, from what I hear, all over the country. So it was great.

I just want to say one thing. It brought me back to olden times. You know, by that I mean like 20 or 30 years ago. For us to organize a thing like this, which we did do during the Vietnam War, something called “Angry Arts,” which we worked at, took us months, took us really a long time. By the time we got the mail out and by the time we got all the volunteers to come in and lick the envelopes and by the time all that was done, it was a long — and then this happened like that, in three days. So it was quite extraordinary, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you were recently named the poet laureate of Vermont. It’s very interesting. You’re named by the governor, who is a Republican governor. Can you talk about how you relate to him and your meeting with him?

GRACE PALEY: Well, first of all, he really — he didn’t — well, he had to sign the paper, but I was chosen by a group of other poets, a couple of whom had been laureates, like Galway Kinnell and Ellen Voigt, and a couple of other people who had to make a choice. I don’t even think I was the best one, but that’s beside the point. Still, you know, there’s time for others. And then I had to meet with him. He wanted to meet with me and talk to me, but before he really signed on. And he knew a lot about me, and I said, well, I wasn’t going to change very much, you know? I’d probably be the same person I was, no matter what. And we talked a while about this fact. And he really — and then he signed it. That’s all.

AMY GOODMAN: Governor James Douglas?

GRACE PALEY: Yes. He’s a Republican. He has a very mild manner, and I don’t know whether that’s the part of the Republicans of Vermont or what, but he’s a Republican. I mean, there’s no question about it.

AMY GOODMAN: But in terms of your poetry, more significantly, here he is naming you poet laureate, whether he chose you or not —

GRACE PALEY: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — he is for the war, and you’re opposed.

GRACE PALEY: Yeah, right. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have been using your poetry a lot in the last few months to express that view.

GRACE PALEY: Well, I would do that, no matter what. I mean, this is what I’m about, and this is how I live my life. I don’t even — I wouldn’t understand how to do otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the position of state poet laureates?

GRACE PALEY: Well, you don’t have to do anything. It’s an honorific, really. And if I chose to just sit around and write poems, which would be nice, I could do that, you know? But very few others have done that. And people before me have done a lot of good work.

But what happened to me in this first month is that I’ve gotten so many requests to read at this library in Rutland, that place in Brattleboro, and all over the state, and I’m very ill-equipped by my organizational gifts or the state of my desk to really get everything straight about where I should be. The last place I was was at a Barre senior center reading to and talking with a lot of old people, a lot of old people, many of whom were younger than me. But they loved poetry. They really loved poetry, and they wanted to hear me read poems. They wanted to tell me about their poems. It’s really great, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Grace Paley, can you talk about your background? Can you talk about your family, coming from Russia when they came, what their politics were?

GRACE PALEY: Well, I’m from the Bronx originally. And my parents came over here in 1905 from Russia from a town called Yuzovka. And they were — my father had been in prison before that, and my mother was in exile for a while. And then the czar had a son, and when he had a son, all the people under 21 were pardoned. And so, my grandmother got them all out of Russia, and they came to the United States. So that was their politics. They were social democrats, actually. And they didn’t do much political stuff. Once they got here, they just worked like hell. And my father, supported by the women in the family, aunts and so forth and mother, went to school and became a doctor very soon and moved to the Bronx. And that was my life.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you discover the written word, whether it was poetry or prose? When did you start?

GRACE PALEY: Well, I had an older sister. My brother and sister are both 15 years older than I am, and they were very — my sister, especially, read to me a great deal, and she liked poetry. She happened to like poetry, and she read poems to me. And so, I began to write little poems, you know, cute stuff, you know? You write — by that time, my sister and brother, who were the children of the working class — I came along, and I was a child of the middle class 15 years later. And so, they — you write a sentence, and everybody says to you, “Oh, isn’t that nice,” you know? And so, you write another one. And then I began to be, you know, a big reader, what we used to call in the old days a “big reader.”

AMY GOODMAN: When did you — actually, when were you first published?

GRACE PALEY: Well, you see, I wrote poetry for a long time, and I had hardly ever sent anything out. And I think I may have published a couple poems when I was about 20. And then I had children and led another life, but kept writing and began to write stories in my mid-thirties, and that’s what I published. I did not publish poems until many years later.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did the politics of the times — for example, the Vietnam War — weigh in? The nuclear movement — how did that affect what you were doing and what you saw your role as a writer and poet as?

GRACE PALEY: Well, I never saw my role — I never thought of it like that, you know? I mean, that’s what I was doing. And at the same time, I did have these very strong political feelings and very natural ones, they seemed, to me.

And so, even when my kids were smaller, you had three — people like me had three things to do. They had the family to take care of and to worry about. And they had our political lives to lead — I mean, I should say the business of the war or whatever it was. And then we also had our work, our life work, which for me was literature, which I — which was my great good luck that I had that, because it enabled me to think in another way than a lot of other people.

AMY GOODMAN: Your mother was protesting way back. You talked about the bus.

GRACE PALEY: Well, that was — I wrote a story about that called “Traveling,” about my mother, in 1927, going to visit my brother at college — was sitting in the back of the bus as they went down, and when they got to Washington they asked her to please move to the front, and she refused.

But what’s interesting about that, to me, was that my sister never really told me that story until like five years — seven years ago, eight years ago, something like that. She just never told it to me. And when she did tell it to me, it meant a great deal, because I remembered my own trip down south in 1943. And it became a story in this book called Just as I Thought, in which my grandson, who isn’t white, also appears. I brought it all together. That’s the thing about writing. You can bring a lot of stuff together.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you read something you have written? Can you read one of your poems?

GRACE PALEY: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: You have your Grace Paley Begin Again: Collected Poems book in front of you. Grace Paley is with us. She is the poet laureate of Vermont, has written many poems and books and was here in New York last night for a reading, for an international anthology of writings from antiquity to the present called Women on War. Grace Paley.

GRACE PALEY: Published by the Feminist Press. OK. This poem is called “Fathers.”

Fathers are
more fathering
these days they have
accomplished this by
being more mothering

these scenes were brand-new
exciting for an old woman who
had watched the old fathers
gathering once again in
familiar Army camps and com-
fortable war rooms to consider
the necessary eradication of
the new fathering fathers
(who are their sons) as well
as the women and children who
will surely be in the way.

AMY GOODMAN: Grace Paley, her poem “Fathers.” Grace, in your life, you’ve spent time in jail protesting. What has that meant to you, how it has affected your writing?

GRACE PALEY: Well, I haven’t — you know, I guess I — it’s only interesting to me, the time I spent a week, but I’ve never spent real time in jail, just like overnights. A lot of overnights is the way it happened, or two days or three. But one time, by accident, by the accident of a judge, I spent a week, a whole week, in the Women’s House of Detention. And it, you know, was a teaching experience. It was a very valuable experience to be among all those women. And I wrote about it. And it was a funny experience, because I lived right around the corner from the house of — Women’s House of Detention —

AMY GOODMAN: Here in New York.

GRACE PALEY: — which was on 10th Street at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Where Angela Davis was also.

GRACE PALEY: Yeah. And I used to look out the window, and I could see my kids going to school, you know? And it was a very — I mean, that was very —

AMY GOODMAN: Did you yell through the bars, “Dress warmly”?

GRACE PALEY: Well, I almost did, you know, but they weren’t paying attention. They just wanted to go about their way. But people did yell up to me and yell up and say, “Grace, how are you?” You know.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, maybe that’s why it’s no longer there, right in the middle of civilization in New York.

GRACE PALEY: Well, it’s a terrible thing that it’s not there, because once they moved that prison, they moved it out to Rikers Island. See, when it was there on that street, people could come, and they — older people remember that — and on Sixth Avenue, they would stand there, and they’d yell up to everybody. And people would be able to — apart from visiting, they could see each other out the windows and yell out back and forth, “How’s the kids?” You know?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us.

GRACE PALEY: OK, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Grace Paley, you write about that experience in Just as I Thought. And a new anthology, Women on War, put out by Feminist Press, also has Grace’s writings.

That does it for the show. If you want to get a video or audio copy, you can call 1-800-881-2359. That’s 1-800-881-2359. Our website is democracynow.org. And if anyone missed any part of the show, you can go to our website, video and audio streaming, at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, with help from Noah Reibel and Vilka Tzouras. Mike Di Filippo is our engineer. A special thanks to Uri Gal-Ed and Angela Alston, Emily Kunstler, Orlando Richards, Simba Russeau, Rafael de la Uz, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Pacifica Radio, this is Democracy Now!

The San Francisco Chronicle has fired a columnist after he took part in an antiwar rally. We’ll speak with Henry Norr. We’ll go to northern Iraq to talk to the publisher of what may be the first independent newspaper to be freely distributed in Iraq in a generation. And we’ll hear from professor Edward Said on colonialism, his classic book Orientalism and the future of the Middle East.

EDWARD SAID: It’s quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples could be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.

AMY GOODMAN: All that and more, coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Between 1 million and 2 million people gathered in Karbala yesterday for the conclusion of the Shia pilgrimage. The Independent of London is reporting the final prayers of the festival were different from the days that have gone before. Thousands of young men arrived from the cities of a de facto Shia confederacy, which is already taking shape. They demanded the establishment of an Islamic state and threatened jihad against American occupiers. In sermons, imam after imam called on Iraqis to take the destiny of the country in their own hands, and the Shia to take their rightful place in deciding how the country should be governed.

Meanwhile, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said yesterday the Bush administration has warned Iran not to interfere with the development of a government in Iraq. The administration is worried Iran might be sending people into Iraq whose mission is to influence the majority Shiite Muslim population. A senior administration official told The New York Times, quote, “It’s clear we are going to have to step in a little more forcefully.” Special Forces and intelligence officers are trying to identify pro-U.S. clerics in small towns and cities, encouraging them to issue religious edicts, or fatwas, in support of the U.S. occupation.

In the city of Kut near the Iranian border, U.S. marines are suppressing anti-U.S. protests by threatening to open fire on crowds. The Washington Post reports marines arrested a prominent cleric yesterday upon finding a gun in his car. Hundreds of people converged on a contingent of marines and protested. The marines threatened over a loudspeaker to open fire, and the crowd dispersed. A few hours later, a few hundred men staged a spontaneous human blockade on both sides of a narrow bridge over the Tigris River, trapping several Marine trucks for half an hour. Meanwhile, the Marines have still not dared to enter the mayor’s office in Kut. Shiite Muslim preacher Sayed Abbas Fadhil has proclaimed himself the new mayor and has welcomed into the mayoral compound several hundred young men who are vowing to defend him if the Marines try to remove him by force.

In Baghdad, the U.S. military yesterday attempted to strip the self-appointed mayor, Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, of his authority. Commander of ground forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, proclaimed, quote, “The coalition alone retains absolute authority within Iraq,” and warned that anyone challenging U.S. authority would be subject to arrest. U.S. forces delivered the edict to Zubaidi and told him to vacate his office at the Palestine Hotel. How the general will enforce his edict is unclear since the huge U.S. presence in Baghdad is concentrated largely at the international airport, which is miles from any populated area. The International Herald Tribune reports Iraqis on the street, almost without exception, say neither Zubaidi nor the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, is welcome as the new mayor.

Three marines died yesterday in an accident involving a rocket-propelled grenade near the city of Kut. Earlier in the week, an Army soldier was killed south of Baghdad when he fell from a truck.

The London Guardian is reporting the entire Arab world now faces invasion by American television. The U.S. news report called Iraq and the World is currently being beamed into Iraq from an Air Force plane. Norman Pattiz is the chair of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Middle East Committee, which is behind the project. He told The Guardian a full-service version of the newscast should be broadcasting 24 hours a day to 22 countries in the Middle East by the end of the year. Dan Rather of CBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC are appearing with their words translated into Arabic. White House officials say the broadcast will also carry PBS’s NewsHour and Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume. Democracy Now! hasn’t yet received a request from the White House to air our news program.

Meanwhile, U.S. customs officials have charged Fox News engineer Benjamin James Johnson with attempting to bring 12 paintings into the U.S. last week. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection said yesterday at least 15 paintings, gold-plated weapons and other items have been seized at airports in Washington, Boston and London in the last week. In four of the five incidents, journalists were involved. Fox immediately fired Johnson for attempting to bring these paintings in from Iraq. Customs officials also discovered a painting in the possession of Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have arrested fighters of Ahmed Chalabi’s U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress after they were found looting the abandoned homes of former Iraqi government officials.

British forces detained Al Jazeera TV correspondent Mohammad Alsayyed Muhsen on Sunday in Basra. Two British armored vehicles approached the crew as they were preparing a report, and asked to see their press cards. Muhsen said a British soldier became furious when he read the cards, which were issued by the Iraqi Information Ministry. The British soldier said U.S.-led forces were, quote, “dealing only with listed journalists who accompanied coalition forces.” Soldiers pointed weapons at Muhsen, confiscated his camera and told him they would not be allowed to work in the area until further notice.

The U.S. military yesterday admitted children under 16 are being held as so-called enemy combatants in the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. A U.S. military official told the London Guardian the U.S. is holding prisoners, boys aged between 13 and 15. The official spoke on condition of anonymity. He would not disclose the children’s nationalities but said they had been brought from Afghanistan this year on suspicion of terrorism. A spokesperson at the base, Lieutenant Corporal Barry Johnson, said the children were moved to a, quote, “dedicated juvenile facility” at the camp, where they can socialize with each other and are given “specialist mental health care, in recognition of the difficult circumstances that child combatants go through.” But Johnson said the children will still be indefinitely held without access to lawyers. Amnesty International spokesperson Angela Wright said holding the children is, quote, “wholly repugnant and contrary to basic principles of human rights” and violates nearly universally accepted U.N. rules. The United States and Somalia are the only members of the United Nations that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The mayor of Toronto is outraged at the World Health Organization for declaring his city a no-go zone because of the outbreak of SARS in the city. The World Health Organization yesterday issued an advisory against all but essential travel to Toronto. The virus has killed 15 people in the city, but Mayor Mel Lastman is insisting SARS is under control. Toronto is Canada’s financial capital. The WHO also added Beijing and China’s Shanxi province to the no-travel list. This comes as China has sealed off a major hospital in Beijing and announced four more deaths from SARS. Staff and patients cannot leave the 1,200-bed hospital, and no one is allowed to enter. The BBC reports alarm is spreading in the Chinese capital with panic buying of rice, salt and traditional remedies.

Three other developments in the SARS crisis: Tourism in the region is down. Hong Kong-based carrier Cathay Pacific cut nearly half its flights, and Singapore reported a 70% fall in visitor arrivals. More than 100 representatives of the world’s airlines are holding emergency talks in Bangkok to decide how to handle the crisis. Russian airline Aeroflot says it’s disinfecting all planes arriving from China, Vietnam, India and Canada. Police in Australia were given new powers to round up and quarantine suspected SARS victims.

Envoys from the U.S. and North Korea have begun a second day of face-to-face negotiations in Beijing about North Korea’s nuclear program. Negotiators on both sides have refused to comment on the progress of the talks. North Korea’s official news agency said the U.S. invasion of Iraq shows that other countries need a strong physical deterrent force to protect themselves. A memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urging removal of the North Korean government, and leaked earlier this week, has exacerbated tensions.

This as the Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time that the Bush administration intends to produce — not just research — a thermonuclear bunker-busting bomb. Federal officials signed documents in Washington this week to launch a preliminary design contest between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The San Jose Mercury News reports the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator will be a full-power hydrogen bomb that would throw up enormous clouds of radioactive dust, while wreaking large-scale damage and death if used in an urban area. The bomb will be thousands of times more powerful than the conventional bunker busters that were dropped on Baghdad.

A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded train station in central Israel today, injuring 13 and killing a security guard. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen ended their standoff yesterday when Arafat agreed to put Mohammed Dahlan in charge of security. Arafat was under heavy pressure from the U.S. to give Abu Mazen a free hand to choose his Cabinet. Both the prime minister and his choice for security chief are supported by the U.S., Britain and Israel. The U.S. government promised to help implement the so-called roadmap to peace only once the new prime minister was installed.

British antiwar Labour MP George Galloway is embroiled in a struggle for his political life as the allegations continue that he received up to half a million dollars per year from Saddam Hussein to fund his campaign to end the sanctions against Iraq. The uproar started when the British newspaper The Telegraph published documents it said its correspondent found in the ruins of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. One of the document purports to be from the head of Iraqi intelligence and suggests Galloway demanded money from the Iraqi government under the Oil-for-Food Program. Galloway is suing the newspaper. However, last night, he told the London Guardian that intermediaries in his fundraising activities could have siphoned off money from Saddam Hussein, but insisted he had never done so.

The Republican Unity group yesterday demanded that Republican Senator Rick Santorum apologize to gay men and lesbians for remarks equating homosexuality with bigamy and incest. Officials of the group include former President Gerald Ford and Mary Cheney, the daughter of the vice president. The group spoke out a day after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee defended Santorum as, quote, “a voice for inclusion and compassion.” The White House has remained silent on the issue. Commenting on a Supreme Court challenge to a Texas law banning consensual sodomy, Santorum told the Associated Press, quote, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” After Santorum complained Tuesday that the quote had been taken out of context, the AP released the full text of the interview. Santorum also said, quote, “I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts.”