Veterans Day

Let Me Call It Remembrance Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A post today for a holiday with complications. In the UK, Canada, and the former Commonwealth, today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow is Remembrance Day. In my United States tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. Remembrance Sunday/Day is a bigger deal. Here in the U.S., it’s one of two holidays set aside to honor the armed forces,*  and the Spring Memorial Day gets more observance. America moves it around as a Monday workday holiday, so it now rarely occurs on November 11th, the day it was originally meant to commemorate, Armistice Day, the day that WWI ended. In the American observance, the day and the moment being observed are no longer there as they happen to be this year.

But then, all the events of WWI have now passed out of the living’s remembrance, and WWII is entering the time of that leaving — while in England the wound and loss are still felt by a generation that themselves only recall the generations that personally experienced it.**

Historically, poets suffer, fight, and die in wars. Presently in the U.S. this may be less true than was traditionally so, our soldiering ranks now coming from a different cohort than those with MFA and workshop attendance. That too is complicated, and I’ll choose to honor your time today by not going into all of that. Yet I’ll maintain that the experiences of service to country, of organized protection and organized death, of comradeship and loneliness — these words of history aren’t so far away if we only open ourselves to listen to them.

Here are five poems for this complicated holiday that this Project has presented over the years. In honor of the UK preservation of the original reason for the holiday, four of them will be British to one American.

Gone, Gone Again (Blenheim Oranges)

British poet Edward Thomas is too little considered in the United States, but in the run-up to WWI this overworked and underpaid freelance writer started to expend his writing efforts to the least commercial of literary forms, poetry of individual honesty — urged in that endeavor by his expatriate American friend, Robert Frost. Frost left England for America as the war began and he asked his friend to follow him and emigrate to the United States.

Thomas didn’t accept his offer. In Britain Thomas is remembered as a War Poet, as one of the casualties of The Great War, but his poetry doesn’t speak of his trenchside times in the conflict — instead it sings with lovely precision and concision of the British countryside as he is making his decision to take the road well-traveled to enlist to the front. “Gone, Gone Again”  is one of his masterful poetic verse-essays on this time of decision, as he observes an England depopulated of its workmen. Why did he go to the front? He explained it mostly as being unable to shake his patriotic connection to the very soil and experience of Britain that his poetry sings of, but I said today’s post would be about complications. Thomas was also a troubled soul, looking for meaning in his life not captured by certainty, and some have speculated that a soldier’s pay was a better economic offer for his family than his Grub Street freelancing. He packs every bit of that into this short poem.

.

Shadwell Stair

Wilfred Owen is another Brit who took up poetry in the context of serving in The Great War. He’s known for his scathing anti-war poems, which to Britain’s credit doesn’t keep him from being honored nationally as a War Poet. But here’s a lonely poem written on the banks of the river Thames, likely during the time he was back from the front being treated for what was then called “shell-shock.” Folks today can experience the poem in a context pointed out later, that the Shadwell Stair location was a gay cruising spot at that time. Historically, there’s a blindness in some eyes to see that not just that poets and artists serve, but that they aren’t all straight.

.

On the Troop Ship to Gallipoli

Rupert Brooke was a rising young poet before WWI started, and even at his young age, great things were predicted for him. Unlike Owen, his war poetry is conventionally heroic, conventionally patriotic. Unlike Thomas, he was under no economic pressure when he enlisted. Would that tone have continued, could he have written glorious battlefield odes, or would the war have turned him into a skeptical Modernist? In an irony that only the Fates could have woven, he was detailed to be part of the disastrous attempt to land at Gallipoli. While on the troop ship steaming there, he fell sick from what I’ve read was an infected insect bite, and died before reaching the deadly front.

I took a fragment Brooke composed on that fatal voyage, and audaciously decided to take a Modernist blue pencil to trim and rephrase it the way an Imagist might. That was a complicated act, one that I’m not sure I can justify, other than to say that I wanted Brooke’s moment on that troopship to stand out more vividly, riding roughshod over his verse to honor that.

.

The Cenotaph

I don’t believe there are any women on WWI War Poet plaques in Britain, but of course they were asked to and worked with the war effort, and were there to tend, mend, and mourn the casualties during and afterward. Here’s a complicated poem of mourning, written as the original Cenotaph*** was erected in London. Its author Charlotte Mew is another British poet little-known in America. From what I’ve read she was seen as eccentric by other artists of her time, and her poetry doesn’t fit easily into any movement or style. Every Remembrance observance in Britain to this day has a ceremony at the London Cenotaph where the current government pays solemn homage to the soldiers’ sacrifice. If I read Mew right, she’s the ghost-at-the-feast here, and has some particular wailing to do.

.

.

Grass

Lastly, for Remembrance Day, here’s the American — and non-more American than the child of immigrants Carl Sandburg. I would post his poem “Grass” every Memorial Day, every Veteran’s Day — and yes, even every Remembrance Day. Yet, this is a poem that sings about forgetting. Is forgetting wars, forgetting soldier’s service and sacrifice, a callous thing? Is forgetting the follies and cruelties of war dangerous ignorance? Is it better to forget wars than to suffer them forever in endless horror? Is forgetting just the way things are eventually, an erasing sigh that fades into new present days — as what humans do that humans can never fully comprehend?

Look, I said it was complicated.

.

*In the US, there’s fine print sometimes invoked to separate the two: Memorial Day for those who died in service, and Veteran’s Day to honor all that served. The UK Remembrance Day is more like American Memorial Day focused on wartime losses and sacrifice.

**Proportionate to population, the US casualties in WWI were much lower. And England’s cities suffered under bombs during WWII. I was going to write too about the World Wars and their effect on the British Empire and colonialism, and America sliding in as a replacement, but that subject is too big for any footnote.

***So great were the WWI deaths that logistics couldn’t see to repatriating all the bodies of British war dead back home, and unidentified dead and missing in action mysteries clouded the situation too. Regional cenotaph memorials, including a great one in the national capitol, would serve as a consolidated gravesite to lay flowers and visit in remembrance.

The Absent Poetry of World War II

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

It’s been sometime since I’ve posted here. Having fewer blocks of uninterrupted time to compose and record the audio pieces for this Project, I’ve spent time instead with that proudly designed to be a time-waster Twitter in the past week or so. Twitter* has its own news stories this week — but that’s not my subject today.

I have a tiny number of followers there, and what I tend to talk about on Twitter is poetry, and then less-popular types of music. Really, not unlike what I do here on this blog, but more cut-up and off-the-cuff — and with more typos from typing on a small tablet screen and screen-keyboard. While working with poetry and music might cross-train you to fit things into constrained spaces, the Twitter short post-length limits challenge even this fan of compressed verse and sub-1000-word essays.

I came upon this Tweet this morning though that brought to mind something I’ve not revisited here on the blog for a while. One of the regular Twitter poetry-posters put up the devastating Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,”  and I once more thought of how powerfully the soldier-poets of World War I wrote about their war from the front lines — how to this day England recalls what they said combined with their presence as example casualties from that war, and in the sum, the tragedy all that entails. Long-time readers of this blog will know how thoroughly I’ve extracted poetry from WWI for presentation here.

War Poets in Poets Corner Westminster Abbey

Here’s a picture of a specific memorial to WWI poets in the Poet’s Corner of Britain’s Westminster Abbey

.

Perhaps it’s the Public Domain limitations of what can be freely reused in a Project like this, which puts my attention on pre-1927 work — but I was caused again to wonder, why don’t we have dozens of effective poems about WWII, many of which will be commonly anthologized and recalled by the general audience poetry retains? If called to find examples I might start (as would many others) with Auden’s “September 1, 1939” — but this isn’t a first-person “report from the front lines” poem like Owen, Sassoon, or T. E. Hulme presented back then. It’s not even as close to harms way as the incisive poems of Edward Thomas who wrote about his approach to volunteering for the British Army that led to his death in the conflict, or Apollinaire’s equivalent to Auden’s poem about the outbreak of WWI, “The Little Car.”  It’s not that poets or writers didn’t serve, and a great many novelists who served had a war book in them it seems.**  So, we can easily think of the novels about WWII written from frontline experience. But poems?

Was WWI poetic and WWII novelistic? I can’t make that case. Maybe you can. Is it down to the changes in the literary marketplace? Plausible, though within poetry’s more limited audience in the second half of the 20th century you think there’d be room for poetry as vivid as those of the WWI soldier-poets. Here’s a short list of a few of the notable American poets who did serve in WWII: James Dickey (Air Corps airborne navigator, though some reports say fighter pilot), Richard Wilbur (Army Signal Corps in Europe), Frank O’Hara (sailor on a destroyer in the Pacific), Richard Eberhart (gunnery trainer), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Captain of a submarine chaser), Karl Shapiro (medical corps clerk in the Pacific theater), Kenneth Koch (infantryman in the Philippines), Randall Jarrell (“Celestial navigation tower operator,” which he claimed was the most poetic job in the Air Force).***

Of that list only Shapiro and Jarrell wrote what might be called “from the front” poems. Jarrell’s “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”  may be the  example of an anthologized WWII poem, and Shapiro had his first book about his overseas, but not exactly in front line combat, V-Letter,  published as the war was still ongoing.

What happened? Why didn’t more of these poets write more about the details and moments of their service? My general observation is that instead they wrote consciously and unconsciously about how the war changed their outlook on the world. David Haven Blake wrote a short journal article on Wilbur’s World War II poetry, but instead makes the case more for this theory. He quotes Wilbur as saying “The war challenged me to organize a disordered sense of things, and so prepared me to write a poetry of maximum awareness and acknowledgement.” I’ve seen another quote from Wilbur circling the same thought “One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.”

This non-scholar will now generalize wildly, but the WWI war poets used poetry, often structured metrical/rhyming poetry, to demonstrate the world out of joint, a genteel form container for barbarity and chaos. The WWII poets muted all that as unspeakable (or even over-spoken?) and sought to portray in poetry (that wasn’t always as formal) the values and observations of a peacetime more precious, however ambivalent and imperfect, from the militarized brutality of combat.

Let me dedicate this little essay to Robert Tallant Laudon. Laudon sought out the Lake Street Writers Group early this century as an 80-something veteran who had served in a logistical role in England during WWII. Though he became a music professor after the war, he seemed not completely sure of his skills as a poet, but he wanted to use poetry to portray something of his experiences during the war. By the time he was 86 he published a small chapbook “Among the Displaced — World War II”  with the resulting poems. I now view the younger me who heard him workshopping drafts of these poems as a much younger man than I thought I was then. Such is the progression of age! His poetry, like much good poetry, was written in an immediate present while depicting the 1940s, and I’ll always treasure that experience.

I mentioned at the start no new music, but here’s a piece, a “found poem” I created out of a recorded interview with another music professor, Weston Noble, who had served in WWII and which I set to my own music early in this Project. The voice you’ll hear in this must-listen-to piece is Noble’s. He commanded a tank in Europe during that war. In other parts of that interview, he recalled that when under fire, another member of his crew would ask him to sing. Inside that steel turtle shell the war outside existed mostly audibly, and the fate of those vibrating inside was unsure. The voice of Noble somehow calmed his crew. And this person now, here, who writes this? I’m still afraid to sing, worried that the unpleasant sounds that I too-often utter will embarrass me and displease any listeners. When I hear this man, now far in age from the war he fought in, decades from the interior of that tank, speak to the recorder of “The Garden of Trust”  claiming that it can be found in music, I invariably start to mist up.

Listen to this two-minute audio piece with the player below — or if you don’t see it, with this highlighted link provided as a backup.

.

*A new sole-proprietor owner has led many — who have through long activity and posting on this online service built up it’s usefulness for themselves and others — to worry about its continued existence.

**Kurt Vonnegut did two WWII novels . One, Slaughterhouse Five,  is one of the last first-person-experience-informed WWII novels, and another, Mother Night,  is a personal favorite, and includes this WWII poem that this Project performed.

***I was able to start this list from an article on the Poetry Foundation’s web site linked here.