[nyctom]

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.