Letter to the editor of American Thinker  ()

Dear "American" thinker,

We know you're worried. So was Senator McCarthy.

"Art" was easy for you to control. But Japanese-American haiku writers interned by the U.S. goverment (Executive Order 9066) were not. Tillie Olsen's employment of Felipe Ibarro's letter to describe 1930s sweatshop conditions in Texas in her poem "I Want You Women Up North to Know" was not. My fellow Minnesota writer Meridel LeSueur, was not. Langston Hughes was not. Ammiel Alcalay is not.

And neither are we, critics of US-foreign policy poets, anti-NAFTA/CAFTA/FTAA poets, anti-media-conglomerate/monopoly poets, pro-peace poets, pro-free-Leonard-Peltier-Mumia-Abu-Jamal-and-the-Cuban-Five poets...

So you call us anti-American thinkers, "nominally literary in discipline," supporters, "implicity, with terror".

But you are an institution, and like Whitman wrote in "I Hear It Was Charged Against Me," we poets have no fear of institutions. We only wish to establish "The institution of the dear love of comrades."

For we, we *are* the people,

Union of Radical Workers and Writers