{"id":1864,"date":"2014-04-20T16:43:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T16:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/2014\/04\/war-poetry-i-mean-today.html\/"},"modified":"2016-10-11T19:11:59","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T19:11:59","slug":"war-poetry-i-mean-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/2014\/04\/war-poetry-i-mean-today.html\/","title":{"rendered":"War Poetry. I Mean Today"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Let\u2019s talk war poetry. Not Wilfred Owen, not Giuseppe Ungaretti, not any of the poets who wrote of that old war (it is<\/i> a hundred years ago now, so I guess it counts as old). Let\u2019s talk of war poetry today, and how it differs and resembles the efforts that defined the category, set a standard, and laid out the rules.<\/o:p><\/div>

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Among the various books that I\u2019ve been (very kindly) sent to review, I count two that belong to the genre. One is Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting<\/i> by Kevin Powers, which David Clarke reviewed not too favourably last week<\/a>. The other is War Reporter<\/i> by Dan O\u2019Brien, which I didn\u2019t send out to my critics because I wanted to review in person. I\u2019ll have to base my article on these two sources because, I liberally admit, I don\u2019t know any other contemporary war poetry \u2013 if you have suggestions, my e-mail\u2019s at the end of this page<\/a>.<\/o:p><\/div>

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I\u2019m less than halfway through reading O\u2019Brien\u2019s book and my inclination to review it is already dwindling. It\u2019s not that the verse isn\u2019t good. Not at all: O\u2019Brien has a real talent for imagery and his poems are subtle and rich, evoking the poet\u2019s own life as well as his strange relationship with war photographer Paul Watson. Perhaps it\u2019s just the fact that I was looking for something else. I was looking for war poetry, and neither of the two books delivered (yes, I read Powers as well before sending it to David, though not with the same levels of concentration I\u2019d dedicate to something I\u2019m reviewing).<\/o:p><\/div>

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Hold on a second \u2013 how are these books not<\/i> war poetry? Isn\u2019t Powers a genuine veteran of the war in Iraq, speaking \/ writing from lived experience? Aren\u2019t O\u2019Brien\u2019s poems stark and real and full of the unchanging horror of war? Take these lines by the latter poet:<\/o:p><\/div>

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On a bed we discover the body<\/o:p><\/div>
of a child at the bottom of a pile<\/o:p><\/div>
of dead children. Quartered like chickens. Outside<\/o:p><\/div>
another\u2019s buried alive. The hand is<\/o:p><\/div>
like a tuber. At the refugee camp<\/o:p><\/div>
a girl stumbles barefoot into a ditch<\/o:p><\/div>
of corpses. Some wrapped in reed mats. Looking<\/o:p><\/div>
for help, crying. But nobody\u2019s coming.<\/o:p><\/div>
I say to myself, This will make a great<\/o:p><\/div>
picture. This is a beautiful picture<\/o:p><\/div>
somehow. Raising my camera to my face<\/o:p><\/div>
I step on a dead old woman\u2019s arm: it<\/o:p><\/div>
snaps like a stick. In Nyarubuye<\/o:p><\/div>
we open a gate on a courtyard<\/o:p><\/div>
of Hell. Tangles of limbs junked. They\u2019d come to<\/o:p><\/div>
this church hoping God would protect them but<\/o:p><\/div>
it only made things that much easier<\/o:p><\/div>
to be hacked to pieces. [\u2026]<\/o:p><\/div>
(\u2018The War Reporter Paul Watson on Suicide\u2019).<\/o:p><\/div>

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Isn\u2019t this just the gruesome reality of war? Aren\u2019t these the words of someone who jumped down the black shaft of war and came back to tell us what it\u2019s really like? Isn\u2019t this enough<\/i>? What more do you want? How horrifying does it have to get before you recognise it as genuine war poetry<\/i>?<\/o:p><\/div>

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No more words.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
It\u2019s probably a good idea at this point to state my respect for Powers, O\u2019Brien, the photographer Paul Watson and anyone else who lived through this unspeakable inferno. As David noted in his review, there is only silence that makes for an appropriate response to this suffering. I don\u2019t know what they know, and in this particular case I am grateful for not knowing.<\/o:p><\/div>

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That being said, there is a problem here and our inability \u2013 our unentitlement \u2013 to respond to this kind of imagery is part of it. Contemporary war poetry is not unlike World War I poetry in its occasional tendency to make a catalogue of horrors. But one of the crucial differences between the two canons is context. WWI poetry was written at a time when war was highly romanticised and patriotism was seen as a basic moral standard. Indeed, war poetry of the times includes the writings of young romantics like Rupert Brooke who extol the beauty and the nobility of war (before they saw it, anyway).<\/o:p><\/div>

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The merit of the war poets was that of reinventing the imaginary of war (or, should I say, erasing the \u2018imaginary\u2019 bit). It said that war was hell at a time when people were saying that war was god. Reproducing the crude horror of war was part of that task of reconfiguration.<\/o:p><\/div>

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Off to war with a smile. Yeah, it doesn’t fool anyone any longer, does it?<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
Contemporary war poetry appears at a time when society speaks in a very different voice: the lines on limbs flying and children torn to pieces are horrifying, yes, but also kind of a given. They feed the reader of war poetry what s\/he wants to read from war poetry, which is what s\/he thinks people don\u2019t want to read. Not only are they customary, they also risk falling somewhat short of their peers in other media: no matter how good your language is, it\u2019s a damn challenge to reproduce the visceral impact of seeing<\/i> the effects of steel and fire on flesh as we get them in every war movie since Saving Private Ryan<\/i> (so much so that it\u2019s hard to even shock us anymore \u2013 carnage may leave us dumb, but sometimes it leaves us dumb with boredom, because we\u2019ve seen so much of the \u2018mutilated arm\u2019 and the \u2018hand holding his own guts\u2019 and the \u2018neck torn open so I only have a line of breath to say write to my family dear brother\u2019 and so on).<\/o:p><\/div>

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If war poetry from one hundred years ago was radical, contemporary war poetry is conformist. Certainly, it has more levels of reading (O\u2019Brien is especially subtle, but from what I\u2019ve read so far his subtlety doesn\u2019t invalidate any of my criticisms), and it is more delicate in its approach than Spielberg\u2019s bombast, but it\u2019s still treading much of the same ground, where you know that nobody hid any mines.<\/o:p><\/div>

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You may ask, what more can be said of war? What more should<\/i> be said of horror but to say that this is the horror? Again, I must qualify my arguments by saying that this is not about the experience of the war poets in and of itself. I\u2019m not discounting that \u2013 how could I? The problem in this case is not the poet, it\u2019s the reader.<\/o:p><\/div>


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