Roughly 50 years after a young protester placed a single flower into the barrel of a military policeman’s rifle, a California poet is turning again to flower power — and drones — to protest war.
Los Angeles poet David Shook is on an ambitious mission to raise $10,000 to fly a drone dropping biodegradable antiwar “poem bombs” impregnated with wildflower seeds around the world.
Project Poetry Drone aims to purchase an unmanned aircraft to carry and drop specially commissioned poems by leading U.S. and world poets over literary and art events in an attempt to demonstrate the good drones can actually do.
The goal would be to “promote discussion, humanize its victims, and explore the political responsibility of poets, artists, and citizens,” according to the Kickstarter page.
“Join me in reinventing what drones can do,” Shook writes in an accompanying black-and-white video emphasizing the startling number of casualties committed from drones overseas.
“Drone strikes have increased substantially under President Obama: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that there have been 369 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing roughly 2,500 to 3,500 people, including at least 168 children and 400 – 900 civilians,” Shook writes on his page.
If Shook’s campaign can reach its financial goal by July 16 he plans to use the funding to purchase a drone as well as fuel the production of its “paper bombs.”
Those poems will also appear in their own published work, The Poetry Drone Anthology, come December.
The exact schedule of where the drone would fly has yet to be released.
“All poems will be printed on plantable paper, biodegradable paper impregnated with wildflower seeds, so that if left behind (or planted) they will grow assorted wildflowers. The poems will be printed with earth-friendly soy ink,” Shook writes on his page.
He also makes it clear that with their drone being nonlethal, it would face the same laws as hobby drones.
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