Remembrance Day 2011: Podcasts, Publications, Poets Laureate

Over the past fortnight, discussions of war poetry have abounded.

The Guardian's excellent series of podcasts included an Armistice Day edition featuring Michael Morpurgo, Louisa Young and Andrew Motion. My usual complaint about Motion---a passionate advocate for war poetry--- is that he tends to reduce it to pity and waste. In Motion's hands, war poetry sounds strangely comforting; it is well behaved in saying what he wants to hear. Yet when he has the right subject, he is extremely eloquent, and he talks movingly and truthfully here about contemporary soldier-poets.

Michael Morpurgo is another whose absolute faith in the futility myth avoids inconvenient truths about the necessity of fighting in order to survive as a nation ('lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed', as Edward Thomas put it). Morpurgo argues in the podcast that our only way of approaching the war now is through the experience of an individual (whether it be a human as in Private Peaceful, or the horse of War Horse). This runs counter to Geoffrey Hill's argument in The Triumph of Love, which grotesquely parodies the Spielberg approach to genocide: 'refocus that Jew---yes there, / that one.' Morpurgo and Hill share a starting point: we can make sense of one death, not of millions. Morpurgo implies that we can extrapolate. Hill insists that the act of making sense falsifies the magnitude of the suffering. Thinking that we understand, we only betray. Hill's is the most discomforting assault on the easy sentimentality underlying so many modern-day representations of war. I wish that the Guardian would bring together Morpurgo, Motion and Hill for unflinching discussion: the podcast would be superb.

An earlier Guardian podcast examined rhetoric in the Iliad, and featured Alice Oswald whose Memorial is based on Homer's epic. I look forward to reading Oswald's book, which is the subject of a positive review by Simon Turner here. I am less persuaded by Oswald's comments in an interview given previously to the Guardian: 'That [Homer's Iliad] turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes–it's become a clichéd, British empire part of our culture.' So Oswald doesn't like public schools, glamorising war, or the British Empire: she is, after all, speaking to the Guardian. But does anyone really hold that 'public school' view about Homer? Because of Owen's influence, the misreading of Homer is likely to be in the other direction: that Homer is about nothing but the pity of war. I only wish that public schools did still teach Homer.

I must end with a few words about Carol Ann Duffy, accepting that the poet laureateship is an anachronistic public challenge which the incumbent can never win. Even so, when she remarks of a new anthology of soldier-poetry that it is 'humbling, allowing the voices of those whose lives have been changed by war to speak to us', I wonder at her use of 'allowing'. And when she serves up her annual slop of First World war clichés in the Guardian (which, on this occasion, really should know better), she would do well to remember that she is writing about something more significant than the latest royal engagement, or whether sherry tastes of the sea. This is Great-War-by-Numbers. Next year, expect to read about shell-shocked Tommies shot at dawn by General Haig.

Google Discussion Groups

Here are two Google discussion groups which deserve support. I've linked to this one, 'Modern War Poetry', previously. The other is 'World War One Literature', which includes a mostly (and perpexingly) positive thread on Duffy's 'Last Post'. No one mentions 'bled bad blood'...

The 'Real' War Poets

Responding to Carol Ann Duffy's call for a 'new war poetry', Erica Wagner has set about finding 'the poets whose experience of conflict is direct, intimate, everyday'. She collects their work here --- poems from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Gaza. Her article is provocatively titled 'The real war poets'. Although she describes Duffy's commissioning of 'a slew of modern war poetry' as 'wholly admirable', the challenge to those British and American poets who have the comfortable benefit of writing 'at a distance' is loud enough. Old arguments about witness and entitlement are still alive, and still divide.

The Times website has not treated line-breaks and stanza-breaks in Wagner's selection kindly. That makes judgements about the poems treacherous. The only anglophone poem, Brian Turner's 'Ashbah', is not his strongest: it reads like Keith Douglas by numbers, with its lost and wandering revenants, desert wind, 'trash', and narrow alleys. As for the others, poetry in translation may be better than no poetry at all, but it is impossible to gauge how these poets sound. 'During my long, boring hours of spare time I sit to play with the earth's sphere', one poem begins. Shouldn't it be 'sit and play'? Is 'boring' not implied and therefore redundant? Shouldn't the 'earth's sphere' be replaced by 'a globe'? Who's at fault: the poet or the translator? It may not be a coincidence that what seems like the most impressive poem, Dunya Mikhail's 'Pronouns', is also the one which lends itself most readily to translation.

This selection is a valuable start, and I hope that Erica Wagner will expand it over time. So far, plenty of countries are represented, but by very few poems and poets. A much fuller offering from any given war or country would make it easier to understand the poetic traditions at work.

Carol Ann Duffy's Great War Poem

The BBC has commissioned a poem from the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to mark the recent passing of the remaining British soldiers of the Great War. It is titled 'Last Post', and you can read and listen to it here.

I'm sure that the poem's motivation is honourable. But it seems to me to be desperately tired in its attitudes and images. Duffy has crossed 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (predictably enough) with Time's Arrow, and tossed in a bit of early Hughes for seasoning. 'That moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud' is pure Hughes --- on a very bad day.

Please tell me why it is a good poem in the comments below.

Update: On their respective blogs, George Simmers and Dan Todman admire the poem, albeit with reservations. They both dislike the allusions to Owen. ('Dulce --- No --- Decorum --- No --- Pro patria mori' makes little sense, beyond indulging in the kind of Horace-bashing which Owen carried out far more memorably.) George notes that there's some confusion over whether the protagonist is a victim of gas or shrapnel. George also thinks that the rewinding is reminiscent of Slaughterhouse Five.

Would anyone like to offer a view on the phrase 'bled bad blood'?

Poems about Iraq and Afghanistan

Today's Guardian carries a number of poems commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy about war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cynical attitude to this exercise would read as follows: some of these poets had not thought to address the issue before, but a request from the Poet Laureate, together with a cheque and publication in the Guardian, are enough to provoke the obligatory hand-wringing. The usual suspects and the usual politics are out in force. (Ian Duhig's poem risks seeming to call the RAF 'Jihadists', but see the comments below.) Duffy says in her introduction that 'British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war'; no, they sit at home writing about it. (There are, contra Duffy, poets who have served in the warzones, but they are silently excluded.) Not one of these poems is news that will stay news; they are soon-to-be-forgotten froth. But the poems aren't really about the poetry; they aren't even about the wars.

All of the above is, I think, true, but it isn't quite the whole truth. Poets are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Rejecting Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie in 1928, Yeats told the playwright, 'you are not interested in the great war; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your own opinions.' None of the poets commissioned by Duffy is interested enough in the wars to visit the warzones in any capacity. (Compare John Balaban, a conscientious objector who spent decades teaching in Vietnam during and after the war there.) But then, few of us are 'interested' enough to do that. Carol Ann Duffy deserves praise for broaching the subject, and her own poem 'Big Ask', while not belonging among her best work, is at least better than Andrew Motion's astonishingly dreadful 'Causa Belli'.

The poetry of the concerned civilian who, nevertheless, leads a normal life in which awareness of the wars plays only a small part is perfectly valid, and is needed. But most poets overplay their hand, insisting that we appreciate their heightened sensitivity to the news bulletins, or that we recognise their special disgust at war. They want to tell us what we already know, but they want to tell us that they know it more than we do. They feel it. Several of Duffy's poets fall spectacularly into that trap. The better poems claim no more than they are entitled to, like Matthew Hollis's Edward-Thomas-inflected 'Landlock', with its cunning reference to 'the uncommissioned sea'. To be commissioned, Hollis hints, is to be tamed. He knows exactly what is expected of him, and resists in the act of accepting.

Two or three of these poets have written about contemporary wars before. Paul Muldoon's Horse Latitudes, for example, gives considerable attention to war in Iraq. Muldoon is an old hand at writing about violence. His two-line poem here ('It's getting dark, but not dark enough to see / An exit wound as an exit strategy') is a frivolous thing, held together only by the heavy play on 'exit', but it does bring to mind a passage from his great poem of the Troubles, 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants':

You could, if you like, put your fist
in the exit wound
in his chest.
He slumps
in the spume of his own arterial blood
like an overturned paraffin lamp.

The voyeurism, the wildly inappropriate language, the artistic delight in figurative possibilities --- this knows the cost of translating atrocity into art, and gives us the full horror unmediated by pity. With the exception of David Harsent, apparently uncommissioned by Carol Ann Duffy despite the success of Legion, no anglophone poet of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has yet come close to that achievement.

Postscript, June 2011: if you are looking for analysis of Jane Weir's 'Poppies', you will find it here.