WAR POETRY: IRAQ AND GUANTANAMO

AN ECSTASY OF FORGETTING | December 5th 2007

Guantanomo Bay

The Daily Show/Paul Schreiber/Flickr

War can unite us in grief, or admiration of valour--but the details divide us. Ariel Ramchandani responds to recent war poetry, including "Gulf Music", by Robert Pinsky, and "Poems from Guantanamo" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Gulf Music" by Robert Pinsky In his newly republished "Poetry as Insurgent Art", Lawrence Ferlinghetti begins his treatise with a call to poetic arms:

I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest destiny is no longer manifest; civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at your door
... The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

These phrases come at the beginning of an ongoing project started in the late 1950s, in an undeniably different sociopolitical climate, and one I wasn't around to witness. But I do find their revolutionary fervour to be quite exhilarating. The question is, do they apply to the United States today, where there is plenty to get incendiary about--but little or no revolution, poetic or otherwise? Admittedly poetry may not be able to provide the horsepower behind a revolution in 2007. However, there is poetry written, if not in revolution, in dissent against the government, and a growing amount in response to Iraq.

One seemingly obvious example is the publication of the poetry collection entitled "Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak", a heavily edited compilation by the inmates at Guantanamo. Dan Chiasson, in his New York Times review, "Notes on Prison Camp", calls the poems "the kind of things sad or frustrated people have always written," and so un-telling that

A better subtitle might have been "The Detainees Do Not Speak" or, perhaps, "The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak".

A proper debate on the ethics of judging poems by people in such dire conditions ensued, with the greatest support for Chiasson being the fact that very few commentors on his review or the collection itself had actually read it.

The most interesting point raised by Chiasson is our want for grief, that amorphous monster, to get more specific. In our poetic renderings of tragedy we want our authors to attack, and, as Robert Pinsky puts it, in his review of "Soldier's Heart", by Elizabeth D. Samet, in the New York Times ("The Things They Carried"):

The target is unreality, in particular falsehood about war, valor, wounds and death.

When you apply this to the war in Iraq, things become unequivocally complicated, because the war's greatest unreality is unreality itself. For many, it has become a constant, if unpleasant, background noise, something that doesn't really exist. A historical event that happens not to have ended just as yet.

Pinsky's latest collection of poems, "Gulf Music", outlines our relationship with this unreality. In a poem aptly titled "The Forgetting" Pinsky writes:

No, they were listening, but that certain way. In it comes, you hear it, and
That selfsame second you swallow it or expel it: an ecstasy of forgetting.

The poems are at times oddly flippant, and detached, spoken in the horrible (and humorous) cadences of one who has forgotten how to feel. In one of a few sections about Guantanamo in the "Poem of Disconnected Parts" Pinsky chides:

No, he says he cannot regret those three years in prison: Otherwise he would not have written those poems.

... Did he see anything like a prisoner on a leash? Yes,
In Afghanistan. In Guantanamo he was isolated.

Tactically different, but united with Pinsky against ignorance are the poems that have come out of the Iraq poetry contest, run by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. These poems soar when they pinpoint individual moments, moments that can often be erased by the patterns of the quotidian. In his review of "Soldier's Heart" Pinsky quotes Elizabeth Samet thus:

[In] our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers-- the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes ... We have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.

Poems such as the this one, by Frances Richey, undercut this generalised heroism, with the personal impact of Iraq:

Last Mother's Day, when
he was incommunicado,
nothing came.
Three days later, a message
in my box; a package,
the mail room closed.
I went out into the lobby,
banged my fist against
the desk. When they
gave it to me, I clutched it
to my chest, sobbing
like an animal.
I spoke to no one ...

This poem derives its poignancy by contrasting between the specificity and terror of the speaker's experience with the every day workings of a mailroom. Through these turns towards individuality there are glimpses of revolution (or insurgence). As Pinsky says, they provide a " a context for valour", a way to make the conflict real. The scary part is only the thought that we might not need a context for valour, that we are content to have no context, to listen and to give ourselves over to the "ecstasy of forgetting."

(Ariel Ramchandani is a writer based in New York.)