NATIONAL POETRY MONTH . . .

April 1st—and thus the start of National Poetry Month. No fooling . . . and no better time than now to begin to redress the utter absence of poetry from this blog. It’s not that I don’t read poetry (on pretty much a daily basis, no less): it’s more that I just haven’t come up for air much recently from my reading of prose, especially fiction.

But I might as well get this month off on the right foot (metrical and otherwise) with “shout outs” to a couple of poet-friends of mine who have shared their work with me in recent months. The first is Dorothy Shubow Nelson, who last Fall published her first book of poems, The Dream of the Sea. I took my time with this book, picking it up and putting it down, reading it forward and backward over a few weeks. Dorothy shows a real attentiveness to craft in her poems—they are satisfying and gratifying, one after another. But the one that I keep on returning to is actually the one that I just happened to read first, when I flipped open the book for the first time a few months ago:

HORN PLAYERS
Pine Street, Cambridge

Six horn players performed under
our window in the middle of the night

a dissonant modern composition
with unexpected harmonies.

The horns were old, tarnished, gray.
Were we being targeted or praised?

I read that the army was short on buglers—
they were playing reveille on tape.

There’s hunger here and lack of work
no shortage of horn players on this street.

I love the way that the poem “turns” away from its whimsical—almost surreal—opening six lines to hoist some serious thematic weight related to the troubling times that we live in: the painful recognition of both the need for and the shortage of military buglers in this time of high-casualty overseas war along with the compounding irony of the war-complicated economic woes so close to home. This one is a real keeper.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the launch of a fine new literary journal, Consequence, which is dedicated to publishing literary engagements with war in the 21st century. Dorothy has a poem in that inaugural issue of the journal, and so does Kevin Bowen, who is well-known for writing about the Vietnam war from his perspective as a veteran who served with the U.S. Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1968-1969. Consequence is well worth looking into.

And so is Kevin’s latest gathering of poems, Thái Bình / Great Peace—a set of compelling lyrics culled from his various return visits to Vietnam over the past couple of decades. Of the many poems that gripped me in this chapbook, “In the Cu Chi Tourist Zone” is among the most powerful. Part of the reason is that I read it right around the time we read and discussed in my Understanding Literature course Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” which has a scene involving the network of tunnels that the U.S. soldiers had to deal with in Vietnam (and that scene inevitably reminds me of the movie Platoon, which captures so graphically the unspeakable stress and strain the soldiers experienced when they had to crawl into those tunnels to ensure they were empty before destroying them). But another reason this poem particularly struck me involves the way that it testifies to the ongoing-ness of the Vietnam war . . . the “collateral damage” that continues to be felt on both sides of the globe. One of the functions of poetry is to provide such testimony:

IN THE CU CHI TOURIST ZONE

After the tunnel crawl, the lecture on methods
of channeling smoke from the kitchens,
care of the wounded, the old woman tells
how she survived the Rome Plows,
listened from her spider hole to the soldiers’
footsteps overhead. But then, something
not in the script happens. The acrid scent
of tear gas drifts through the lean-to.
In a nearby field two boys run from a ditch,
behind them a rusting red fifty-five gallon drum
leaks pink powder down into a water-filled bomb crater.
Call it collateral damage, thirty years later again.