Chekhov’s Mistess

Random Thoughts, American War Poetry

At dinner with some friends not long ago, one person asked where is the war poetry? Where is the poetry to express my outrage over Iraq? My, admittedly facile, answer was “You can’t write war poetry from Starbucks.” Truth is, I didn’t have an answer. When I think of “war poetry” I think of poetry that experiences for us the tragedy of loss that must be individualized when deaths are numbered in the thousands. Implicit in that is a bit of helplessness. Susan Sontag says in her speech “At the Same Time, the Novelist and Moral Reasoning” that it is “our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events…” that is, that “we are here, now prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening…while elsewhere in the world, right now…”

But, she goes on, that “it is not ‘natural’ to keep remembering that the world is so…extended.” While this is “true,” she says, this “is why we need fiction: to stretch our world.”

Stretch, clarify, express our helplessness or outrage.

My wife and I just watched Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathers” (which we will soon follow with its companion “Letters from Iwo Jima”). Most “anti-war” films, such that they are anti-war films because of the fine line between glorifying and revealing tragedy in war, dwell on heroism in the face of terrible circumstance. Eastwood’s film balanced the inner struggle of the soldiers who were celebrated for raising the flag at Iwo Jima while they came to grips with the brutality of the deaths they witnessed, and the vague impressions of civilians at home whose romantic vision of the cause for war seems to have equaled their idea of its effects.

By focusing on that seminal photograph of soldiers raising a flag five days in to a 40 day battle, Eastwood beautifully highlighted the distance between those at war and us at home.

A Box Comes Home

I remember the United States of America
As a flag-draped box with Arthur in it
And six marines to bear it on their shoulders.

I wonder how someone once came to remember
The Empire of the East and the Empire of the West.
As an urn maybe delivered by chariot.

You could bring Germany back on a shield once
And France in a plume. England, I suppose,
Kept coming back a long time as a letter.

Once I saw Arthur dressed as the United States
Of America. Now I see the United States
Of America as Arthur in a flag-sealed domino.

And I would pray more good of Arthur
Than I can wholly believe. I would pray
An agreement with the United States of America

To equal Arthur’s living as it equals his dying
At the red-taped grave in Woodmere
By the rain and oakleaves on the domino.

- John Ciardi (1955)

Isn’t it ironic that as the images we see of war become more close, more stark, more real and more numerous that we become more distant personally from the effects of war and the cause for war? I’m not talking about how we might become inured from seeing photos and footage day after day, but the coincidence that

as our reporters are “embedded” in the field of battle, giving us all a cinematic seat at the death of others, we are expected to participate less

and our loss – for most of us- our loss is limited to our pride of belonging to a belligerent nation (for a discussion of war imagery, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others is required reading). The erosion of our basic freedoms (particularly for those who have immigrated here) is a form of loss too. Humility, not when it’s the opposite of pride, is a loss too.

“It is not my government, it is the government of my country. And notice how our syntax is here displaying its great wisdom. It doesn’t commit itself to either of the two great philosophies of our time by deciding whether my country means the country to which I belong or the country that belongs to me.”

- The Minister of Imponderabilia in Stefan Themerson’s “The Mystery of the Sardine”

In an interview segment in “Flags of our Fathers” a former soldier discusses the importance the Iwo Jima image held as a symbol of victory in winning the war. He contrasted that with the image of Nguyen Ngoc Loan during the Viet Nam war, saying that image of assassination became the symbol of loss. That was it. And what is the image from our war in Iraq?

I believe it is the hooded victim of torture at Abu Ghraib. The loss of moral authority.

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices
these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you
noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap
is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the
sense
Of being an adult and having no voice?
Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

- Robert Bly

Two great shifts from the beginnings of this country to now:

Civilian casualties of war have overwhelmed military casualties.

Lorrie Goldensohn, prefacing the last chapter of the anthology she edited American War Poetry says that 10% of the fatalities of World War I were civilian, yet in post World War II conflicts “fatalities and injuries are now 90% civilian. Surely the imbalance is even more in evidence in the counterinsurgency that defines our current war.”

The other shift is that in general our poetry has turned largely from pride, empathy and sadness. As Goldensohn says “The American war poem…rooted in the starvation, hardship, and dogged will of revolutionary independence, often evinces an unabashed and optimistic patriotism and deep love of country.” Not without moral conflict.

Today’s poetry has shifted toward protest, complicty and detachedness.

The Kind Shadow That Calls Out Fate

Early in the day reports said our planes
had bombed a wedding party in a distant country—

We could tell it had really happened
from the way the spokespersons on TV hesitated

before denying it – from the way they clear their throats
and said it was pending investigation.

You those crazy natives and their customs,
well, apparently it was their way of celebration
to shoot their rifles into the air

and jets showed up soon afterwards – forty dead,
and some of them horses.

Hearing about it over and over through the week
hearing he descriptions repeated over and over

of the colorful wedding clothes made brighter by the blood
the groans coming from they dying bride,

the bad news surrounded our house, like something rotten:
We sensed we couldn’t get away with this one.

It was exactly the sort of thing which in a greek play
would initiate a sequence of events

that turns inexorably back to bite
the hand that set it into motion

-and we knew we also were part of the plot.
We sat there in the audience as we have so often

as at a scene where the king drops his crown
which rolls across the floor and falls offstage

while he scrambles after it – and thoughtfully, the queen watches.

- Tony Hoagland

Interestingly, Goldensohn says that half of the poetry she collected was from witnesses of war.

There may be something to the fact that the most memorable war poetry has been from soldiers like Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.

Truth is, much of the new American poetry I’ve seen since 9/11 and the Iraq war hasn’t done the job. Much of what I’ve seen has fallen back on prosaic story-telling and it’s much too literal, tv like, to be effective, in my view. After 9/11, Frank Bidart’s “Curse”

“Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter / the skin of another, what I made is a curse”

and Auden’s “September 1939” were the two poems most resonate (completely wholly emotionally and intelligently resonate), where, say, Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell” sounded like something you might hear from a thoughtful newscaster rather than a world class poet.

And no timely matchless poem has arisen for the ongoing crisis in Iraq. Goldensohn’s anthology certainly allows us to have some perspective, reaching back as it does to the 18th century, before protest might have been so easy – so it would seem – as sending chain-emails of outrage to all your friends, or signing online petitions.

from Humanity at Guantanamo

We couldn’t let them die.
That would be inhumane
(besides leaving us shy)
of persons to detain).

Also it’s bad PR
(should it come out by chance)
that, treated as they are,
death is deliverance.

- Peter Kane Dufault (Poetry Magazine’s Humor Issue)

Perhaps we need distance in time equal to the distance in space we have between here and there. Perhaps too our outrage is muffled by our complicity. In the documentary film “Why We Fight” Eugene Jarecki argues persuasively just how ingrained war is in the economic fabric of our life in this country.

It’s not going away; nobody’s willing to make it go away because that would mean jobs and all the million things that happen.

We’re left to fight the little battles, enjoying how unsympathetic and unintelligent our President is, shaking our heads and wondering how half the country can possibly believe the entire other half is egregiously mistaken, or wondering why no one seems accountable for the day to day atrocities committed in the name of freedom. But war isn’t going anywhere.

from Masters of War

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins
…
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

– Bob Dylan (1963)

But as tempting as it may seem to say that poetry isn’t enough, action must be taken, no matter how true at one level that is, this friend of mine was right. She had just been reading a lot of poetry from bright minds and couldn’t find what she was looking for. In fact it sounded like most of what she read was from poets more engaged with themselves and academia than the world around them.

In the so-wonderful-I-keep-turning-to-it speech “Literature is Freedom,” Susan Sontag says “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted – made cynical, superficial – by this understanding…Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”

from Don’t Let it Happen Here

One day they came and they took the communists,
And I said nothing because I was not a communist.
Then one day they came and they took the people of the Jewish faith,
And I said nothing because I was had no faith left.

One day they came and they took the unionists,
And I said nothing because I was not a unionist.

One day they burned down the Catholic churches.
And I said nothing because I was born a Protestant.

Then one day they came and they took me.
And I could say nothing because I was guilty as they were,
For not speaking out and saying that all men have a right to freedom.

- Charles Mingus

photos of Raphael Zollinger’s “Welcome”

from Lorrie Goldenshohn American War Poetry(2006 Columbia University Press*):

John Ciardi, “A Box Comes Home” from The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (Fayettville, Ark.: The University of Arkansas Press, 1997.)
Tony Hoagland, “The Kind Shadow That Calls our Fate.”

Robert Bly’s “Call and Answer” from The Nation, November, 21, 2002.

Susan Sontag’s “At the Same Time, the Novelist and Moral Reasoning” and “Literature is Freedom” from At the Same Time, Essays and Speeches(New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007)

Peter Kane Dufault “Humanity at Guantanamo” from Poetry Magazine, July/August, 2006

*note: I have a business relationship with Columbia University Press.

comments

I just now found your blog post and really enjoyed reading it: relevant, to the point and sharing in my anger and frustration about the present war.
i must now read more - thank you so much.

    – raphael zollinger (07/08  at  11:13 PM)

Page 1 of 1 pages of comments

Next entry: Letter from BookExpo
Previous entry: From Life Stories and the Novel

« Back to main

About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 29, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

Recommended Links

- top -