Chekhov's Mistress
Today’s Oxymoron: War Poetry
Election season is thankfully drawing to a close, but just to be in the spirit of things, I thought it worth mentioning the latest issue of Poetry Magazine (now the richest little poetry magazine in the world), which features an article by Eleanor Wilner called Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance?
where she expresses her dismay over the NEA’s Operation Homecoming: Writing the War Experience,
described as a project to help soldiers write about their experiences in war by bringing writers to military bases to conduct workshops for soldiers returning from combat.
Although I at first countered her dismay with the thought of the poignant WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen, among others, I was soon convinced of Ms. Wilner’s argument that As poets, we do not choose our subjects; the imagination is a force which can be invited, but it cannot be commanded.
Language, as it should be in this context, is the issue here:
When promoting a war, which means authorizing the killing of other human beings, it is necessary to use a language which robs them of their humanity. There are several ways this is done. One is by seeing them as members of another species—something bestial, primitive, predatory. Perhaps that is why most animals do not murder their own kind: they are not subject to this confusion. Another way, which is characteristic of military language, is to denature the enemy by the use of a detached, Latinate, and bloodless language, so that one “neutralizes” opposing forces, or the burning, mutilation, and killing of civilians is masked as “collateral damage.
Of course, her main concern, shared by many whom she quotes is the politicization of that language: Operation Homecoming threatens to move the NEA into the business of supporting the generation of propaganda, a wartime exercise that is not part of its mission, and does writers, veterans, and the public a great disservice.
The article is available on-line, so you can draw your own conclusions.
Read widely, think well, and write often.
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