Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Denise Levertov and draft registration in 1980

Currently in my reading of one poem every day from "The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov", I am on a collection I hadn't read before: "Candles in Babylon", from 1982. If I had read it as her student a few years later, I would have been delighted by the poem  "A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980". That rally would have been not only against the draft, like rallies Levertov certainly attended during the Vietnam War, but also against draft registration, which had ended in 1975 but was about to be reinstated at the time. My small gesture of resistance was that I never did register for the draft. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 April 2022)

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