Where Have All the War Poems Gone?
Today the United States has been engaged in war, with its NATO allies, in Afghanistan, for nearly seven years, and, with a cobbled together Coalition of the Willing, in Iraq, for more than five. By contrast, the Allies defeated the Axis in six years (1939–1945). Yet the present conflict has inspired no poems that have penetrated into the consciousness of American society, except, perhaps, Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” an ode to paranoid conspiracy theories that gained notoriety in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, by suggesting that “Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion” and that someone “told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” Baraka’s poem could be classified as anti-Enlightenment, an indictment of the atrocities committed by the ascendant Western powers, with the implicit argument that America, as the culmination of that immoral ascendancy, blew itself up. Some consider it anti-Semitic, unpatriotic rubbish. I don't know what to make of it myself: The lines quoted above, taken out of context, are incendiary; but the poem as a whole doesn't debunk the conspiracy theory so much as suggest a conspiracy so vast, reaching back centuries and hurtling into the future, that nearly everyone is implicated. Both the poem and Baraka's lengthy defense of it can be found on the poet's web site: http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html.
It is possible that the absence of war poems in the present era tells us more about poetry, and the way poetry is presented, than about the war(s). I have written to editors at three magazines that regularly feature poetry—The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Poetry—to explain the absence of war poetry in their magazines. I have not, as of this writing, heard from The Atlantic. Paul Muldoon, poetry editor of The New Yorker, wrote:
As you might imagine, we consider all subjects to be grist to the mill of poetry. That includes war. The circumstances in which we publish poems “about” the war are precisely those in which we publish poems about women’s wear or wagtails—when a really good one comes in. You can expect to see some of those in upcoming issues of The New Yorker.
I found what could be considered a war poem in The New Yorker, published by Muldoon’s predecessor, Alice Quinn. “Baggage Claim,” by W. D. Snodgrass, introduces the war as an inconvenience to travelers returning from their overseas holidays. While waiting for their baggage to arrive at the baggage claim, the narrator and his companion(s) see “one last black bag alone, vanishing / ten times into the rough black curtains / unclaimed” and they are reminded of the death of a friend, Fernando, a man fondly recalled who seems to have lived a full life. As this recollection concludes, “Their faces distorted in / distress, two older women rushed past.” Many of us can relate to feelings of distress in an airport baggage claim, not knowing whether one’s bags will arrive. The women are told by a “cop,” “Your stuff / will be out soon. They’ve got this short / ceremony—military.” The narrator recalls that “just before our takeoff one marine / in full parade dress / had quietly been slipped on board.” He remembers a news report about a 22-year-old marine serving his third tour who had been killed in a roadside blast. Evidently, that marine’s remains are being brought home for burial. Without hectoring his readers, Snodgrass draws the distinction between vacationers inconvenienced at the airport and those who spend their time “abroad” serving their country; between those who die of normal causes and those killed in war; between momentary distress and death.
Fred Sasaki, an assistant editor at Poetry, replied, “We regularly publish poems that address the war, explicitly or obliquely, and occasionally essays that do so as well.” Following his suggestion, I reviewed issues of Poetry from the past five years and found two essays on war, one of which, “Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance,” by Eleanor Wilner, took to task the National Endowment for the Arts for its Operation Homecoming, a program that matched returning veterans with creative writing teachers. Wilner, in turn, was lambasted in letters from readers. I also found in Poetry half a dozen poems, running the gamut from explicitness to obliquity. One, for example, is titled “Bosnia Aftermath” and has to do with the previous war, during the Clinton administration, in which the United States suffered no casualties.
Meanwhile, war poems can easily be found on the Internet. Most of it is doggerel: sincere, naïve and excruciating. On the other hand, several of America’s best poets, regular contributors to the magazines named above, contributed poems to http://www.poetsagainstwar.com/chapbook.asp#Angel. Based on these contributions, a book titled Poets Against the War and dedicated to Laura Bush was rushed into print in 2003 with an introduction by its principal editor (or maybe “begetter” is a better word), Sam Hamill, which boasts:
Between the last week of January and the end of February [2003], poetsagainstthewar.org became host to several historic moments: Never before in recorded history have so many poets spoken in a single chorus; never before has a single-theme anthology of this proportion been assembled; never before had such wide-ranging national—and eventually global—“Days of Poetry Against the War” been organized. A historic moment indeed. Besides the sheer quantity and enthusiasm of 11,000 poets, we have brought poetry into the American consciousness as never before, reminding our citizenry that poetry (and all the arts) indeed addresses social and historical subjects. (xvii–xviii)
Indeed, indeed. Two indeeds in consecutive sentences. Apparently, Dick Cheney does not have a copyright on self-delusion.
Nevertheless, I found a number of good poems here, none of which have blood and guts; these are anti-war poems by noncombatants. One of the most moving was by Katha Pollitt, who dramatizes, in “Trying to Write a Poem Against the War,” the plight of the civilian poet protesting war in a manner natural to her but alien to the world:
My daughter, who’s as beautiful as the day,
hates politics: Face it, Ma,
they don’t care what you think! All
passion, like Achilles,
she stalks off to her room,
to confide in her purple guitar and await
life’s embassies. She’s right,
of course: bombs will be hurled
at ordinary streets
and leaders look grave for the cameras,
and what good are more poems against war
the real subject of which
so often seems to be the poet’s superior
moral sensitivities? I could
be mailing myself to the moon
or marrying a palm tree,
and yet what can we do
but offer what we have?
and so I spend
this cold gray glittering morning
trying to write a poem against war
that perhaps may please my daughter
who hates politics
and does not care much for poetry, either.
This is a poem that follows Auden’s dictum about poetry making nothing happen, but what I find most attractive about it is the poet’s humility: Pollitt, not the Muse, makes nothing happen. She hews to her own experience, which is both the limitation and the strength of poets; contemporary poets like Snodgrass and Pollitt don’t write as if they were journalists embedded with an army unit when, in fact, they have never been to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Some poets turn to satire. Tom Sleigh’s “Fable,” in the June 2005 Poetry, has for epigraph “A little village in Texas has lost its idiot—Caption on a protest sign.” Others direct their bile at the voters who elected the idiot. Others find the idiocy in themselves as responsible citizens of a country that readily consents to “pre-emptive” war.
These are difficult times for poets who want to write poems that are political in nature or strive to address a larger audience, because poetry over the last hundred years has turned relentlessly inward. To be plain runs counter to the dominant esthetic of obliquity and ambiguity, which is enforced by the editors at all the prestigious magazines, whether they own it or not. The fact is, when a poem was judged by its technical accomplishment—its mastery of meter and rhyme, the rightness and originality of its metaphors, the adroitness of its phrasing: in short, its wit—then the poet could make his meaning as plain as porridge. He could say anything and be judged a poet; but now, anything said plainly is judged to be prose of the lowest order: propaganda.
This divorcement of poetry from the larger reading public is nothing new. In fact, this is the ostensible cause of Operation Homecoming, which, according to Dana Gioia, poet and soon-to-retire chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, came up in a discussion during a gathering of poets laureate from all fifty states. (Who knew that every state had a poet laureate?) In his preface to Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, Gioia writes:
We spoke about how separate the worlds of literature and the military are in our society and how crucially important the art of literature might be to military personnel undergoing huge changes in their lives. What would happen if the nation fostered a conversation between its writers and its troops? (xii)
The 400+ pages of Operation Homecoming, edited by Andrew Carroll, are a moving testament to the service of American citizens and to the horrific realities of war, which writers who have not experienced it are unable to express. But whether it promotes a dialog between writers and troops is unlikely. Gauging from the fact that only sixteen poems are included, it has done nothing to make poetry more public.
Yet the poems that were chosen for this volume are not negligible. What is more, they are not uncritical of the war. But what I find here is a balanced view on the part of combatants and their families, a view similar to that of World War I poet-soldiers: soldiers may die, some of them do, war is hell, and a lot of it is senseless.
In his introduction, Carroll quotes Kathy Roth-Douquet, wife of a Marine Corps officer commanding a helicopter squadron in Iraq. Her poem is “Emily, Updated”:
Helicopters
fly without
feathers.
Hope
is the thing
with armor. (xx–xxi)
This short poem could be said to affirm that the mission of the helicopter pilots is to bring hope, whether they are killing the enemy or medevacking wounded soldiers, and, at the same time, to call attention to the woeful under-armoring of soldiers and their equipment. Another poet, Ryan Alexander, a civilian working with the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, writes in “The Cat” that “A pregnant cat [is] a happy distraction; / some sort of normal thing” and that this feral creature he surreptitiously feeds is “the one true heart and mind that America / had won” (159–60). In “The Baghdad Zoo,” U.S. Army Sgt. Brian Turner takes aim at the oil-centric post-invasion strategy in these lines:
There were tanks rolling their heavy tracks
past the museum and up to the Ministry of Oil.
One gunner watched a lion chase down a horse. (283–4)
The zoo inhabitants are on the loose, the art museum is ignored, and only the Ministry of Oil is guarded. Turner also writes about the violence that poets at home don’t see, as in “The Hurt Locker”:
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls. (284)
Most graphic is Army Captain Robert W. Schaefer, who describes a soldier being killed by a mine, or IED (improvised explosive device), as he
gingerly tapped one
with the toe of his boot
which then evaporated in a pink frothy cloud,
a bubble gum pop, the cotton candy chunks
arcing lazily through the air
landing with little wet thumps
muffled by the sand. (280–1)
There are other themes that are familiar from past wars, such as the boredom and futility of barracks life, expressed by Sgt. Sandi Austin in her song, “In the Hangar,” whose refrain is “Where is the music? Where is the praise? / Stuck in this sandbox for too many days” (152). And there are poems about the bond between soldiers, as in “Our War”:
And I
waking just enough to check,
turn my head to see that my friend has made it back safely.
Wrapped in an olive drab sleeping bag—
the reassuring shape of her
rises above the horizon of her cot. . . . (108–9)
Part of what makes this poem, by U.S. Air Force First Lt. Stephanie Metzger Harper, so moving is that it is written by an American woman in combat; but it would have been moving if written by a man about his tent mate.
In conclusion, war poems are being written and even read. They are tender and terrible, sentimental and satirical. They come from a variety of positions and perspectives. They don’t have a prominent place in the mainstream media, but they can be found with only a little effort. Poetry is still a backwater but not brackish; there’s life in these poems. They’re still kicking.
Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. "Somebody Blew Up America." http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html.
Carroll, Andrew, ed. Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. New York: Random House, 2006.
Hamill, Sam, et al., eds. Poets Against the War. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books, 2003.
Myers, Jack, and David Wojahn, eds. A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Pollitt, Katha. “Trying to Write a Poem Against the War.” www.poetsagainstwar.com.
Snodgrass, W. D. “Baggage Claim.” The New Yorker, 19 February 2007.
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