In response to the ways in which Barack Obama will strive to “get the world right” during his carefully watched first 100 days in office, one hundred American poets will be writing new works as part of the project Starting Today: poems for the first 100 days, launched on Inauguration Day by Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg.
The call went out on the 20th, and more than one hundred American poets responded immediately to Zucker and Greenberg’s emailed request. The first 100 poets were each assigned one of President Obama’s first hundred days in office at random, and each will write a poem reflecting on the new president and the state of the nation and world on that day. A new poem is posted each day.
The project exists right now as a public blog; the editors hope to turn it into printed matter—either as a book or limited-edition broadside series—after its completion. Zucker says, “"We're all impressed with a sense of the historic nature of the time we're living through and think it is important to capture these moments as they pass. And we felt that doing so online, with 100 poets posting poems over 100 days, would fit the occasion well--it has the triple virtues of being immediate, public, and democratic."
The poets—including Beat poet Anne Waldman, American Poetry Review co-editor Elizabeth Scanlon, National Poetry Slam Champion Patricia Smith, NEA-winner Fanny Howe, regional poet laureates Leslea Newman (Northampton, MA) and Linda Buckmaster (Belfast, ME), well-known poetry blogger Joshua Corey, and many editors, publishers, graduate students, professors and activists--represent the USA from coast to coast. Poets from their twenties to their seventies are involved, as well as poets of many ethnic and racial heritages.
Says Greenberg, “We were moved by the inclusion of Elizabeth Alexander, an important and serious American poet, in the inauguration festivities, and feel that with the new administration comes a renewed sense of hope for the future of literature and culture in our country. This project is a testament to the idea that poetry can and does engage in the current political moment.”
Rachel Zucker is the author of three books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press and one forthcoming from Wave Books; she is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a former poet-in-residence at Fordham University and a certified labor doula. Zucker lives in New York City. Arielle Greenberg is the author of two books of poetry and a textbook, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow; she is an assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago and a birth activist. Greenberg currently lives in Belfast, Maine, where she is working on a project about the new back-to-the-land movement. Both Zucker and Greenberg have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry, and their past collaborations include the anthology Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (Iowa, 2008).