Pinter Wins Nobel Prize in Literature - A couple of his War Poems

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God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

Harold Pinter January 2003

-------


The Special Relationship

The bombs go off
The legs go off
The heads go off

The arms go off
The feet go off
The light goes out

The heads go off
The legs go off
The lust is up

The dead are dirt
The lights go out
The dead are dust

A man bows down before another man
And sucks his lust

Harold Pinter
August 2004

http://www.haroldpinter.org/home/index.shtml#


LBN thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1846661

[tmooses]

1. A great choice for Nobel prize-literature. He has likened Bush and

Blair to war criminals and clearly articulated the Bush/fascism connection.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

2. American Football

American Football
(A Reflection upon the Gulf War)

Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their
own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of
dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here
and kiss me on the mouth.

-----------------

It is significant that on the death of Graham Greene in April 1991 Pinter praised him for his ability to look beyond political rhetoric at the reality of 'a tortured naked body'. Pinter's own obsession with the gulf between language and fact prompted him in August that same year to write a poem called 'American Football - A Reflection on the Gulf War'. It was rejected for publication by the Independent, the Observer, the Guardian (on the grounds it was 'a family newspaper'), the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. The last named, in particular, aroused Pinter's ire by accompanying rejection with the assurance that the poem had 'considerable force' and that it shared the author's views on the United States.

http://www.haroldpinter.org/poetry/poetry_football.shtml

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4. thanks - I didn't see that one

I'll pass it on to some sports fans :evilgrin:

[Stephanie]

3. Thanks!

It's well deserved.

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5. .

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6. .

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7. NYT article today - Friday:

Pinter Wins Nobel for Dramas of Ominous Power Struggles

By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 14, 2005

LONDON, Oct. 13 - Harold Pinter, the British playwright, poet and political campaigner who uses spare and often menacing language to explore themes of powerlessness, domination and the faceless tyranny of the state, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms," the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said in announcing the award, which is worth $1.3 million.

In his versatile and productive career, Mr. Pinter, 75, has written plays and screenplays, directed theater productions, acted on screen and stage, and won awards across Europe. So precise and pared down is his prose, so artful his use of pauses and omissions to invoke discomfort, foreboding and miscommunication that he has his own adjective, Pinteresque, signifying a peculiar kind of atmospheric unease....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/books/14nobe.html?th&emc=th