Poetry being dead--an anachronism, an elegant relic--why is it suddenly the topic of conversation, and in newspapers, and even on TV? Because in just three weeks since Sam Hamill launched www.poetsagainstthewar.org, more than 9,000 antiwar poems have been posted to the site by every amateur poet from here to Helsinki. (Hamill, the local poet and cofounder of Copper Canyon Press, first made news a few weeks ago when the White House canceled a February 12 poetry symposium because Hamill threatened to turn the event into an antiwar rally.) One of the poets featured on the website is Neal Ahern of Olympia, who is resistant to the war "with all [his] strength, on all [his] levels," and is, we come to learn, "hungry for people to shut their eyes, and visualize, the ones they love, and smile."

If you weren't at Richard Hugo House's packed, wall-to-wall antiwar poetry reading last week, estimated at roughly 400 strong (similar readings occurred all around the country), Ahern's online sentiments will give you a sense of some of what you missed. You also missed statements like, "Every single person is a special person, and a writer, and a poet." You missed impassioned readings of W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, and many original compositions, including one about tanks, chocolate bars, and "misinterpreted dreams"; one about 12-year-old boys being blown apart by missiles; and one about the "hypermagical ultra omnipotence" of governmental power.

All evening there was talk of "momentum" and not losing it--at one point someone announced that the number of poems on Hamill's site had far exceeded everyone's expectations, and someone else yelled, "Well, let's keep on!"--as if the aggregate number of voices were the primary concern, as if this were some kind of vast petition. With all this outpouring of emotion, I overheard one person say they were really going to "send a message."

But the message they're sending, if you listen to it, is uncompelling. All that these "poets" are able to articulate is an enormous amount of hesitation, a trite wariness illustrated by the shriek of a baby or the flash of a bomb. There is a strong, coherent case to be made against military action in Iraq, but protest poets don't like to get mired in the specifics of an argument.

What this protest doesn't accomplish is anything on the level of poetry, because the moment poetry becomes useful it is not poetry at all. Auden wrote, for example, that "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/in the valley of its own making." And yet the crowd of people who gathered at Hugo House last week certainly thought they were using poetry to make something happen; or, at the very least, they were using it to make something happen for themselves. One 21-year-old woman told me, "You go to these things and sometimes you feel alone. And then someone says something that was going through your head, and you feel like you belong." When I asked her whether she thought poetry is effective on the level of politics, she said, "It's effective on the level of ex- pressing emotions."

But protest poetry relies on simple emotions, uncomplicated truths: It persuades with broad emotional appeals that polarize and overstate, but never deepen or extend the issues. As an art form, protest poetry is a bastardization; and as a political tool, it is completely impractical. (The White House is going to receive a printout of all 9,000 poems that have been posted to the website, which I would not wish upon anybody; they will likely be immediately tossed into the trash, which is where they belong.)

The art of poetry is concerned with what is various and irreducible--issues like the subjectivity of human experience, the sovereignty of the individual, the complicated nature of truth. At its best, poetry is an antidote to provincialism, intellectual oppression, and simplification. To me, the most alarming thing about www.poetsagainstthewar.org, and there is a lot to choose from, is the page outlining submission guidelines: "All poems must be against the war; no pro-war poems, no hate-filled poems, no obscene poems will be published." Such restrictions could only produce the worst kind of poetry; poetry that fails to reflect the contradictions and uncertainties of the real world we live in.