I Prefer Not To

As part of National Poetry Month, I was solicited to take part in a public reading with an emphasis on protesting the war in Iraq, now at the start of its fourth year. The assumptions behind the invitation are inaccurate, self-serving and offensive, and might be summarized this way: 1. Anyone who writes is, by definition, opposed to the war in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism. 2. Anyone who writes and opposes the war must write anti-war poetry. 3. Poetry expressing anti-war sentiments will help end the war.

Poets are no better informed, no more politically or morally gifted, than plumbers or osteopaths. In fact, one of the worst people I have ever known called himself a poet. That’s easy, like calling yourself a vegetarian, a feminist, a neoconservative, an anarchist – any self-regarding label you choose. Poets make poems – that’s the start and the finish of their job. In his great elegy for Yeats, Auden famously said “poetry makes nothing happen.” Almost as famously, William Carlos Williams wrote “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there,” and he was pathetically wrong. That’s not at all why men die, miserably or otherwise. As a physician, Williams knew better, but even poets sometimes play romantically at being poets, when it serves their purposes.

The late Anthony Hecht was a great poet and an Army infantry veteran of World War II. About five years before his death, Hecht agreed to a book-length interview with Philip Hoy, which was published in 2001 by Between the Lines in London. In it, he admits he was a disappointment as a soldier and, like most enlisted man, says such things as “all the officers I encountred from the rank of captain on up were contemptible and often ignorant, swaggering in the full vigour of their incapacity.” But Hecht also describes the cold-blooded killing of German women and children by American soldiers and the discovery by his division of Flossenburg, the Nazi concentration camp, near Buchenwald, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been murdered one week earlier.

“The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” Hecht says. “For years after I would wake shrieking.”

In other words, Hecht was no sensitive plant but neither was he a superpatriot. Like most of us, he was a thinking person, often confused and appalled by the last century, the worst on record. The war in Vietnam made oblique appearances in his poetry. In his 1977 collection, Millions of Stranger Shadows, “The Odds” includes this stanza:

“Like the blind, headlong cells,
Crowding toward dreams of life, only to die
In dark fallopian canals,
Or that wild strew of bodies at My Lai.
Thick drifts, huddled embankments at our door
Pile up in this eleventh year of the war.”

More than 20 years before My Lai, Hecht had witnessed his own “wild strew.” Later in the interview, Hoy asks Hecht about the Vietnam War and its impact on him. He answers at length, and this is what I wish the organizers of anti-war poetry readings would read:

“It was a strange, troubled and wrenching period in America. Thinking back on it now, I can remember only one person who fully supported the war in Vietnam, and I discovered this under circumstances that exposed us both to some embarrassment. He was older than I, and a conservative businessman. We were both members of a club, and I spoke critically of the war, supposing no one would disagree. But he was deeply affronted, and said so loudly and at length. For a while I thought he was a mindless zealot, but it turned out that his only son had been killed in the war, and to admit to himself that the whole bungled and hopeless campaign was doomed was more than he could bear. He had to believe in eventual victory, if only to justify his son’s death. This kind of mental attitude is all too-common in war-time, and the army is invariably eager for early military heroes, especially dead ones. Nothing can make the home front more implacable than unwillingness to admit that its most terrible sacrifices have been in vain. But that is only part of the story. Opposed as I was to every aspect of the war, I was also determined not to rant and rave in public poetry readings on the subject, which was ultimately only a kind of self-promotion. There were not a few poets in those years who literally got their pictures in the papers for resisting arrest at anti-war demonstrations. Such arrests did nothing to impede the war effort, nor introduce a moment’s doubt in the minds of Henry Kissinger or the president. A number of my fellow teachers found a curious academic mode of war-resistance. They quietly but resolutely gave no poor grades to any male students that might jeopardize their draft status by academic failure. It was probably, in the light of all the deaths and casualties of that war, a feeble gesture, though it almost certainly saved more lives than all the anti-war poetry readings combined.”