 Of War _________________________________________________________________________________ Take John Donne's words to heart, "No man is an island, entire of itself, every man...a part of the main", and it means that something as dreadful as war will have a profound effect on the poetry written in its time. There is no way to escape the blood-streaked images of MSN or the statistics of the nightly news, no way to completely detach from the fact that thousands of miles away our sons and daughters are fighting and dying where there are hundreds dying by our hand, and it's happening with each beat of our hearts. Just as Whitman was inspired to see us in our common skin, in uncommon suffering as he tended to the wounded of the Civil War, how can we not be pulled by the very hair roots watching a child cradled in the arms of an agonized father as he runs along a street of bombed out, burning cars? Write of families, write of closeness at this time, and somewhere in the back of the mind, that film loops horribly. There's a wretchedness of soul that informs so much of what we see, and do and write, how can it not stain darker the very borders of every day if we have compassion in us? The temptation to despair can sometimes make it difficult to write at all if a poet skips light-heartedly to larks or even love that is not tinged with an awful brokenness: the world is grieving. Give it voice. At least, that is so for me, and I suspect it's true for a good many writers out there- in fact, I would go farther than that: I'd say that poets not affected by the war, are closed off in ways that howl with lack of conscience. This air- this very ring of oxygen that covers the earth like batting holds a poison sniffed significantly by those of sensitivity- and even Christmas is profoundly shadowed by a Cross from which our brothers and sisters hang in misery, so write it out: joy mixed with mourning and blended to the truest notes. Not all poetry written at this time must be nakedly about war, but I would expect a more enlightened work: poetry that zeroes in on what's important, something more than the trivial or vapid, the sloppy, catchy, 'cute', or sensationally and self-centeredly sexualized. Even in writing in detail of one's own life, if written with blinders off and finely focused, can be found universal truths that speak to everyone: we're not so very different from one another. If what you're writing, day in, day out, is not somehow part of the fabric of this world by feeling the fray of the threads beyond it or the fires that people are living their ravaged, burning lives inside, dying in our sight- then I don't understand us at all: every sunset seen at this time not smudged in smoke, is a miracle, and the heart expands to bursting that's immediately torn because the eyes of all our children do not share it. Every day in freedom, every breath not choked by oil fires, should produce a poetry of such symphonic resonance, joy is felt more poignantly within the soul, and gratitude as well: write that wholesomeness out but magnified, as Whitman did. This body electric still sings, the poet hasn't aged, it is the world itself that's jaded. As writers, we are the Geiger Counter needles of the world and cannot afford a distance from it, for poets shape the silences for those who can't for themselves- those who are mute- and who are stunned by their own muteness. These are the times to write 'big'-sometimes by noting the very small, but we can pour into the silence all the answers of the heart. As Whitmans wrote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"-- for that's what poetry does: poetry in the time of war is important because it keeps us human. It allows a glimpse of the heart in its extremes, which, in times like these, is a crow-picked muscle, but with a dove inside it fluttering: wings bloody, bravely flapping. Main Page |
