No Poetry at the White House

By Don Gonyea

Published January 30, 2003 at 11:00 PM CST

The White House apparently has cancelled a poetry symposium after a number of American poets threatened to turn the event into an anti-war protest. The Feb. 12 symposium on Poetry and the American Voice was one of a number of literary gatherings organized by First Lady Laura Bush. NPR's Don Gonyea reports.

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

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