I’ve seen several poets questioning if it’s morally right to write poems or blogs that deal with a war they’re not physically involved in. It seems they’re worried that it’s inappropriate to ‘make art’ off the back of other people’s suffering.
My immediate answer is that our role as writers – of poetry, or anything else – is to react to the world around us as honestly as we can. The technology we all deal with every day means we see wars in horrible, close-up detail. A reaction is, therefore, inevitable.
Sure, poets can hide from it temporarily – and sometimes we need to for the sake of our sanity – but to avoid it altogether seems to me a kind of denial, both of our roles as writers and also of the appalling suffering of the victims. I doubt if Tennyson had watched day-to-day footage of the Crimean War that he would have come out with something as weird as ‘The Charge Of The Light Brigade’, so in that sense we’re lucky to have the privilege of access to the carnage. We should use that privilege.
It exasperates me when I see, in months as vile as this one has been, poets bury themselves in insular arguments. This week someone kicked off on social media because a poet had called his or her poem a sonnet, when it was, in the view of the complainant, merely a poem with fourteen decasyllabic lines. Good grief.
I feel I’ve had no choice but to write about the wars that have affected my life. No, I’ve not fought in one, and have not had a battle raging around me, but the images and noise of war has been there throughout my seventy years of existence. I knew the effect of World War Two on my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. I can’t not write about that, or have it crop up in my poems from time to time. Off the top of my head the following countries have been directly and obviously involved in wars, either between nations or within a nation, or have had wars inflicted upon them, during my time on earth (it’s a scary list, perhaps):
USA, United Kingdom, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Algeria, France, Russia, Ukraine, Angola, Argentina, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Falkland Islands, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Myanmar, Mozambique, Lebanon, Georgia, Haiti, Libya, Moldova, Liberia, Grenada… and no doubt so many others that have not sprung immediately to mind as I’m writing this.
If I ignored this and wrote entirely about the immediate world around me, ignoring TV, newspapers, etc I would question my validity as a writer. Or poet if anyone should consider me such a thing.
The best poem I read about the ‘Twin Towers’ atrocity was not from someone in New York, but in rural Wisconsin. Michael Kriesel included his poem Grape Jam in his collection Chasing Saturday Night. It describes how he was helping his elderly Grandma make grape jam in her kitchen as the TV broadcast the disaster and Grandma confused it with Pearl Harbor… ‘I told her this was different/ but she said the dead/ are just as dead/ no matter what the TV says/ then she turned the TV off/ like God commanding darkness by remote/ knocking a jar off the table by accident/ both of us just sitting there a moment/ watching darkness seep across the old linoleum.
Kriesel captured what it’s like for most of us on the outside of a war or a disaster. We’re doing other things when it happens. We take in the information, and the effect of that information, and then get on with our lives because we have to.
This week I was walking with an image of Gaza rooted in my brain – a mother on her knees cuddling her dead child in its white shroud – when two men passed by. One said to the other: “How’s the old golf handicap coming along?” It shocked me momentarily but it’s how it is.
We also have opinions that must inform our poetry (or blogs). I have seen only the damage a war can do. It’s easy to say victory ‘saves the world’ from this or that dictatorship or repressive regime, and to a certain extent that’s true, but the cost of the war to me is the real tragedy. The suffering each one inflicts on the innocent is obvious – but I believe it also debases those who provoke and inflict it on the innocent. Ordinary people, who are persuaded to become an army, find themselves killing and maiming other ordinary people, which unbalances their own existence permanently.
I can’t – won’t – avoid writing about the wars that affect me, most recently Ukraine and now Gaza. To ignore them would be to reject my responsibility as a human being to attempt to care, as best I can, for my fellows, even if I disagree with them or think they’re idiots.
To avoid permanently a reaction to war, given the immediacy of the films that are screened in our living rooms every day, is in my mind to avoid a responsibility and to let down those who reacted before me. Sure, Wilfred Owen knew more about war than I’ll ever know, but there were those in his time who recoiled from his writing about it. Should he not have written Anthem For Doomed Youth or Dulce Et Decorum Est? How dare anyone tell him, or us, that he shouldn’t?
So with Picasso and Guernica, a work so brilliant it will never be forgotten. So with W H Auden, in New York on September 1, 1939, writing: I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-Second Street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade… The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night.
As those before us saw war around them, we see it around us. And as they wrote about it, so then should we.
Bob Mee poetry and more 