By Richard Tedesco
Wheat revealed the plan of his poet peers after a reading at the Five Towns Forum on Friday nifght. He sees the media attention to the denial of his installation as Nassau County laureate by the county legislature as an opportunity to help make poetry relevant to people."This isn't the end," he said. "This is the beginning of a movement."
His peers deny any political motivation in the initative to recognize his lifetime of work. "The poetry commiunity really feels that they want to honor Max," said Paula Camacho, a Farmingdale poet who originally proposed Wheat for the newly created position of county laureate. "We're just getting together to say Max is our poet."
The unofficial ceremony to recognize the 80-year-old Wheat will take place later this month at Cedarmere in Roslyn, where the official installation would have been held.
The Freeport resident feels he was unfairly pilloried for the opposition to the war in Iraq expressed in his collection "Iraq and Other Killing Fields."
"I was being penalized because I had a political view about something. It has the seed of McCarthyism in it," he said, after a reading at the Five Towns Forum on Friday night.
"This book was inspired by concern for our people and for the Iraqi people," he told his audience. "It is concern for what they have been made to do, concern for them as people."
In one of the poems that upset the legislators, "The Colonel Will Know When the Troops Can Go Home," he describes an acerbic Marine colonel as "Hannibal with General George Patton's appreciation of words." The poem concludes with the colonel saying, "It's over for us when the last guy who wants to fight for Saddam has flies crawling across his eyeballs."
Wheat served in the U.S. Marines for 18 months at the end of World War II, guarding the Chesapeake Naval Base in Maryland. "I still am proud to be a Marine," he said.
The only agenda Maxwell Wheat had in mind in contemplating the role of Nassau County poet laureate was trying to give his neighbors a chance to enjoy poetry.
"I looked at the whole county as part of a class," he said, explaining that he planned to stage free seminars to introduce the uninitiated and simply encourage more poetry reading.
"We are a country uncomfortable with poetry. People are deprived of a great language being used," he said.
But Wheat became the object of the Nassau County Legislature's scorn in what he views as an exercise in political "grandstanding." Along with that poem about the Marine colonel, Republican legislators were disgruntled that he described both George Bush and Dick Cheney as "less-than-Elected" president and vice president.
He sees the power of poetry in a much broader context: "Poetry can be a language for peace. I have faith that poetry can put meaning into our lives and inspire us to do meaningful things."
After earning his master's degree at New York University, the most meaningful things in Max Wheat's life was his career as a junior high school teacher, and the poetry he continued to write.
He is disappointed at the legislature's action, but not dismayed. He's looking forward to his ersatz installation as poet laureate by his peers, and hopes all the publicity he's received will provide a payoff by raising people's consciousness about the art form he loves.
