What to say about the Old Master? The only American to win Pulitzer Prizes in poetry and fiction . . . that's a start. Easily, with Cleanth Brooks, the most popularly influential American literary critic of the post-50's era, and only because of the utterly pervasive Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, the two text books that taught American high school and college teachers to teach literature they way that Warren and Brooks wanted it taught . . . that's another reason. And then, pure longevity: Warren's writing career spans a good half-century. He wrote a lot, and he wrote well.
But people generally don't read his poems as much as his fiction. Understandable, particularly since All the King's Men is now a "major motion picture," which I've never seen. But his body of poetry in some ways not only develops, but careens through its phases in a way that I've always found to be typically American, at least, and perhaps typically poetic.
And this last statement will require a bit of elucidation.
Warren was a voracious reader, a life-long student, and a devoted amateur philosopher. And what he read, what he studied, and what he philosophized about appeared in his poetry, varyingly digested. I'm calling this project of synthesis--and that's what is was for Warren--an essentially poetic project because, while the poetry rises from Warren's immense preparation, it also rises in a form that hardly resembles its sources. There is transformation here of an extraordinary kind. That's what I'm calling poetic: synthesis and transformation, taking a known quantity, reworking it, and giving it back in its newly resplendent form. This, or something like it, stands at the heart of Warren's contribution to letters, and while it can be argued that all poetry does this, I would argue that Warren's poetry attempts this project in a way, and to a degree, that most poetry doesn't.
Take Audubon, for example. Just what in the world is that poem? A history of a Franco-American painter? A confession? A poetic aviary? A depiction of the American frontier before the Civil War, the event that Warren claimed was the continental divide for the American imaginative writer? But what is the goal of the poem? Maybe it is this (Section IV):
To wake in some dawn and see,
As though down a rifle barrel, lined up
Like sights, the self that was, the self that is, and there,
Far off but in range, completing that alignment, your fate.
The self that was, is, and will be: these are the parameters of story, and story is the supreme 
ordering device of our lives. We tell them to our friends and to ourselves. Perhaps this is why the last line of this poem is simply, "Tell me a story of deep delight."
One of the most effective ways of reading Warren--try this as you go through him--is to list his subjects, and then, after you've done that, star those that you'd categorize as obsessions. His development to me is orderly and encyclopedic--there's a wealth of information here, but it's all easy to find. Try this, and let me know what you think.
Reading--or trying to read--Robert Penn Warren was a pleasurable challenge. Perhaps compounded by a particularly hellish weekend & weekend, I found his poetry intriguing, and even kind of fun, yet difficult to decipher and work through.
As this is election year, we occasionally hear pundits refer to "wine voters" and "beer voters"; if we were to extrapolate this to the poets we've read, I think Eliot would be our "wine poet," Heaney our "beer poet", and Warren out "whiskey poet"--as the Jack Daniel's slogan goes, served in fine establishments & questionable joints everywhere. What I mean in terms of Warren's poetry is that it is deeply literate and dense, much like Eliot's, yet--although it seems to lack the explicitly political bent of Heaney (or Milosz), there is a roughness and edge to it; coarser than Eliot, but not quite as pugnacious as Heaney.
(Brief aside: what would our other poets be? Perhaps Bishop the "mimosa poet" and Jackson the "Irish coffee" poet"? What in the world would Stevens be? Just wondering...)
Again, although I enjoyed this raw quality in the tone of Warren's poetry--which is also present in his always surprising use of language--I confess to have some trouble getting through the volume comfortably. Like Stevens, there were many times I was left scraching my head. For my post, I've decided to follow Dr. Burris's suggestion and try to identify some of Warren's obsessions (although, because I finished the reading before I looked at his post, I had to work through these backwards, rather than indicating them as I read) and provide a few thoughts to get the ball rolling. Due to my uncertainities, I may write slightly more generally than I'd like, but hopefully I can get the conversation going online enough to carry on to Tuesday. Now, on with the obsessions:
1. Order/Time/Sequencing
Something striking about Warren's poetry--partially just *visually* striking--is the way he arranges his poetry. I found this aspect of his work amusing, considering that we spent the first part of last week's class discussing the ways in which we organize our notes & work, trying to make some sort of comprehensible sense out of our materials. His poems are, in many cases, arranged like outlines: from a title, we are given points, sub-points, and occasionally sub-sub-points. When reading poems like "Tale of Time" or "Promises", it can become difficult to remember that all of these sub-sections are of a piece; it can feel as if you're reading poems within a poem. But, from these fragments, Warren seems to strive for some sort of unity. As with Eliot, finding a sense of unity and order out of dissociation seems to be a primary concern for Warren.
In addition to his search for order and unity, Warren also shares with Eliot a preoccupation with "Time" (as opposed to "time"). References to this capital-T Time appear consistently throughout his body of work. I'm somewhat curious as to what Warren means by his insistence at making "time" a proper noun. Usually, when poets and philosphers write of "Truth," they are referring to something, if not objective, than at least universal. I wonder what this suggests about Warren's conception of time?
In any case, an example of his interest in time and sequence that I found particularly fascinating was his exploration of the nuclear strike on Hiroshima, "New Dawn." The opening stanza, "I. Explosion: Sequence and Simultaneity" struck me. I'm not exactly sure why, but there is something unsettling about seeing the different "times" across the world (San Francisco Time, Greenwich Time, etc.) the Hiroshima attack occured. Not only does it point out just how arbitrary our measurements and conceptions of time are, but also, it seems that comprehending an event that massive and world-changing needs to be rooted in some sense of stability; Warren is showing us that we can't even use the time of attack as a starting point for attempting to understand the devastation.
2. Place/region
I'm somewhat hesitant to write much on Warren's obsession with place. Clearly, there are frequent references to his home-state of Kentucky, especially in the early poetry, and there is in many ways a distinctly Southern feel to his work. However, I think I may leave this one to the Southerners & Southernists to elaborate further upon.
I would like to mention "The Ballad of Billie Potts," however, as this poem does seem important with regard to place. Dr. Burris mentioned Warren's "poetic" ability to synthesize and transform: in this case, we get a regional folktale from his youth, reworked into a poem. I'm not entirely sure what the tale reveals--if anything--about the values or concerns of his region, but I do think the transformation of a "backwoods" folk tale into "literature" raises some interesting questions about hierarchy, appropriation/appreciation, and the values of the academy/literary community. I'm not familiar with the folktale, but I wonder what Warren was hoping to accomplish with his transformation of the story into a poem.
3. God/The Unconscious
Warren invokes "God" (and even Christ) fairly regularly, but--perhaps on the heels of our discussion over Milosz--I didn't get the sense that he was a Christian poet in the way Eliot is. Warren seems to refer to God in less a Judeo-Christian way as opposed to the "universal spirit" definition of the term. There were a few times when Warren would write about "God" that I was reminded of Jung's "collective unconscious"--some sort of unifying or shared spirit that bonds us together. For instance, in "Last Walk of Season" from ALTITUDES AND EXTENSIONS, shortly after referring to "God," Warren writes:
"We undertake/Not to exist, except as part of that one/Existence. We are thinking of happiness. In such case,/We must not count years." (272)
My tenuous interpretation of the poem as a whole leads me to believe that Warren feels there is a deep inter-connectedness between, well, everything: between people, and humanity and nature, and that connection can be called "God." Although there is a separation between humanity/civilization and nature, we strive for unity, and "existence" comes from embracing this collectivity of spirit and consciousness.
4. Self-identity
Lke "Time" and "God," Warren's poetry is peppered with references to the self and identity. Perhaps the most notable example is "Audubon." As Warren explains in his introductory note, the "identity" of Audobon is fluid, continually constructed, mysterious, and ephemeral. Audubon's "identity" (whatever that means) is a strange concoction of, as Dr. Burris points out, stories: stories from his mother, himself, and others--including Warren. Indeed, Warren's poem creates a strange dialogues with his subject matter and theme: for, just as Warren acknowledges the "legends [that] accreted about him" (129), Warren's own poem now revises the old and creates new myths. Notions of identity are molded by story, and are unstable and ever-changing.
---
These are the obsessions that I felt figured most prominently throughout Warren's work. I'm most interested to hear comments/criticism & further/better examples, as well as additonal recurring themes.
Posted by: Jack Ayres | April 20, 2008 at 12:19 AM
Stevens, I think would be the saki poet?
Posted by: sburris | April 20, 2008 at 07:28 PM
Though I’m more of a whiskey-poet-sort-of-girl, and I do appreciate/share certain obsessions of/with RPW, I must confess before I comment on any of them that I have a long-standing bone to pick (is that a “Southern” enough way to put it?) with the Fugitives/Agrarian/New Critic clan (decidedly with a “c” not a “k”– even I’m not that frustrated with them). However, most of my venom has typically been aimed not at RPW but at some of his colleagues (particularly Donald Davidson as I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive him for what he did to Frances Newman and the reception of her work). Reading RPW, however, reminded me of why I habitually cut him some slack: he’s much less pretentious/arrogant than Tate (I seem to recall anecdotes about his less than admirable treatment of Caroline Gordon), Donaldson, etc., and tends to romanticize “The South” much less than his brethren are wont to do (I think “Brother to Dragons” and “Court-marital”are rather balanced, for lack of a better term, and “Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A.” and “Two Studies in Idealism: Short Survey of American, and Human, History” are fascinating and honest explorations of (white) Southern masculinity).
RPW’s obsessions/recurring themes of identity, story-telling, place/region and Time (with a capital “T”) that both Dr. B and Jack mention are all quite intertwined. I’m even inclined to collapse them together into a process of how one (particularly a white, upper/middle class Southerner) comes to terms/copes with family history, regional history (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and integrates it with one’s sense of self– and we “Southerners” can hardly conceptualize individual identity without enmeshing it in some sort of collective, or multiple collectives, right?– which seems to tie back into another obsession Jack identifies, a sense of a “collective unconscious” (and I might venture to say that with RPW as with a number of Southern writers, part of the unifying bond is a history that haunts us, but in a different way than, say, what I labeled a sense of haunting in Milosz’s work). Such a process typically, and I don’t think RPW is an exception, entails a catharsis/purging– which some writers/poets accomplish more gracefully than others (and I think RPW does this)– not unlike what Dr. B calls a synthesis and transformation (as RPW’s particular purgings are not only more graceful than others’, but also more innovative/intriguing/creative?). Even I’m hard-pressed to produce the name of a lynching narrative that resembles “Pondy Woods” or an ode to Mammy that is as complex (and subtle) as “The Interim.” Ultimately, in spite of myself, I enjoy reading RPW and sympathize with his concerns/obsessions in an embarrassingly regional way (and I’m nearly certain that I’ve had an experience not unlike the one he relays in “Folly on Royal Street before the Raw Face of God,” though I’m just as sure that mine wasn’t nearly as “poetic” as his).
Posted by: alschmidt | April 21, 2008 at 06:05 PM
I don't know Jack, I think for me right now Warren is some kind of unholy mixture of bourbon AND wine, and his poetry is going down my throat about as smoothely. I have to confess, I've not finished the anthology, and I feel like I'm wading through the "fetid bottoms where/ The slough uncoils." Of course, I love Warren's imagery, I don't think it's a secret that I am a push over for an image well-rendered in poetry. This definitely hangs me up in a poet like Warren, where the ideas are (to me anyway) concealed in the folds of image after image that catches my mind, perhaps in the same way ideas about death, identity, family, home, time, fortune (I think the inverted Oedipul plot in the ballad is rather cool) are concealed in the seemingly plot driven cadence of an old time ballad...
I am thinking, of course, of "The Ballad of Billie Potts," a poem which, it seems to me tells two stories: one, a pounding-in-the-head whiskey tale of dark riders, and seedy deals, and murder, and the other, a slowly seeping wine meditation on the psychological landscape in which all this took place. I think there is a lot more to the poem than its significance in terms of "hierarchy, appropriation/appreciation, and the values of the academy/literary community." Or, maybe I do, in the sense that I think that Warren does try to delve into the concerns and values of his region, and he does this by writing both a ballad that, by very nature of its historical purpose, tells a story to a community, of a community and its legends, and also a very modernist sort of meditation on an individual connected with that community and what befalls them. How much of the ballad was written by Warren or not, he certainly captures some of the genre's tropes, and I find it quite striking how effectively each part (ballad and meditation) of the poem adds to the other. Without the vivid plot of the ballad, the meditation would amount to nothing more than mopey reflection on what it means to try to come home (Therefore you tried to remember when you had last had/ Whatever it was you had lost...For there is no place like home[306-313].) But compounded with the twists of the plot, the psychological poetry becomes interesting. Reciprocally, the internal aspects of the meditation render the ballad, which normally races past at the speed of a good story and leaving little time for reflection, more human, and invites the reader to empathize with the struggles of the poem's protagonists.
I guess in this way, Warren reminds me a bit of Heaney and Milosz, in the sense that his poetry shows a sort of balancing act between the community/region of his birth and the individual that he has become, steeped in both the culture of his youth and the literary and intellectual culture he has encountered beyond his youth. I'll read on and see if these themes have any staying power.
Posted by: Margaret Poist | April 21, 2008 at 09:24 PM
I don't know Jack, I think for me right now Warren is some kind of unholy mixture of bourbon AND wine, and his poetry is going down my throat about as smoothely. I have to confess, I've not finished the anthology, and I feel like I'm wading through the "fetid bottoms where/ The slough uncoils." Of course, I love Warren's imagery, I don't think it's a secret that I am a push over for an image well-rendered in poetry. This definitely hangs me up in a poet like Warren, where the ideas are (to me anyway) concealed in the folds of image after image that catches my mind, perhaps in the same way ideas about death, identity, family, home, time, fortune (I think the inverted Oedipul plot in the ballad is rather cool) are concealed in the seemingly plot driven cadence of an old time ballad...
I am thinking, of course, of "The Ballad of Billie Potts," a poem which, it seems to me tells two stories: one, a pounding-in-the-head whiskey tale of dark riders, and seedy deals, and murder, and the other, a slowly seeping wine meditation on the psychological landscape in which all this took place. I think there is a lot more to the poem than its significance in terms of "hierarchy, appropriation/appreciation, and the values of the academy/literary community." Or, maybe I do, in the sense that I think that Warren does try to delve into the concerns and values of his region, and he does this by writing both a ballad that, by very nature of its historical purpose, tells a story to a community, of a community and its legends, and also a very modernist sort of meditation on an individual connected with that community and what befalls them. How much of the ballad was written by Warren or not, he certainly captures some of the genre's tropes, and I find it quite striking how effectively each part (ballad and meditation) of the poem adds to the other. Without the vivid plot of the ballad, the meditation would amount to nothing more than mopey reflection on what it means to try to come home (Therefore you tried to remember when you had last had/ Whatever it was you had lost...For there is no place like home[306-313].) But compounded with the twists of the plot, the psychological poetry becomes interesting. Reciprocally, the internal aspects of the meditation render the ballad, which normally races past at the speed of a good story and leaving little time for reflection, more human, and invites the reader to empathize with the struggles of the poem's protagonists.
I guess in this way, Warren reminds me a bit of Heaney and Milosz, in the sense that his poetry shows a sort of balancing act between the community/region of his birth and the individual that he has become, steeped in both the culture of his youth and the literary and intellectual culture he has encountered beyond his youth. I'll read on and see if these themes have any staying power.
Posted by: Margaret Poist | April 21, 2008 at 09:25 PM
Perhaps one more comment, in case there is an inquiring "Shreve" out there, on region and my personal feelings about RPW: "I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"
Posted by: alschmidt | April 21, 2008 at 10:20 PM
The Frank Insinuation of Yusef Komunyakaa
“Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.” Yusef Komunyakaa, when asked “What is poetry?”
Not a full frontal assault, maybe, but certainly as a whole, Komunyakaa overwhelmed me with a patented brand of frank insinuation. Paradoxical, no? Well, I’ll explain. He’s frank because he explores issues of sexuality, race, identity, corrigenda with a candor that is several steps above the poetry I’m used to. In fact he does so to the extent of anatomizing certain taboos in a way that is either hyper-confessional (relative to what most people would feel comfortable implying about themselves) or indicative of a supple imagination (capable of rounding out the speakers of his poems, if indeed they are not always himself, with arresting detail.) A poem I think of specifically is “Gloria’s Cues,” a work that seems to delve into a passive and inconsequential lapse into something close to pedophilia, without any evident self-damnation or damnation of the speaker. In general, there is a lot that Komunyakaa unpacks, and sometimes I as the reader am not necessarily surprised at what is found in the suitcase, but maybe just a bit jarred by being privy to it. But he maintains the art of insinuation in his narratives by showing very little consequence following various acts and feelings. I think that this tactic is a specific strength of poetry: these are not morality tales. His isolated poems tend not to make moral arguments. Rather, Komunyakaa uses strategically placed disclaimers, corrigendas as he calls them, to advocate the power of speech that sometimes sacrifices comfort for honesty.
“Gloria’s Clues” is one poem out of many that explores sexuality and in many ways, this particular subject matter seems multiply bonded with the various other themes Komunyakaa insinuates. Rarely is sex present in his poems as a pure celebration of a good lustful romp. Often, it is woven into family relationships, race, violence, the human as an animal, all of which are concerns that pop up often in NEON VERNACULAR. In the neon framework that sex tends provide, he presents scenario after scenario that constantly ask: what is this? why does it happen in our species, in our communities? what is wrong with it or right about it? His poem SONGS FOR MY FATHER presents many of these struggling questions. He reminds us from the start that his and his brothers’ complex relationship with their father began with…sex:
I told my brothers I heard
You & mother making love,
Your low moans like a blues
Bringing them into the world.
I didn’t know if you were laughing
Or crying.
The uncertainty of those last two lines quickly turn to violence as he introduces the tension within this father/son relationship:
Sometimes I think they’re still jealous
Of our closeness, having forgotten
We had to square-off and face each other,
My fists balled & cocked by haymakers.
Thus, Komunyakaa sets up the variable nature of his relationship with his father that echoes throughout the poem. He tells of fond memories (“Sometimes you could be/ That man on a read bicycle,/ With me on the handlebars….”) and he tells of his rage at having encountered explicit family violence (“Goddamn you. Goddamn you./ If you hit her again, I’ll sail through/ That house like a dustdevil.”) But he also tells of the strange union between himself and his father, which culminates in his confession of a shared sense of sexuality with his father, represented by the fact that they slept with the same woman:
Since I sought out one of your lovers
Before you were dead
Though years had passed
& you were with someone else…
Yes, she cried out,
But she didn’t sing your name
When I planted myself in her.
Through this, Komunyakaa implies his own undeniable self that have been passed down to him from his father, turns the poem swiftly from what seems like a renunciation of what his father was capable of to a total admission of his similarities with his father. It is startling, but I find it gracious in a strange sort of way, that he establishes himself in contrast to this man whose behavior he has fought against, but offers his own behavior for inspection. It’s as if he says, “But wait a minute, now that I have your attention, don’t feel sorry for me. Examine me. What do you see? What is this? Why does it happen?”
Throughout his work, Komunyakaa periodically offers the reader a breath in poems where he explains his technique a bit, as in “Safe Subjects”:
How can love heal
the mouth shut this way?
Say something worth breath.
Let it surface, recapitulate…
Say something about pomogranates
Say something about real love.
Yes, true love—more than
parted lips, than parted legs
in sorrow’s darkroom of potash
and blues. Let the brain stumble
from its hidingplace.
These moments, in “Safe Subjects”, “Corrigenda”, and others serve to allow me to distance myself from the striking nature of his content and ask the pertinent questions that his poetry begs. How does Komunyakaa serve us, his anticipating readers, by putting this down on paper? What is particular to the experience of reading poetry that enters into a discourse that would not normally be socially acceptable? Is it because poetry is a passive art form, meaning, it moves only as the reader moves through it (and do you agree with this assertion)? In discussing in another class last week Sade’s text (one can hardly call it a novel) JUSTINE, a work saturated with radically taboo material, some grotesque to the extent that I really hesitate to discuss it in the same breathe as Komunyakaa, a few people said that they just had to close the book when it reached the upper limits of raunchy. This incited a discussion of the power that is vested in the reader: readers can stop the movement of the text they are reading. This is not necessarily true of many of our most modern media forms: many of them move on their own, and in a way that I think is more swiftly intoxicating than reading. There was never a moment when I felt like closing NEON VENACULAR; nothing Komunyakaa wrote shocked me, mostly I found his candor intriguing and his periodic disclaimers soothing and refocusing. Ultimately, I think Komunyakaa’s refusal to damn the behavior in his poetry expanded its use. I find myself much more full of questions and internal debate than I am when I’ve just read a poet whose voice I comfortably relate to.
Posted by: Margaret Poist | April 27, 2008 at 09:34 PM
Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Neon Vernacular”– the title nearly says it all. A number of the selected poems, and most of the new ones (which I liked the best, I think), attest to Komunyakaa’s “vision” as one that deliberately invokes the past, present, and future. If Warren and his clan consistently look over their shoulders to the past (and sometimes frantically try to “keep up” with the present), Komunyakaa seamlessly moves from his childhood, to Vietnam, to the implications all past/present experiences have for the future. While it seems his identity is quite grounded in /tied to his upbringing in LA (Louisiana– not California, or “Lower Alabama”), or the “vernacular,” he is also consciously responding to how that identity fairs as (and affects) an adult who has traveled far from rural LA, into the “neon,” and then returns, altered, in some respects, but not entirely. “Salt” is illustrative of this– he cannot even remember the woman’s name (“Lisa, Leona, Loretta?”) but can give a full account of the atrocities in her family history, and she, though as children together they “played doctor & house”) responds to him by grabbing her purse and pulling at her skirt. In other words, because of the complicated history of their families (as his relationship to hers is one of “housekeepers/ & handymen”), and in spite of their personal history of interacting as children, they do not even speak when they encounter one another as adults.
Additionally, “Neon Vernacular,” in a more general rather than personal way, appears in Komunyakaa’s regular invocation of Hughes (Langston not Ted), and also of Dunbar (particularly in poems from “Copacetic” with all of its masks). This seems entirely appropriate, as Hughes set about for himself a similar (but of course different, as well) project of making the “vernacular” “neon.” I’m thinking of course of Komunyakaa’s persistent incorporation of jazz and blues into his work– evidenced by overt allusions and (obviously) by titles: “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window...,” “Elegy for Thelonious,” “Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival,” etc.– the list is entirely too long. But also of poems like “The Plea,” with its refrain of “Bop, bop, bebop, rebop”– “Montage” anyone? (Despite all of Hughes’s work, and of the “progress,” particularly economic, in the South, I think we still tend to consider any cultural product (whether produced by black or white artists) that comes out of the rural, deep South as being somehow “vernacular,” more tied to “folk” traditions (especially unwritten ones) than writing or art that is produced in NYC, for example– which makes YK’s use of such stereotypes interesting, as I’m under the impression he hasn’t lived in LA for a while.)
While Komunyakaa’s invocation of Hughes is apparent (sometimes even a little too much so, even for me), I think he also bears some similarity to Heaney and Milosz. As to Heaney, I’m sure everyone was reminded of his work when reading “Landscape for the Disappeared”– is this a conscious reference to Heaney? (“Yes, peat bogs/ in Louisiana”). And actually, the sorts of images that YK invokes are quite similar to the ones I myself was musing on when I read Heaney’s account of bogs across the big pond swallowing up/preserving disposed of bodies. The notion that the landscape literally holds our, the South’s, secrets is an eery if often invoked one (Lord only knows how many bodies the swamps in LA or the rivers throughout the Delta have held– I always think of folks dragging rivers for certain unlawfully disposed of persons and finding about 5 or 6 bodies that aren’t even the ones sought after). In other words, while Heaney’s description of the bogs as graves is more fascinating then horrifying (though perhaps I’d feel differently if I lived in European environs), Komunyakaa’s is painful, spooky, and unsettling. I think the “spookiness” of YK’s account goes back to silence (not unlike that present in “Salt”), of what we refuse to talk about/acknowledge even when we all know, and maybe also to the more recent-ness of it– it’s one thing to talk about sacrificial murders from “way back when,” but it’s an entirely different matter to find bodies disposed of within the last 50 years.
YK’s similarity to Milosz, I think, is his sense of guilt (which also could be read as similar to Heaney, though like Milosz, YK’s seems a bit more intense than Heaney’s). But like his similarity to Heaney, YK’s guilt manifests itself in radically different terms. While Milosz feels guilt over leaving the site of conflict, YK tries to come to terms with placing himself in the midst of it. I’m thinking, of course, of his Vietnam poems, from his collection, “Dien Cai Dau.” I was particularly struck by “Hanoi Hannah” and “Report from the Skull’s Diorama.” I must confess that most of the accounts of black men’s roles in Vietnam that I’ve read have not been written by those who went and, instead, are arguments against going. Not only to deal with the psychological stress of war, but also to be listening to radio announcements from back home, tauntingly asking, “‘Soul Brothers, what you dying for?’” must have been nearly unmanageable. I think it’s easy for us of the post-Vietnam generation to get caught up in the rhetoric of why someone shouldn’t have gone to Vietnam and to lose those voices that went (and may not have chosen to go). YK, in “Report” especially, expresses an awareness of the injustice at work both at home and abroad, and is yet still participating in and suffering from it simultaneously– hearing about King’s assassination while napalming villages is understandably haunting, particularly with flyers circulating that state “VC didn’t kill/ Dr. Martin Luther King”– and once again, “silence” on the matter.
(On Tuesday, I also want to chat about “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window...” as it is one of my favorites– I’ve experimented with reading it in different ways and have yet to be disappointed, and I think we’ll also have to discuss the Thorn Merchant poems, though as of now, I’m not sure what to say about them that’s not completely obvious...)
Posted by: alschmidt | April 27, 2008 at 09:45 PM
Let me know how it goes and definitely let me know your results. It doesn’t take long to feel and see a lift.
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