10 Years Ago, Poets Against The War

Ten years ago, as the UK prepared for a potentially illegal war against Iraq, Nthposition, edited by Val Stevenson, and myself, the site's poetry editor, hurriedly compiled a global anti-war anthology that was soon followed by many others.  The anthology, ten years later, has been written about in several academic studies, sometimes vilified, and was even mocked by the comedian S. Fry.  It was also downloaded tens of thousands of times, launched in dozens of cities at once, from Russia to Japan to America to the UK - and was turned into a very rapid book by Salt (when it was featured on CNN).  The Guardian that year selected it as the most popular poetry book of the year, in terms of library loans.  It was called 100 Poets Against The War.  That's what I did, way back then, when younger, with my spare time; it is now available online for sale for one penny.