Poet Loses Laurel.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: McCarthyism Watch - Essay

June 4 was supposed to be Maxwell Corydon Wheat's big day. That was the day the eighty-year-old poet, who lives in Nassau County, New York, was to be announced as the county's first poet laureate.

But the announcement never came. Instead, he saw his name sullied, and then his nomination shot down--all because he's written some poems critical of Bush and the Iraq War.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Wheat's book, Iraq and Other Killing Fields: Poetry for Peace , he has a powerful poem entitled "Coming Home." The poem recounts the biographical details of several soldiers killed in the war, with the refrain:

All lidded down inside casket carefully, caringly covered with the American flag . In his poem "Iraq," he writes about the "Less-than-Elected-Vice-President Cheney" and the "Less-than-Elected-President Bush," who are contemplating the best time to launch a strike against Iraq to further their imperial desires.

He also gets blunt in his poem about the desecration of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "Oilman George W. Bush's Hollow Eye Sockets." (Those eye sockets "vent black liquid.")

But these are the exceptions in his work. A birdwatcher and nature lover, Wheat writes most of his poems on more bucolic topics that have nothing to do with politics.

It's his political poems that got him into trouble, though.

A year ago, the Nassau County board voted to have a poet laureate. Wheat says he was one of fourteen who applied. "The choice was I," he says. "Get that grammar right. I'm an old English teacher."

He was told to show up on June 4 for the announcement, and he had prepared a statement of acceptance. "I'm going to make Nassau County an open classroom for poetry," the statement said.

But he never was able to deliver it.

"I got a call from a legislative aide who told me it had been taken off the calendar," he says. The aide explained that a couple of board members had complained about Iraq and Other Killing Fields , though Wheat believes they saw the book only that morning.

When twenty other poets showed up anyway at the county board meeting, the board agreed to put it back on the...