From the Whistler

There has been a lot of war poetry in the air of late—most of it anti-war poetry, in fact—as the United States and Britain gear up for the invasion of Iraq. The dubious pairing of war and poetry is one of those odd little cultural hiccups we see every now and then in our modern world. Western civilization seems perfectly content to neglect poetry, except for certain ritual purposes such as this. Perhaps it is felt that only poetry’s exalted language can live up to the seriousness and highly emotional state we associate with wars. Or perhaps it’s just a good vehicle for propaganda. Whatever the case, I find most of the war poetry being thrown about nowadays hollow and rhetorical, namely because the war has hardly begun (they are just dropping the fist bombs on Baghdad as I write this).

Look, for example, at the First World War. It begins in 1914 with wonderfully chivalrous, nationalistic pieces like Rupert Brooke’s "The Soldier", where the poet pleasantly reflects on his being buried in "a foreign field / That is for ever England". Then the real fighting starts and we have John McCrae in Flanders Fields, writing a poem that is still, to be sure, patriotic, but with a heavy doom etched into its lines. And after Ypres and the Somme we come to Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon, composing poems of mortar barrages, shell shock, gas attacks, writing it all down the way they see it and desperately hoping someone would notice and stop the madness that the war had become. For some reason the war poem that comes most readily to my mind is a short verse by English poet/novelist Vera Brittain, who served as a nurse in France. It’s called "The Troop Train":

As we came down from Amiens
And they went up the line
They waved their careless hands to us
And cheered the Red Cross sign.
And often I have wondered since
Repicturing that train
How many of those laughing souls
Came down the line again.

As most great poetry possesses both humanity and imagination, in a sense every poem is an anti-war poem. In any case, for now, here at Whistling Shade we will limit ourselves to war poems written by those who are actually taking part in a war. In the meantime, as spring is the season when we start getting out more often to traipse about in the mud and melting snowbanks, we thought it would be appropriate to have some sports fiction, complete with baseball, basketball, football, and a squirt gun fight thrown in for good measure. And while you’re out and about, don’t forget the Whistling Shade annual reading. This time it will be at the Infinity Expresso Café (471 St.Peter Street in downtown St. Paul) on April 23, starting around 7:30 pm.

- Joel Van Valin

Home