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 | | Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford English Monographs) by Subarno Chattarji ISBN-10: 019818767X ISBN-10: 0-19-818767-X ISBN-13: 9780198187677 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-818767-7 Hardcover 2001-12-13 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description In this unique and significant addition to Vietnam studies, Memories of a Lost War analyzes the poems written by American veterans, protest poets, and Vietnamese, within political, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wealth of material often published in small presses and journals, the book highlights the horrors of war and the continuing traumas of veterans in post-Vietnam America. In its inclusion of Vietnamese perspectives, the book marks a departure from earlier works that have largely concentrated on Vietnam as a war rather than a country. | ||
Reviews | ||
Stateside Poetry versus Veteran Poetry in Memories of a Lost War Subarno Chattarji introduces his book with historical and political information about the rising struggles within Vietnam and the United States that ultimately lead to war, briefly introducing American fears of the domino theory, where one Southeastern Asian country falling to communism would result in the rest following suit. Chattarji quickly divides the poetry of the Vietnam War era into three categories: stateside poetry, which largely focuses on the anti-war movement, and veteran (or soldier) poetry, and Vietnamese poetry. Chattarji’s division focuses mainly on the stateside poetry and veteran poetry, and, by clearly demarcating the strict line that separates the two, he upholds the division that veteran poets such as W.D. Ehrhart regard as essential: “‘The few poems I read about Vietnam after I came back only made me angry: What the hell did these people know about it, for chrissake?’” (92). Chattarji furthers his divisions by dividing veteran poetry into three categories: protest and anguish, combat experience, and the aftermath, with each chapter highlighting poetry representative of the chapter’s title. The final chapter, dealing with Vietnamese poetry translated into English, is Chattarji’s attempt to represent all different sides of the Vietnam War: American soldiers and protestors and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, though Chattarji cannot directly correlate Vietnamese poetry to traditional western poetic influences evident in stateside and veteran poetry. Chattarji emphasizes American soldier poetry, establishing it as the crux of the book, but also introduces a hint of resentment by soldier poets against stateside poetry figureheads such as Ginsberg, Levertov, and Bly. Carefully straddling the fence on whether one holds more impact over the other, Chattarji introduces and juxtaposes the ever-changing stances of Erhart, a prominent soldier poet of the Vietnam war, on the stateside poets: “Although the essay [of Erhart’s] does stress the problems with stateside poetry, it is largely an endorsement of protest poetry in times of crisis such as the one represented by Vietnam” (93) and “[Erhart] stated that poetry by Bly, Levertov, Ginsberg, and others, had ‘served a political purpose,’ but it ‘doesn’t work’ as poetry and is ‘not durable’” (93). Therefore with the line established between veteran poetry and stateside poetry, Chattarji draws a connection between the two (i.e. the poetry that both sub-genres draw from) and uses the poetic background and influences of each to found the principal that the two—though in opposition—work toward a similar poetic expression, or goal, that uniquely identifies the horrors of the Vietnam War in order to prevent their reoccurrence in future wars. Chattarji avoids associating stateside poetry, and its traditional anti-military sentiment, with the awe-inspiring images of the terror of first-hand experience associated with veteran poetry, but he links the two by drawing their poetic roots and foundations to earlier American/British wars (i.e. World War I and II) and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Howard Nemerov, and Randall Jarrell. By tying the two somewhat opposing types of poetry together, specifically emphasizing the rich poetic background from which anti-war and soldier poets draw, Chattarji extends his idea that, “American poetry on Vietnam does not exist in a critical, literary vacuum” (25). Chattarji clearly establishes Bly, Levertov, Ginsberg, and Nemerov as strong stateside poets during the Vietnam War. Chattarji opens his chapter on stateside poetry by introducing several of Nemerov’s poems about World War II, which actually provide connections to his later poems: “The connections are interesting and evident, particularly the ways in which Nemerov highlights the instrumentalist nature of state language in his poems on Vietnam” (31). Nemerov, whose main work is emblematic of the combat he experienced in World War II, also writes about the Vietnam War, drawing specifically from influential poets such as William Butler Yeats. Chattarji introduces Nemerov’s poem, “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem,” and then quickly points to the title’s allusion to Yeats’s poem, “On Being Asked for a War Poem.” Nemerov uses the title to depict the social advancement from a focus on war to a focus on peace, borrowing from Yeats and expanding his own poem into, “a less terse, more complex and humorous insight into the relationship between a poet and war” (70). Nemerov is the only major stateside poet, who had actually experienced combat, which Chattarji addresses in his chapter on stateside poetry. Chattarji uses Nemerov as a transitional figure between soldier poets and stateside (or anti-war) poets. Chattarji shifts focus from Nemerov to other stateside poets whose poetry is clearly based on a political agenda such as Bly’s poem in his book The Teeth Mother Naked at Last: This is what it’s like for a rich country to make war this is what it’s like to bomb huts (afterwards described as ‘structures’) this is what it’s like to kill marginal farmers (afterwards described as ‘Communists’). (53) Chattarji points out that, “The agenda is not one of unearthing ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ information, it is one of highlighting the proliferation of the war, and the polyphony of that spread. The poem counterpoints brutal destruction with clinical military jargon” (53). Bly’s poetic enjambments and his mingling of “military jargon” combined with overarching statements of destruction prove his poetic talents, but his poem strays in effectiveness because of the lack of gruesome details prevalent in soldier poetry. Chattarji defends Bly’s poem by stressing that the poem’s agenda is different from the traditional authenticity of soldier poetry, but W.D. Ehrhart’s statement that the political poetry “doesn’t work” rings true when comparing Bly’s poem to the vivid images, smells; sounds of soldier poetry. Erhart’s statement that the political poetry is “not durable” is clearly evident from post-war perspective of over thirty years. Bly’s poetry, like most stateside political poetry, clearly loses its impact when taken out of the time period in which it was written, whereas soldier poetry, with its grisly portrayals of atrocities, stands out past its historical context, actually gaining popularity as the years of the war sink further into the past. Chattarji introduces the same poetic influences in soldier poetry as in stateside poetry early in the first section of veteran poetry with a quote from W.D. Ehrhart: “The main thing that happened in the early writing when I was trying to figure out how to write about the Vietnam War, was the influence of other writers I read—some of Sassoon, but everything of Owen…I knew his work very well…so when I began to write about my war, that was my reference point…So, early on, you find me completely missing all the rich imagery of my own war and, instead, inserting images about blood dripping like tears from the blade of a bayonet” (113). Chattarji even goes as far as comparing the trenches at Khe Sanh to the stalemated trench warfare of World War I, but he emphasizes that, despite the loose historical correlation between the trenches, the early images in the poetry of the Vietnam War come directly from the soldier poets like Owen and Sassoon of World War I—images borrowed to express the horrors of a new war until soldier poets of the Vietnam War could find their “own language” (113) and “come to grips with the peculiar reality of Vietnam” (113). Chattarji’s first chapter on veteran poetry mainly deals with protest and anguish, though he includes some immature poetry in support of the war, and Chattarji accentuates his emphasis on protest and anguish by pointing out the soldier poet’s early inability to create a unique images of the Vietnam war, simply relying on and borrowing poetic devises popularized by earlier poets. In Chattarji’s second chapter of veteran poetry, he underlines combat experiences, where the soldier poets have found their unique poetic voices and expressions, often dealing with internal struggles of morality and ethics and the basic human struggle to stay alive. The first poem Chattarji introduces in this section is David Connolly’s “After the Firefight,” where Connolly clearly uses images unique to the Vietnam War and also deals with the soldier’s ability or inability to deal with the horrors of a new kind of warfare: Afterwards, with the gunfire still ringing loudly in our ears, but not so loudly that it drowned out the screams. And afterwards, still blinded by the tracers’ flashes, but not blinded enough by the pumping or sucking or gaping wounds; we’d come to our sense, what sense were left. When the rush of adrenaline, and the haste to stop the life from spilling out of a Brother, and the hesitancy to touch what was human, was over, we’d strut and brag and bluster for each other. Later, we would weep, separately, for the little that was left of us. Much later we would weep together, when it appeared there would be nothing left. (122) Chattarji addresses the poem’s message that the struggle doesn’t end once the fighting is over: “At the end of the battle there is ‘nothing left’ except the awareness that one has lost everything; the long, lonely nightmare of life after war has just begun” (123). Connolly’s poem deals with the American soldier’s outward expression of pride in being a good soldier: “we’d strut and brag and bluster / for each other.” Here Connolly expresses the immediate relief after battle, set off with the comic relief of bragging between soldiers, but Connolly furthers the poem by expressing the idea that bragging was a means by which the soldiers could delay their expressions of sorrow—“Later, we would weep.” Connolly’s poem, in comparison to the earlier poem by Bly, maintains a multi-faceted message with deep-seated undertones of grief felt by the surviving soldiers. Poetically, Connolly’s poem stands up to (and outweighs in my opinion) Bly’s poem. Connolly develops rich lingual texture within his lines such as the alliteration and repetition of the ‘w’ sound in “we would weep.” Connolly also uses enjambment (or line-breaks) to emphasize and tweak out ambiguities and alternate meanings; specifically, Connolly breaks line 12 at the word “life” so that the line reads “and the haste to stop the life,” which hints at killing, but Connolly extends his enjambment to actually discuss the preservation of life in line 13: “from spilling out of a Brother[.]” The veteran poetry clearly touches on ideas, fears, realities, and grieves that the stateside poetry lacks, which again echoes Ehrhart’s statement that political poems are “not durable.” Chattarji’s final chapter on veteran poetry deals with the aftermath of the war and the struggle of the American soldier to return to civilian life after encountering the horrors and atrocities of Vietnam. Horace Coleman’s poem “D-Day + 50; Tet + 25” deals with the soldier’s struggle as a survivor of war: It’s been all my life since Normandy and half my life since Tet. And the scars my father and I share in our minds are half-healed. The shock of survival can be worse than other wounds. We didn’t know there would be seams on our souls. (145). In his analysis of Coleman’s poem, Chattarji focuses on the connection the speaker of Coleman’s poem makes to his father who “fought the ‘good war’” (145). Coleman’s poem clearly creates an irony by juxtaposing the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam because American forces took the offensive on D-Day, whereas the Tet Offensive was a Viet Cong attack, where American forces fought a defensive battle across all sectors of Vietnam. The irony in Coleman’s poem serves as a vehicle to compare the aftermath of battle and the struggles of surviving in both Vietnam veterans and veterans of the ‘good war’—World War II. Coleman’s poem, like much of the poetry Chattarji explores in his aftermath chapter of veteran poetry, embodies the efforts of veterans to effectively deal with the trauma they experienced in war, clearly outweighing the political agendas of the stateside poetry by focusing on the individual instead of the country, the soldier instead of the military. The stateside poetry and veteran poetry which Chattarji outlines as opposing agendas, styles, and effectiveness serves to create a literary movement containing rough and fervent images of the effects of warfare technology on the individual. Stylistically, much of the early soldier poetry does match the poetic quality of the stateside poetry, but, as more soldiers returned from Vietnam, they found their voices and turned to poetry as an arguably therapeutic means to cope and deal with their own demons, providing a rich, unique poetic texture that strongly outweighs the political agendas of many of the stateside poets. Chattarji’s final chapter addresses the translated poetry of Vietnamese citizens, which draws from a different poetic background, largely emphasizing pastoral ideals and mixing them with language of the war, specifically images of bombings in Chattarji’s book. With different poetic backgrounds, the poetry of the Vietnamese people is largely incomparable to stateside and veteran poetry, simply because of the lingual and literary differences. Chattarji’s book carefully explores the poetic foundations of the poetry of the Vietnam War, pitting soldier poets, struggling to find a voice, against established, professional poets, who focus (inappropriately) on the political context of the Vietnam War instead of dealing with the psychological elements and the rude, narrow images staining America’s supposed moral and ethical superiority. Chattarji appropriately focuses the bulk of his book on the veteran poetry that came out of the Vietnam War, providing insight to the anguish and horrors expressed in the unabashedly crude poetry of the America’s crude war. | ||