2003 in Poetry - Events

Events

• The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was opened at Queens University, Belfast, this year. It houses the Heaney Media Archive, a unique record of Heaney's entire oeuvre, as well as a full catalogue of his radio and television presentations. That same year Heaney decided to lodge a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University.
• January 29 — Poet Dana Gioia, who had retired early from his career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full-time, becomes chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's arts agency.

• Call: Review, an American little magazine, is founded by poet John Most.
• After First Lady Laura Bush invited a number of poets to the White House, one of them, Sam Hamill started organizing a protest in which poets would bring anti-war poems. The February 12 conference was postponed, but Hamill organized a "Poets Against the War" Web site with contributions from others. More than 5,000 poems were contributed, including work by John Balaban, Gregory Orr, Rita Dove, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Marilyn Nelson, Jay Parini, Jamaica Kincaid, Grace Paley and even U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Also on the Web site, W.S. Merwin contributed the highly emotional statement: "To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein." The new group, "Poets Against the War", organized poetry readings for February 12 across the country, demonstrating the strong links between many established poets and left-wing pacifism.
• Early November — Carl Rakosi celebrates his 100th birthday with friends at the San Francisco Public Library.