Body Bags


I

Let's hear it for Dwayne Coburn, who was small
And mean without a single saving grace
Except for stealing—home from second base
Or out of teammates' lockers, it was all
The same to Dwayne. The Pep Club candy sale,
However, proved his downfall. He was held
Briefly on various charges, then expelled
And given a choice: enlist or go to jail.
He finished basic and came home from Bragg
For Christmas on his reassignment leave
With one prize in his pack he thought unique,
Which went off prematurely New Year's Eve.
The student body got the folded flag
And flew it in his memory for a week.


II

Good pulling guards were scarce in high school ball.
The ones who had the weight were usually slow
As lumber trucks. A scaled-down wild man, though,
Like Dennis "Wampus" Peterson, could haul
His ass around right end for me to slip
Behind his blocks. Played college ball a year—
Red-shirted when they yanked his scholarship
Because he majored, so he claimed, in Beer.
I saw him one last time. He'd added weight
Around the neck, used words like "grunt" and "slope,"
And said he'd swap his Harley and his dope
And both balls for a 4-F knee like mine.
This happened in the spring of '68.
He hanged himself in 1969.


III

Jay Swinney did a great Roy Orbison
Impersonation once at Lyn-Rock Park,
Lip-synching to "It's Over" in his dark
Glasses beside the jukebox. He was one
Who'd want no better for an epitaph
Than he was good with girls and charmed them by
Opening his billfold to a photograph:
Big brother. The Marine. Who didn't die.
He comes to mind, years from that summer night,
In class for no good reason while I talk
About Thoreau's remark that one injustice
Makes prisoners of us all. The piece of chalk
Splinters and flakes in fragments as I write
To settle in the tray, where all the dust is.

As with the great XJ Kennedy, even people who should know better cast Sam Gwynn solely as a "light" poet. Both men are just great poets, and shouldn't be limited by genre. Even in much of their "light" verse, there are serious--even dark--statements lurking beneath the pleasing exterior.
By the way, I assume that this story is apocryphal--but I've heard the claim several times that Shakespeare's company thought that Hamlet was a comedy when they first read it.

What Mike said. These are among the best war poems, and the best contemporary sonnets, I've ever read. There's an equally fine sequence of war sonnets, titled "1916," in Sam's selected poems, No Word of Farewell.

I'm a great admirer of Sam's Body Bag sonnets, too, and have praised them in print--all the while arguing that he's a serious poet, not "merely" a brilliant satirist.

These are wonderful--they strike me as very much in the tradition of Sassoon.

There's been an unpleasant correspondence on The Gazebo (I lifted the poems from there) about Prof Gwynn's politics.
I posted them because I thought them extraordinarily human, full of empathy and dignity also.
I'm not familiar with his politics. Nobody knows mine, not even my wife; not even me, come to think of it.
I wonder how much politics have to do with poetry?
Regards,
David

[This message has been edited by David Anthony (edited February 11, 2003).]

I am pleased that people are discussing the "Body Bags" sequence, and Alicia is right--Sassoon does inform them indirectly, just as he more directly informs some of the "1916" sequence that Catherine mentioned. He was not a great poet, to be sure, but he was very good in a limited way and did serve both humanity and poetry well, in his poems and memoirs and in his mentorship of Wilfred Owen, who eventually surpassed him as a poet.

David is correct in saying that the discussion on Gazebo has turned rather bizarre, and I did respond there to correct some false statements that Nigel Holt, late of this board, made about my political beliefs, about which he knows nothing, or less than that. Tim and Alan have known me for a long time, and I am sure that--whatever they might say about me--they would never call me a Republican.

I too was taken aback at the virulence of Mr. Holt's latest attack. His membership in the Gazebo has now been cancelled, though not merely as a result of the latest attacks.

I was glad to see these poems of Sam's posted there as well as here, and will repeat my comment from the Gaz:

Sam Gwynn's way with a tribute to an old friend is unique and archetypally American in its approach to friendship: warm, casual, dramatic, teasing, and full of seemingly random memories. The impact is enormous as well.

[Though it is irrelevant to David's subject matter here, Sam's poem "Untitled" encompasses fantasy and
homily, the humble and the universal, apparently with
effortless ease.] He is one of the contemporary masters.

Terese

What does Nigel Holt have to do with this poem? Is there any way that we could discuss the poem as a poem without the mean-spirited gossip? Try.

Mr. Gwynn, if you read this, let me tell you that I am generally not a fan of Vietnam War poetry. Imagine watching a 20 hour movie of nothing but explosions and blood and flying guts and body parts. Numbing--at least that is how I feel about it. Well, that is how a good deal of war poetry, especially Vietnam War poetry, strikes me. Numbing. Not particularly interesting or insightful or moving--with all the surface details of horror that, it is sad to say, don't seem to add up to much as poetry, because their accumulation is numbing. And they have all the depth of a campaign promise.

I like these war poems. I was moved by them. And I wondered about what it was that I found moving about them. I am not especially a fan of war poetry. I thought about the Vietnam War memorial, which I was fortunate to see the first month it was unveiled, when everyone and their brother was bitching it was a piece of ugly shit. "It's like a gash in the ground," went one criticism. And I thought, Well--isn't that the point? All those names. It was very moving--because of the SPECIFICITY of the NAMES.

This brought me back to the poems, and gave me a way into them--at least I think so. I think it is the very specific and homely and observed details that make this work so well for me. They don't attempt a political "statement"--they transcend propaganda:

The Pep Club candy sale,
However, proved his downfall. He was held
Briefly on various charges, then expelled
And given a choice: enlist or go to jail.

That kind of detail to me is worth hundreds of War, war is bloody and stupid or War, war is a necessary evil simplistic statement. And the ending of the third, when the poem suddenly leaps up into a broad "statement," it doesn't feel like a cheap piece of propaganda, because the small and, yes, SPECIFIC details have accumulated POWER:

He comes to mind, years from that summer night,
In class for no good reason while I talk
About Thoreau's remark that one injustice
Makes prisoners of us all. The piece of chalk
Splinters and flakes in fragments as I write
To settle in the tray, where all the dust is.


They're good poems. In a hundred years, when all the sniping and bitching about their posting at Gaz is silent, they will still be good poems. I would bet money on it.

These are excellent poems, and I am pleased to see them discussed here and rightfully accorded their due praise.
I am also pleased to associate myself with Tom O'Grady's concluding remarks.

Jim Hayes

Forgive my ignorance, but what is "The Gazebo" and how would one access the recent discussion of Sam Gwynn's supposed political views?

Sounds like Nigel Hold is writing fiction, from the discussion here. Tim Murphey once described Sam Gwynn to me as the last Southern Democrat, so how he's come to be a Repubican baffles me. Besides, last time I checked, Republicans were American citizens, too, with a right to self expression. Though an Independent myself, I think members of both major parties deserve a fair hearing.

In 1965 or '66 my brother, stationed at Travis, had the job of unloading coffins coming back from the war (and stacking them by rank, if I remember correctly, but that's another issue). What was striking was the anonymity of those containers, the uniformity. What is striking about this sequence is the specificity: real people. Most of the time even when a "war" poem is about an individual, the poem comes closer to hagiography than to honest portrayal. Not these. To me, seeing real people evoked so deftly (or, maybe, a real person's recollection of them) carries more weight than any abstraction could. Each character's connection with war is unique, as is each demise... And that image of dust!
RPW

[This message has been edited by Richard Wakefield (edited February 17, 2003).]

(Let's please not bring discussions and from other boards into this. It is distracting and I think does a disservice to the poems at hand.)

Thanks Richard for your remarks. Yes, it is the specificity that is so moving--especially in conjunction with such an anonymous and dehumanizing term as "body bags."

Thanks to all for the comments. Some of us are probably old enough to remember the famous issue of Life that simply ran photos of one week's dead from the Vietnam War. It was, I think, the one anti-war statement that really hit home with what was then called "middle America."

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

Soldiers are sworn to action: they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers, when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)




------------------

Thanks, Sam, for posting the Sassoon poem - a new one to me.
And for writing three of the best poems I've ever read about Vietnam. The specificity of details, the vernacular, the down-home names, the tone, the rhyme - in all three sonnets capture what I remember, all-too-well, about this era.

Yes, I certainly do remember those photos from Life as well as the TV coverage, day after day.

Sam's superb work, and some of its echoes, has me wondering if Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote any poems about war or its social consequences.

Bob

The only one by Robinson that I can think of right off the bat is this lovely little lyric:

THE DARK HILLS

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade - as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.

These poems of Sam's are good, not only because of their specific attention to lives that feel real and valuable, but becuase they're like all Sam's poems: authentic. They come out of genuine feeling, not feeling that "should" be expressed because it's "right" for the occasion or the subject. His autobiographical poems have the same kind of authenticity, including the so-called "light" ones, which are not so much light as possessed of a different kind of gravity.

While Rhina and I both doubtless feel like spooks attending our own funerals in this section, I do appreciate her comments.

I would be remiss if I did not call to our members' attention this very big, ambitious poem from No Word Of Farewell.

Randolph Field, 1938

"Hands of men blasted the world asunder;
How they lived God only knew!
If you'd live to be a gray haired wonder,
Keep the nose out of the blue!"

Framed by the open window, a lone Stearman
Wobbles, dips right, dips left, then dives and banks
For touch-and-go, seeming barely to miss
The sunlit "Taj Mahal" and a stray egret
That has mistaken grass and shimmering concrete
For salt marsh. Two flies on the windowsill
Wait for their chance. The wind-sock hangs limply
In the thick heat, and lunch is still uncleared.

Indeed, the messtray resting on the nightstand
Has not been touched, or hardly--half a wiener,
Succotash and boiled carrots stirred around,
Even the tea and gingerbread just tasted,
And the young man there who has no appetite
Has raised himself up from the sweaty pillow
To watch some fledgling's first attempt, as stirring
As a scene from The West Point of the Air.

It slips from sight. He leans his head back, dizzy
From the slight effort, shuddering against
The squeal of tires, the buzz-saw radial engine
Over-throttled, straining up to a stall,
And then, the day's sole miracle, the steady
Hum of the prop--somebody else's luck.
For now the chills have come to spike his fever,
Everything holding true to course but him.

The skinny nurse who takes his temperature
Charts the latest, 102.8,
And then connects the dots with a red line
That climbs and plummets like a rookie's struggle
To keep the nose cowl flush with the horizon.
It would be funny, but it simply isn't,
Even when Szulic and Rosenthal, his buddies,
Saunter in after class with cokes and Luckies.

He'll envy them that night when, after supper,
He lies in bed and smokes. It isn't easy
To think of them with girls along the River--
Dancehalls, music, beer, all with such sweetness
In the mild evening air he'd like to cry.
He has missed the chance, like Aaron Rosenthal,
To burn above Berlin; like Thomas Szulic,
To spin in wingless somewhere over France.

A decade and a war still to be crossed
Before he is my father, he is only
One of the Dodos, barely voting age,
Washed out a week before he gets his wings.
A radio is playing now. Kay Kyser.
. . . To be in Carolina in the mornin' . . .
It's hard to think of what he must go back to.
He banked on everything but going back.

Off to the southeast, thunderheads are building--
Heat lightning flashing like imagined guns,
Faint thunder and a breeze that brings the Gulf
Into this place of starched white sheets and Lysol
Where he lies watching three red points of light,
A late flight coming in for night approach.
He shuts his eyes and tries to think of nothing
Before he sideslips into dreams of fire.