Write a Poem About Yourself Using the Art of War
Christopher Kempf demands more from poetic appointment with human suffering
In June of 1982, taking advantage of the decades-long civil war betwixt Lebanon'south bulk Muslim population and its Christian minority, Israeli forces crossed the border under comprehend of darkness and entrenched themselves in a siege outside the capital metropolis of Beirut. The offensive provides the occasion for Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish'southward sequence of prose poems, Memory for Forgetfulness, an extended reflection on the invasion and on the office and responsibilities of writers in a time of war. Decrying the demand from politicians and publishers alike for poetry produced amongst the violence of that moment — for poems, equally he writes, "to match air raids" — Darwish argues that it's "galling that we should exist ready during these air raids to steal fourth dimension for all this churr […] that nosotros should be doing this at a moment in which everything has stopped talking."
His comments — objecting, essentially, to an occasional poetry of war — repeat Bertolt Brecht's half a century earlier, which mourned poesy's disconnection from a world in which the Nazi Party was rapidly consolidating its power. "What times are these," Brecht asks in "To Those Who Follow In Our Wake," "in which/ A conversation about trees is most a crime/ For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing?" Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno put it even more than directly in 1948, famously stating that "to write verse later on Auschwitz is barbaric." Simply where Brecht and Adorno imagine poetry as an nigh complicit silence in the face of historical injustice, Darwish locates poetry within history itself, arguing that "Beirut itself is the writing […] Its true poets and singers are its people and fighters, who don't need to be entertained or spurred by a lute with broken strings."
Insisting on what we might telephone call a "lived poetics" over and against traditionally romanticized war poetry, Darwish locates himself at the middle of a question — how, if at all, to aestheticize the violence of state of war — which reaches back far beyond the violence of the 20th century. Virgil himself, poet-historian of the Trojan State of war, calls upon the muse for assist to fit linguistic communication to its military machine subject, in singing, equally he says, of "arms and the human being" and in so doing understanding, through poesy, "the causes and the crimes" of that conflict. But the relationship between state of war and its poetic representation is also 1 of poetry's newest, most pressing problems, particularly at a time when our own War on Terror continues to render language itself doubtable (one thinks of "Mission Accomplished" or "signature strike" or "enhanced interrogation") and particularly, too, at a time when publishers of poetry are showing a renewed involvement, in dissimilarity to the first Gulf State of war, in the poetic product of veterans.
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In the final viii years, five critically-regarded books of poetry past veterans have been released by distinguished presses, each of which responds to the problem Darwish raised — the trouble, that is, of verse's commensurability to war and the violence it engenders. In Hither, Bullet, released in 2005, Brian Turner asserts that "I have no words to speak of war./ I never dug graves in Talafar./ I never held the mother crying in Ramadi." Turner, too the author of the 2010 collection Phantom Dissonance, underscores Darwish's point that the existent poetry of war is written by history, forged, as Darwish writes, to the "rhythm of rockets." Hugh Martin makes a like gesture in the poem "The War Was Adept, Thank You," responding with a serial of fragmented, incoherent images when questioned by "a freshman daughter [who] asks, So, how was the war?" "I didn't tell anyone," Martin writes, "I lay outside shirtless/ and ready ice cubes/ on my closed eyelids." Martin's book, The Stick Soldiers, released in 2013, is filled with this kind of comédie noire, a knowing authorisation which seems deeply suspicious not only of its own attempts to reduce the state of war to linguistic communication but as well of the capacity of its civilian audience to comprehend this language.
Both of these poets manner themselves as reluctant witnesses to a historical consequence irreducible to language, an event that at one time resists poeticization and yet, given the current vogue for veterans' poetry, seems remarkably generative of it. This tension — between poetry and history, language and experience — constitutes a chief focus of the two virtually recent collections from veterans, Kerry James Evans's Bangalore, released in October, and Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers, published in April. In a poem called "Improvised Explosive Device," Powers contends that "If this poem had wires/ coming out of it,/ yous would non read it." And Evans, in a poem called "Vii Chants, A War Cry," explains to "you lot cipher of a reader" that "this is the savage age of battleships and bombs," an historic period, Evans suggests, which refuses to be reduced to glib, well-meaning poetic sensibilities. "These are mornings," Evans writes, "roosters eat eggs, ant colonies gasolined —/ tortured, the queen dead, her neck noosed and hanged.// I am not your Savior. I am not your King."
Evans's disobedience of his readers — the move is a common one throughout his collection — rings false, withal, when we consider his willingness to court those readers through precisely the artful rendering of war that he disavows in claiming, for example, that "I wasn't at that place./ I tin't give the image." For the collection, cartoon heavily upon Evans'southward experience in the armed forces, is brimming-total of images of war and violence: "When I say kill," Evans writes in one verse form, "I mean wrap det-cord around your face." And indeed, Bangalore'due south front embrace features a literal image of the schematics of a Bangalore torpedo. In the same way, Powers's Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting invokes in its very title the spectacular epitome of a soldier scrawling furiously amid the rain of shrapnel and the thunder of explosions, all despite Powers's frequent protestations that he can't write about the state of war. "Guns are not ideas," he says in one poem, "They are not things to which comparisons are made."
Such paw-wringing about the relationship between poetry and state of war suggests, on one manus, an attempt to appoint ethically with this virtually complicated of subject matters, a kind of "hedging of bets" on the part of veteran poets wary of the hard, controversial artful trouble into which they're venturing. On the other paw, however, these poets' seemingly vexed relationship to their arts and crafts is symptomatic of a more glaring problem, especially in the piece of work of Evans and Powers. These writers, invoking the imagery and rhetoric of the War on Terror in the name of marketing, ultimately elide the existent violence of that state of war, shielding themselves from accountability by asserting the exclusive right of the American soldier to narrate the state of war experience.
"This verse form is for every dead American," Evans writes. "This verse form is not for anyone who reads poems." Implying that the war'south "true poets," to quote Darwish, are its fighters, Evans nevertheless abstains, as does Powers, from what might be a discomfiting appointment with those other fighters of the War of Terror, with "every dead" Iraqi and Afghani soldier, besides as with the civilian populations of both countries, transformed, by the very nature of this state of war, into fighters themselves. We should, then, tread carefully in our fetishization of veterans' poesy every bit if such writing constitutes an unbiased business relationship of the state of war experience and not, as it more than accurately does, a representation of the war curated for American audiences enamored — every bit evidenced, for example, by the success of the Call of Duty serial or by the critical acclaim for films like Zero Dark Xxx — with war and war-related violence. And we would be well-served, as a literary culture, to demand from our poesy a richer, more nuanced conception of what it means to engage aesthetically with that timeless and nearly fraught of poetic subjects — man suffering.
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In his review of Turner's Here, Bullet for The New York Times, Joel Brouwer anticipates much of the recent criticism surrounding contemporary veterans' poesy, lauding the "terrific immediacy" of the collection equally well as Turner'southward "brisk, precise — and nonpartisan — attending to both the terrors and the beauty he found among Iraq's ruins." Brouwer's statement is an important — and, as I've suggested, representative — i for the way it frames Turner's work as a poetry of witness, documenting the war in "earnest and expert poems" that "evangelize […] the kinds of observations we would never find in a Pentagon press release."
And indeed there is much of the State of war on Terror witnessed to in Here, Bullet. Merely of the book's 47 poems, but three care for the deaths of Iraqis themselves in a significant manner, and never — excepting an image of American soldiers "stand[ing] over the bodies" of dead Iraqis "maxim/ Terminal phone call, motherfucker. Last phone call" — does Turner show an American soldier actually killing anyone. The aforementioned omission is present in Evans'southward Bangalore, an 82-page collection in which not a single Iraqi or Afghani is killed, and in Powers'southward Letter Composed, in which just two poems out of 34 mention, notwithstanding briefly, the deaths of Iraqis. One could be forgiven for imagining, based on these poets' experiences, that the War on Terror was a relatively bloodless romp through a land where, as Turner romanticizes, "white birds rose from the Tigris."
If contemporary veterans' poetry is, every bit a genre, a poesy of witness, it is one of selective witness, eschewing sustained engagement with the deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis in favor of insufficiently myopic reportage on the day-to-day lives of American soldiers. To exist certain, such reportage constitutes an important archiving of one side of the war experience, but to laud such poetry for providing a human face to the war or for transporting Iraq, as Brouwer claims, "from the fog of political oratory into tangibility" is to have a very narrow idea indeed of what — and for whom — "Iraq" actually ways.
The most complex of these veteran poets, Martin is for his part more than responsible in his treatment of the State of war on Terror'due south collateral damage. In the poem "Observation Postal service," Martin powerfully dramatizes the death of an Iraqi interpreter:
We bulldoze with the helm in a Humvee
and discover the two boys
crouched together, hands
over heads on the floor, their begetter
moisture on their bodies.
Captain takes a photograph, and nosotros lean
toward the backseat window, equally he points
at red scraps of Marwan,
beside the seatbelt buckle. Later,
he'll show everyone, magnifying
the camera'south screen, that's skull
right there, that'south skull,
as if needing others to agree.
Rather than glossing over the violence elided past other veteran poets, Martin self-consciously renders his own titillated witness to this violence, suggesting the arbitration implicit in whatsoever attempted witness to war. Likewise, in "Showtime Engagement," Martin relates an incident in which his unit mistakenly guns downwards an Iraqi "dragging rebar from the dorsum of his truck," though no ane knows, Martin says, that "he was taking it to rebuild his domicile;/ no one knows his son, the passenger, is shot in the arm."
Martin gestures in these poems, every bit his fellow veteran poets rarely do, toward his ain active however cocky-critical participation in the State of war on Terror, but even Martin stops short of showing u.s. the true extent of that war — the "enemy combatants" hooked up to car batteries, the weddings struck with Hellfire missiles, the hunger strikes, the bodies of Afghans on which US Marines urinated. Such events take long been the province of protestation poetry, but they're clearly absent in contemporary veterans' writing. On the ane hand, of course, this absence points to — and can be explained by — the limitations inherent in whatever poetry of witness; neither Martin nor his contemporaries, it seems likely, would have witnessed all, or fifty-fifty whatsoever, of these atrocities, and it therefore seems unfair to demand they write about them.
On the other hand, even so, these poets' disability to transcend the local, to engage the war on more a diaristic level, suggests that we should accept with a grain of salt Brouwer'south merits that in such "nonpartisan" poetry nosotros find "the kinds of observations we would never find in a Pentagon press release." Failing to appoint with the full ethical complexity of the War on Terror — to appoint, that is, with the state of war as an idea — this poetry is in fact often uncomfortably similar to Pentagon press releases, themselves concerned with comparatively myopic reportage framing the war equally an a priori legitimate undertaking. We might very well expect this from the Pentagon, just nosotros shouldn't, I don't call up, accept it from our poets.
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In seeking an alternative model of what a more than socially-committed state of war verse might look like, information technology may be necessary to look beyond our electric current war — and even the first Gulf War that preceded it — to Vietnam, and in particular to the work of veteran Bruce Weigl, whose dozen books of poetry document richly and ofttimes disturbingly his wartime experience. In "Surrounding Blues on the Way Downward," from the 1988 drove Song of Napalm, Weigl describes an older soldier assaulting a Vietnamese woman "bent over from her blimp sack of flowers" who "smiled her beetle-black teeth at us":
I have no excuse for myself.
I sat in that homo's jeep in the rain
and watched him slam her to her knees,
the plastic butt of his M16
crashing down on her.
Similarly, in "The Concluding Lie" Weigl relates an incident in which a soldier throws C rations from the back of the truck at a grouping of trailing children. The poem bears quoting at length:
He didn't toss the can, he wound up and hung it
on the child's forehead and she was stunned
backwards into the dust of our trucks.
Across the sudden angle of the road's curving
I could however come across her when she rose,
waving one mitt across her swollen, bleeding head,
wildly swinging her other hand
at the children who mobbed her,
who tried to take her nutrient.
….
and the guy with me laughed
and fingered the border of some other tin
similar it was the seam of a baseball
until his rage ripped
again into the faces of children
who called to us for food.
It'due south a haunting paradigm, an near mythical depiction of a sort of parental relationship gone awry, utterly transformed by the inhumanity of war. Things get messy in this poem. Things, every bit they do in state of war, get strange and out of control and tearing, and it's precisely this tonal range, this complexity of feeling which gives to Weigl's work a broader, more nuanced conception of war than exists in our own generation of war poetry.
In contrast, gimmicky veterans' poetry seems strikingly flat, its structures of feeling one-dimensional, its tone, as Weigl describes it, "muted." Such flatness may, of course, exist taken to enact on a tonal level what Weigl calls that "necessary numbing of the senses" past which soldiers disengage from the trauma effectually them, and certainly many soldiers have themselves been numbed by an economic and war machine arrangement designed to strip them of their individuality. In gimmicky veterans' poetry we detect an emotional palette reminiscent of Camus's "white style" or what Barthes calls the "cipher degree of writing," a tone — neutral, simple, and spare — that pretends to a scientific objectivity conferring both dominance and authenticity on its writer.
This poesy is often uncomfortably like to Pentagon press releases.
This style, still, is consciously chosen and advisedly cultivated, and, in its ostensible objectivity, information technology has the effect of de-ideologizing war, treating it not equally a contestable undertaking in the name of select interests but as a natural — and neutral — form of international and interpersonal relations. This poetry never risks the 1000 statement or the bold gesture, and just rarely — "We know [Saddam Hussein] had weapons," ane civilian says in The Stick Soldiers — does it locate the State of war on Terror within the political ideologies for which information technology's carried out, those systems of rhetoric and forcefulness responsible for putting these veterans' "boots on the ground" in the first place.
Leaving intact and unchallenged our media-curated understanding of the war, this poesy at the aforementioned time preserves our conception — molded largely in the mass-market, Hollywood blockbuster — of what a soldier is and does, characterizing its own soldiers as the stoic professionals with which we're so familiar. In i poem, for example, Powers resorts to one of the most ubiquitous stock images of the state of war feel as it's been registered on film, describing "a black sedan/ with GOVERNMENT Utilize license plates/ and […] 2 men/ walking upwards the front steps." We've seen this motion-picture show before.
But shouldn't we look from our poetry a more than complex subjectivity than tin be rendered with platitude? Shouldn't we ask that the spare, controlled lyricism of these poems requite mode, sometimes, to chaos? Shouldn't we ask for ache and loneliness and terror? Shouldn't we expect rage? Western culture'due south earliest war verse form, after all, opens with the poet invoking divine assist to "sing the rage of Achilles," naming its focus as that very fury which causes Achilles to drag Hector's lifeless body three times effectually the gates of Troy. "My rage," Achilles says to Hector before stabbing him through the breadbasket, "would drive me at present to hack your flesh away and eat you raw, such agonies yous have caused me." Shouldn't we look that?
Instead, these poets work primarily in an epiphanic style — Charles Altieri calls it "the scenic mode" — that preserves intact the manner of narration past which news pundits and politicians explain the war to us. Here, for instance, is the conclusion to Evans'south "Blanket Party," a poem in which Evans and his fellow soldiers gang up on an outcast soldier. "I called him a faggot," Evans writes,
who couldn't fight, and since
our heads were shaved to fend
off ticks and lice, I didn't pull
his pilus, only planted my elbow
into his temple. He passed out.
One calendar month later he was discharged.
The barracks blackened with sleep,
and that darkness was broken
by a bugle. We'd killed our own.
The poem is a powerful depiction of soldiers exorcising those parts of themselves and of military machine civilization they'd rather not admit, yet the poem just becomes legible in this way in its final line, which Evans delivers with all the heavy-handedness of a math trouble: "We'd killed our own," that is, provides the epiphanic "reply" to the narrative preceding it, rendering that narrative retroactively meaningful. Likewise, Powers ends one poem with a description of himself as a child climbing into the seat abreast his presumably-tubercular father, "that rag he had/ past then begun to cough into/ already resting on his knee." It'due south a forced, last-infinitesimal injection of pathos intended, it seems, both to ominously foreshadow the speaker's own growing awareness of death and to wrap things up in an emotionally-resonant manner.
Much of contemporary war poetry is similarly tidy, tied off with a bow at the cease as if to reassure its readers that there are meaningful answers to this war, that things are nether command here, that the traditional structures of meaning-making, whether poetic or political, remain firmly in place. Nevertheless how, Darwish asks, "can traditional verse […] define the poetry now fermenting in the belly of the volcano?" How can contemporary veterans' verse continue to rely on and perpetuate old modes of writing in this new, radically unlike kind of war? If it's possibly too much to demand an artful revolution in the vein of modernism — which responded, in part, to the increasingly technological and mechanistic nature of warfare — shouldn't we hope, at least, for some measure of formal and linguistic innovation from this poetry? Shouldn't we brand it make itself new?
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Gimmicky veteran poets, withal, are not necessarily the culprits hither, working equally they are within a publishing industry a tad too eager to capitalize on the timeliness of state of war writing. Such writing is, later all, far more than marketable to wider audiences than other modes of contemporary poesy. Here, Bullet was one of the acknowledged poetry books of the decade, and both Evans's and Martin'south collections sold out their first print runs. Too, Powers's collection was reportedly slated for an unprecedented 100,000-copy first press.
Then too, information technology's worth reiterating, might we read the political ambivalence of contemporary veterans' poetry more generously than I have hither, every bit expressing something akin to Darwish's feet about the appropriateness of poetry about gimmicky warfare. Indeed, all of these poets are at their best when self-consciously bookkeeping for their own aestheticizing of homo suffering. In ane of Powers's most moving poems, he describes "a parking lot, which covers upwards a grave,/ a name we give in atypical for the hundred slaves/ they buried there dorsum then." The poem'due south conclusion is a frank and powerful acknowledgement of the callousness required to aestheticize suffering, likewise equally of the complex relation between aesthetics and history: "At that place were some names here once," Powers writes at the cease of the verse form. "Some children, too. And then what? Nothing/ was counted. Order is a myth."
Contemporary veterans poetry documents firsthand the lived reality — or at least one side of that reality — of a historical conflict we in this country experience at such a remove. This poesy is virtually important as a corrective to the pretension of a single, monological narrative to the State of war on Terror. Withal too often this poesy just reinforces that narrative, resembling too closely those unquestioned ideologies — economic and political, of American exceptionalism and militaristic triumphalism —responsible for the war this poesy takes every bit its subject. Nosotros should exist wary, then, as Darwish cautions, of "defending the role of the poet whose writing is unique because it is rooted in his relationship to the actual as it unfolds." For despite this poetry's often spectacular invocation of war and war-related violence, in that location is no real barbarism here, no dead or displaced Iraqis, no double-tapped family members, no waterboarded combatants. There are, as Evans puts it, "No ghosts. Merely the ghosts // of soldiers."
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Besides Recommended fromMRB:
- The Poetics of Tragedy – By Christopher Kempf
- Translating Poesy: An Human activity and Art of Preserving the Essential – Past Rachel Tzvia Back
- Incarnational Poetics and the New Theological Literary Studies – Past Ryan McDermott
- Prayers amidst Parodies and Empty Praisesongs – By Luke Johnson
Source: https://themarginaliareview.com/art-war-poetry-christopher-kempf/
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