Benjamin Britten: An Appreciation

There was a period in my life as a composition student when I studied the music of Benjamin Britten intensively, not least because of his eclectic approach to composition. He himself was open to influence from many sources, including ancient musics from his own English tradition, and also including musics he encountered in his travels around the world as a composer and conductor.

As some few examples of his wide-ranging and eclectic style: Britten wrote a powerful setting of "The ugly Duckling" for boy soprano and piano; he wrote a chamber opera for liturgical performance, "Curlew River," based on the Japanese Noh drama "Sumidagawa," he wrote his important operas, of course, the best of them based on literary masterpieces of the 19th C.; and the sublime "War Requiem," which incorporates poems by Wilfred Owen, is a masterpiece of 20th C. artistry in response to the pity of war.

And I was attracted to Britten because, like me, he was a gay composer. His life-long partner, tenor Peter Pears, was often the important voice in many of his greatest works, including the "War Requiem" and the operas. Pears was both lover and muse to Britten, and many works were written specifically for him to premiere.

I have performed on more than one occasion his famous Yuletide work "A Ceremony of Carols," for chorus and harp. I first performed that work in high school, and several times since. It was one of a few works I encountered at the end of high school and beginning of college that led me towards an in-depth study of Medieval music; especially medieval English carols, which I made a special study of while in music school. I cheerfully thank Britten for being one of the composers who pointed me towards Medieval music, therefore, which has been very important to my musical life, and remains so to this day.

I'm certain Britten has influenced me directly, at least on some subconscious level, as a composer. There are a few 20th C. composers—Britten, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, etc.—whose works I have performed and studied, who all had the gift of writing amazing, memorable melodies. I know that's been an influence on me.

As a composer, I often focus more on melody, and interwoven contrapuntal and heterophonic melodies, than I do on harmony or tonality. Melody, whether it's song or instrumental, is the core of the music i write. In analyzing my own musical habits, several years ago, I realized that melody is at the heart of everything I do as a composer; sometimes it's tangled up, sometimes it's quite dissonant, but it remains central to what I hear and what I write.

I have a permanent soundtrack in the back of my mind, which is always playing something, or making up something. Melody is at the core of what I hear with my inner voice, that permanent soundtrack, which I dip into, which I listen to, when I am writing music. I recognize certain patterns that evoke a particular feeling or nuance for me, that are melodic, sometimes based within a complex chord, sometimes very simple.

I can recognize some aspects of the musical context around the melodies I write—the modal forms, the complex chords, the occasionally dissonant backdrops—as having been influenced by Britten, as well as by Messiaen, Harrison, Takemitsu, and some others. The patterns and structures are not imitative, not obvious in any way, beyond the "flavor" or "feel" of the music. I do tend to write modally rather than tonally, as most of these influences on me also did.

Here then are three quotes from Benjamin Britten, the great 20th C. British composer:

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There should be no such profession as criticism. Musicologists, of course, are quite different, and this is a sadly neglected profession in this country—but there should definitely be no regular critics. To go through life living off other people's work clearly has too degrading an effect.
—Benjamin Britten, essay "Variations on a Critical Theme"

I like here the distinction he makes between musicology, which is the study and appreciation of music, and criticism. Musicology, which I minored in, in music school, is the study of music, its history and forms, its aesthetic and artistic response to life, and so forth. In graduate school, I majored in ethnomusicology, which is the anthropological, ethnographic, and fieldwork-based study of the music cultures of foreign cultures from all around the world. (Ethno also includes the study of our own music culture, but from an anthropological and social perspective.) Music criticism is best done as narrative reporting, a description of a concert or other performance. Music criticism at its worst is ideological, prescriptive, and tends to dictate aesthetics rather than respond as an enthusiastic reviewer.

Or, as Duke Ellington said, in a similar context: Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they really did.

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Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.
—Benjamin Britten, (speech) On Receiving the First Aspen Award

Britten is speaking here of the necessity for active listening, as opposed to passive entertainment. I agree strongly with this. The listener needs to be not only intellectually, but viscerally engaged with music. Music is not an intellectual art, it engages the feelings directly—and it can do so without even engaging the verbal, rational mind, but can bypass it entirely.

I have had occasion to argue with poets who had the opinion the poetry was the greatest (most rarified, highest) artform, because language is so abstract; but music is even more abstract, not even requiring language (symbolic or otherwise) to be able to create a powerfully moving aesthetic experience.

Britten, like other composers I have admired, was a composer who knew the power of words-and-music, how the two together can synergize into something greater than just each part alone. His choral and solo vocal writing is sublime, some of the most pleasing to sing as a performer, and even at its most complex it retains a sense of being rooted in primal human song, the communal activity of singing together, in a way that makes us into one voice. We achieve unity through song, through making art together. And this is an aspect of English choral music that is well-known, in its applications of social cohesiveness, and also of singing together in church, making us all spiritually one through the medium of unitary song.

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All of us—the public, critics, and composers themselves—spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in thirty years' time very few works that are well known today will still be played, but does that matter so much? Surely out of the works that are written some good will come, even if it is not now; and these will lead on to people who are better than ourselves.
—Benjamin Britten, interviewed by Edmund Tracey (Sadler's Wells Magazine, Autumn 1966)

This speaks directly to me as an artist and composer. Indeed, "Let us not be so self-conscious." That actually inhibits creativity, that kind of self-consciousness about always needing to create an original masterpiece. I can think of at least two composers I knew in music school who crippled themselves creatively by being too perfectionistic, too concerned about originality, too worried about the end result—to the point where they basically stopped writing music. This kind of perfectionism in art can thus be crippling to the artist.

Britten's attitude, by contrast, is more relaxed. He was a working composer all his life–and in some ways his attitudes towards his work were craftsmanlike, very artisanal. Not that he didn't always give his best, as a good craftsman ought; rather, he did his best work, then moved on to the next project. There were no endless rewrites and reworkings, the sort of compulsive editing that can take an actual masterpiece and destroy it. To make a masterpiece, you have to be able at some point to just stop, and declare the work done. There may well still be imperfections, things you would fix, or do differently. But the attitude Britten had, which could serve as a good role-model for any artist, was to look forward to fixing his mistakes in the next work. He did revise his work, but not neurotically. Often it takes a new occasion, some time after the original work's conception, that gives one the chance to fix things; and also the time to gain a clearer perspective on what might need to be fixed, and what can stand already as good enough.

Keith Douglas

On Veteran's Day last year I presented a poem or two from Wilfred Owen. This year I thought to quote from another poet of war, Keith Douglas, an English poet of World War II.



Keith Douglas was born in 1920 in Kent, and educated at Oxford. In one of his letters written in 1940 he looks back on his childhood: "I lived alone during the most fluid and formative years of my life, and during that time I lived on my imagination, which was so powerful as to persuade me that the things I imagined would come true." Within days of the declaration of war he had reported to an army office with the intention of joining a cavalry regiment. Like many others keen to serve he had to wait and it was not until July 1940 that he started his training. On the 1st February 1941 he passed out from Sandhurst, the officer training school, and was posted to the Second Derbyshire Yeomanry at Ripon; he spent most of his war service in North Africa. In 1944, he took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, during which action he was killed.

His poetry shows the range of the best of the English war poets, showing what Owen called "the poetry and pity of war," from lyrical to polemical. His poems from the desert are filled with descriptions of the lives of desert civilians as well as warriors, with insight into the burdens of the warrior and wounded. One of the things Douglas thought about, which has become a major theme among veterans over the past century, is: how do you come back home, when the war is done?

Douglas talks less directly about war and politics than other war poets might, but the context is always there. It's the quiet backdrop of his poems, some of the most memorable of which were written in North Africa.

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Villanelle Of Spring Bells

Bells in the town alight with spring
converse, with a concordance of new airs
make clear the fresh and ancient sound they sing.

People emerge from winter to hear them ring,
children glitter with mischief and the blind man hears
bells in the town alight with spring.

Even he on his eyes feels the caressing
finger of Persephone, and her voice escaped from tears
make clear the fresh and ancient sound they sing.

Bird feels the enchantment of his wing
and in ten fine notes dispels twenty cares.
Bells in the town alight with spring

warble the praise of Time, for he can bring
this season: chimes the merry heaven bears
make clear the fresh and ancient sound they sing.

All evil men intent on evil thing
falter, for in their cold unready ears
bells in the town alight with spring
make clear the fresh and ancient sound they sing.

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Cairo Jag

Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,
a pasty Syrian with a few words of English
or the Turk who says she is a princess—she dances
apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne
always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:
she has all the photographs and his letters
tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.
All this takes place in a stink of jasmin.

But there are the streets dedicated to sleep
stenches and the sour smells, the sour cries
do not disturb their application to slumber
all day, scattered on the pavement like rags
afflicted with fatalism and hashish. The women
offering their children brown-paper breasts
dry and twisted, elongated like the skull,
Holbein's signature. But his stained white town
is something in accordance with mundane conventions—
Marcelle drops her Gallic airs and tragedy
suddenly shrieks in Arabic about the fare
with the cabman, links herself so
with the somnambulists and legless beggars:
it is all one, all as you have heard.

But by a day's travelling you reach a new world
the vegetation is of iron
dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions
clinging to the ground, a man with no head
has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

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The Knife

Can I explain this to you? Your eyes
are entrances the mouths of caves
I issue from wonderful interiors
upon a blessed sea and a fine day,
from inside these caves I look and dream.

Your hair explicable as a waterfall
in some black liquid cooled by legend
fell across my thought in a moment
became a garment I am naked without
lines drawn across through morning and evening.

And in your body each minute I died
moving your thigh could disinter me
from a grave in a distant city:
your breasts deserted by cloth, clothed in twilight
filled me with tears, sweet cups of flesh.

Yes, to touch two fingers made us worlds
stars, waters, promontories, chaos
swooning in elements without form or time
come down through long seas among sea marvels
embracing like survivors in our islands.

This I think happened to us together
though now no shadow of it flickers in your hands
your eyes look down on ordinary streets
If I talk to you I might be a bird
with a message, a dead man, a photograph.

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How To Kill

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

•

Desert Flowers

And here's a brief animation built around Douglas reading one of his most famous poems, Simplify Me When I'm Dead:

Wilfred Owen

On Veteran's Day, here are another couple of poems from the great World War I voice Wilfred Owen. I've mentioned Owen on this date before, along with his poem "Strange Meeting."

Wilfred Owen is the iconic WWI poet; there are other great poets from that war, such as Siegfried Sassoon. Owen was not recognized at the time of his death, in battle in WWI, but his reputation as a great war poet has grown ever since.

In 1962, Benjamin Britten included the texts of several of Owen's poems in his War Requiem, adding further resonance to Owen's legacy. The War Requiem was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, England, which had been destroyed in World War II during a German firebombing raid. Britten, a lifelong pacifist, was given the freedom to do what he wished with the commission, and produced what many (myself included) feel is one of the greatest anti-war artworks of the 20th C. Perhaps of all time.

I have been to the restored Coventry Cathedral. I was there in 1978. I also climbed what's left of the belltower from the original 14th C. cathedral, one of the saddest ruins I have ever visited. I was visiting with the Michigan Men's Glee Club; we were on a European tour that summer. At many of the great cathedrals of Europe, when we were touring as a group, we often asked the local rector or deacon if we might sing in their beautiful spaces. And so we sang two spirituals in Coventry Cathedral. I remember working hard not to cry while performing "Deep River," one of my favorite spirituals. The cathedral was mostly empty, and the music rang through it—it is a "tuned" space, very beautiful but also designed for sound. There was a deep silence afterwards. We were all moved, and the deacon of the cathedral was effusive in his appreciation.

Coventry Cathedral to me symbolizes how we come back to life despite death, destruction, and all the horrors of war and its aftermath. It is a cathedral of Peace, one of those rare places that memorialize human peace, rather than human wars, scattered around the world. Most such places are made by local peoples, a small group or a single artisan; war memorials tend to be more famous than peace memorials; the latter are all magical places. Listening to Britten's 1963 recording of his War Requiem, it is easy for me to hear what the music must have sounded like at its premiere in the cathedral, and how it must have affected the audience. The ending of the closing "Libera Me" movement, with its dialogue for tenor and baritone acting out the two voices in Owen's "Strange Meeting," has always been particularly moving. The two soloists braid together the last line of the poem, saying it to each other, and to us, "Let us sleep now. . . ."

On this day, when we remember all of those have served in all of our various wars, I am reminded of how important it is to also remember the peace.

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Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
—Wilfred Owen

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All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.
—Wilfred Owen

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Autumnal
by Wilfred Owen

If it be very strange and sorrowful
To scent the first night-frost in autumntide;
If on the moaning eve when Summer died
Men shuddered, awed to hear her burial;
And if the dissolution of one rose
(Whereof the future holds unnumbered store)
Engender human tears, —ah! how much more
Sorrows and suffers be whose sense foreknows
The weakening and the withering of a love,
The dying of a love that had been dear!
Who feels upon a hand, but late love-warm,
A hardness of indifference, like a glove;
And in the dead calm of a voice may hear
The menace of a drear and mighty storm.

The Poetry and Pity of War

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
—Wilfred Owen



Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that he too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

'I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .'
—Wilfred Owen

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All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.
—Wilfred Owen

Shared Experience and Personal Witness

How do you find your way into a poem written by an Other, by a person whose experience is one you do not or cannot share? How do you legitimately critique such a poetry? Can we be critical of another person's experience, if it cast in the form of poetry or art?

Aaron Baker, in his review of Brian Turner's Here, Bullet, raises the question as follows:

Any poetry clearly based on a writer’s personal experiences (and not just when those experiences are of war), adopts an aura of authenticity that readers can find coercive. It’s not uncommon to see poets who use “experience” as a cudgel of authority to beat down a reader’s resistance. When it comes to stories or poems about war, or others forms of trauma, there is always a nagging sense that we ought to shut up and just listen to those writers who have, in the vernacular, “been through the shit.” But at the same time, we can’t help but remain on guard against the attempts to self-justify and self-mythologize to which such work is especially prone. And all of this happens before we can even begin evaluating poems on the basis of their technical achievement—to commence weighing and measuring somebody’s extreme real-life crises in a way that some might find (not always unreasonably) inappropriate if not downright indecent.

How does one balance the credibility of the eyewitness against the problems of solipsism and the confessional personality-ego "I" in poetry?

Baker continues, about Turner's collection: At the same, the less successful poems in the collection are those in which there is no first-person speaker at the center. The instinct to decenter the subjective I, to sympathetically enter into the experiences of others, is admirable, but the poems which do this usually seem cursory and ill-suited to the minimalistic, perceptually immediate approach that serves Turner better elsewhere. [Such] Poems . . . have documentary interest, but they could just as well have been written by anybody who had heard the same stories.

Towards the end of his review, Baker provides one answer: Because war is a societal, communal event, does the voice of a soldier actually command greater deference than anyone else’s? Does having “been there” give a poet’s work additional weight? The question of deference is probably the wrong one to ask. Regardless of any single poet's experiences or imaginings, poems are entities with lives and careers of their own and will flourish or fail according to terms separate (if not wholly independent of) a poet’s biography.

Poems, like all artworks, have to live or die on their own merits. In parallel, a poet's varying bodies of work must also live or die on their own merits; some may be stronger than others. It's not always admitted, but writers do have areas where they are stronger than in other areas.

It's exactly the experience-factor that is often used to justify poetic "street cred" in the hip-hop and poetry Slam scenes (not that those are distinct scenes any more), and also used by poets of victimology, woundology, and the worst extremes of political correctness, to deflect all criticism before it can start: "You can't criticize my writing becuase you haven't been through what I've been through!" That sort of thing. (I don't get a sense that Brian Turner is doing that, from reading his poems cited in Baker's review; but who knows?)

However, the aura of authenticity only works, I think, if the writing is good writing. Otherwise, it's pretty blatant that bad writing is given a pass because it's highly topical or because it's "not okay." If you don't want to get called racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., you generally have to keep your mouth shut rather than point out that the poem is just a bad poem. The problem is, as usual, one of ego, rather than one of literary merit.

This is a familiar fallacy: confusing the poet with the poem. The rejection of critique of the poem relies upon the poem being identifying with poet, so that all critique of the art becomes an insult to the artist.

The autobiographical fallacy is also why writers get accused of lying when it's discovered that they haven't actually had the life-experience they claimed to have had in their writings. As if writing was ever not lying, on some level. All writing is fiction, to some extent, because it's filtered through an individual's personal perspective, experience, viewpoint, etc. Even the literature of witness has passed through the creative process: readers tend to forget that journalism is also creative-writing, not the direct transmission of thought. Factual memory, as any cognitive psychologist or experienced trial-lawyer will tell you, is notoriously imprecise and self-serving.

One of the purposes of collective memory is so that the tribe can remember its own myths; nonetheless, there is always room for variance. Yet an individual take on an event, whether or not it agrees with the collectivized fiction of cultural myth, whether it affirms or disrupts consensus reality, is a fiction. We could perhaps think of fictions as atomic units, as assembling blocks that generate cultural myth, cultural trope and pattern, and even dogma, doctrine, and belief-system. As the anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out: every tradition is an invented tradition. We could call the historical era in which we live our "ficton," a word coined by SF writer Spider Robinson for just that purpose.

The principal problem with excluding the reader from any possibility of being able to critique, because you have not shared the writer's experience, is that this exclusion leads ultimately to solipsism: If you claim exclusivity of experience—only women should write about women, only blacks should write about blacks, only gay poets can write about being gay, only X can write about X, only (ex-)soldiers can write war poetry—you reduce your audience to a purist group of pure insiders, you reduce your audience to only cliquish in-group writers, and ultimately you reduce your audience to you yourself alone. (The rhetoric of much post-modern poetry criticism seems to want to do just this—and then complains about the lack of an audience. But I digress.) And where is the literary-critical discourse in such solipsism? Usually, there is none, nor can there be any. Discourse is simply shut down.

Most war poetry is similar to most political (politicized) poetry, in that it tends to rely on generalities and abstractions, rather than on the specific and evocatively personal—or, as war veteran Ernest Hermingway once quipped, Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Still, war poetry, as I have often read it, seems more innately personal than most political poetry. It tends to be more embodied and more visceral than political poetry, which is words about ideas, not words about experiences. Anti-war poetry is often political poetry, but war poetry written by veterans of war, or by soldiers in the field, has a different tone than anti-war poetry written by folks who object to war but have never held a weapon or fought in a battle. Some of the most visceral anti-war poetry I have ever read is that written by veterans; for example, Michael Casey's small book of poems, Obscenities, which was about the Vietnam war.

The question of coercion towards the reader is an interesting question—but isn't any compelling, absorbing reading experience therefore coercive in the sense that it envelopes the reader into a full experience evoked by the poem? Isn't any poem that recreates an experience in the reader so that they become completely immersed in the poem—isn't that coercive? It is, in the purely technical sense. The issue is really one of consent.

I think we should clarify the use of the word "coercive," perhaps by rephrasing it as non-consensually coercive, to restrict this connotation to those poems that try to force the reader into believing a viewpoint stipulated by the poem (and maybe by the poet, but not necessarily). Poems that argue political or religious points, poems that tell me what to think—I find these sorts of poems far more coercive than Brian Turner's poems of wartime experiences, in that I feel he invites me viscerally into his experience. Invites me in, rather than forces it on me. He entices, and I consent. This is possibly the difference between restraint and subtlety in poetry versus the heavy-handed use of rhetoric to force (ideological) agreement. The latter is definitely coercive; the former is perhaps what we have discussed before as "poetic embodiment:" inviting the reader to re-experience what the poem evokes as an experience. This allows the reader to consent of their own free will to enter the viewpoint of the poem. To my mind, enticement and invitation go much further, in activist poetry, than do preaching and ideology. By bringing the reader into the experience of the poem, they are free to make up their own minds about the politics of the poem; this, in a nutshell, is "show" versus "tell" in poetry.

I think it takes imagination to read these war poems, too. (In my opinion, baker fails to use his imagination at the end of the review, where he misses the title poem's correlations between the body's gastro-intestinal system and the barrel, body, and action of a bullet leaving a rifle.) They are laced with images that make powerful metaphors.

In the end Baker makes the argument that Turner's book, while containing good poems, and while serving as an effective book of witness, does not break new literary ground, stylistically or technically. Well, maybe that's an understandable and justifiable response to the overzealous hype around the book and the poet; one can only imagine the Pentagon's propaganda machine foaming at their orifices about having a genuine war-hero poet to present. (For the record, my sense is that Turner is complicit in none of that.) But it seems pretty Ivory Tower to demand that a book of war poems must always contain poetic technical innovation on the same level as Wilfred Owen's, et al. I'm not sure that's a valid criticism, even if one does assume that war poetry does drive poetic and literary change. Even though Owen's et al. poetic work did drive some of the changes of Modernism in literature, it's probably not fair to expect any contemporary book of poetry to have the same impact—partly because the world of the arts is not as monolithic as it was a century ago, and partly because war itself has changed so much, technically and stylistically, over the past century. I've read numerous comments along the lines that post-modern warfare is more like a video game, with less direct contact with the enemy (as happens in Owen's well-known poem Strange Meeting). It may therefore be an unfair comparison to force Turner's book into having the same impact on litetature as did Owens'. Only time will tell, on that front. The problem with second-guessing the verdict of history is that history happens after you're dead and gone, usually.

Where Owen and Turner do share common ground as poets can be found in Owens' famous statement: My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. A reader of imagination, whether or not they are a war veteran, can I think participate, as witness, to both the pity and the poetry.

Protest & Political Poetry

Politically motivated? Pissed off at the bad conditions of the world? Empathy for the sufferers, for the mothers of the disappeared? Concerned about social justice? Worried about those worse off than yourself?

Write a poem about it!

But wait: what happened to the tradition of protest music, protest song, political singer-songwriters? that whole generation from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, to the present? (Topic for another time: Industrial music is the new protest music: it addresses the same concerns and issues, while most of the singer/songwriters these day seem to be less political, more self-concerned; the same way the personal confessional lyric has come to dominate poetry.)

Still: write a poem, and speak your mind!

But wait: protest poetry isn't dead, not really. It never was. You could check out Poets Against the War online (I even had a poem on their website, when they first started out) You could check out the entire history of Arabic poetry, which is full of such poetry. War and death and suffering in the desert lands are nothing new.

The chief problem with political poems is that they are ephemeral, and topical: they rarely outlast the events which they are talking about, and they rarely rise above the fray to endure past those times in which they are written. They might still be read in later centuries, but usually only as an artistic footnote reflecting upon the historical chapter. A commentary on social justice by a dead protester.

Sometimes the most political poetry that you can write is something that endures beyond the news of the hour, and lasts for a good long time. Walt Whitman, for example, comes to mind, with his Lincoln poems, his Civil War poems. When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd endures because it is not a short-term angry protest-poem, but because it is a poem of universal mourning, a meditation on death, and an evocation of eternity. Most political poems, especially protest-poems, fall far short of that mark, because they are written out of short-term outrage rather than deep, lasting, human experience.

Sometimes the most political poetry you can write is poetry that points out how the earth endures, despite everything horrible that humans do to it, and to each other.

Even otherwise excellent poets will often write crap, when they turn to political/protest (outrage) poetry. It's not the poets that are at fault, usually, rather the subject matter itself tends to make the poems topical and ephemeral. Even some of the more political poems by Browning, Whitman, Hopkins, Sandburg and Frost, just don't stand the test of time. Protest is a subject matter that inherently tends to be difficult to pull off as a good, enduring poem. It's as if many poets and readers think, given the subject of the poem, the craft of the poem ought to be given a free pass. This is very parallel to poets and readers thinking that therapy-poems ought to be given a free pass, as if a poet who writes about abuse or rape or torture should be soothed rather than critiqued.

It's almost as if the critical faculty goes out the window, when the subject matter is political. At the worst extreme, political correctness gone wrong tells us that we dare not offer critique of the Other's artistic product; although some of the reasons behind that viewpoint may be sound (acceptance of diversity, the innate fairness of wanting to meet the Other in an arena of understanding, whether the arena be one of gender, culture, sexuality, race, whatever), taken to its silliest extreme, that otherwise wise stance or equality and fairness denies any possibility of criticism on purely literary grounds.

It seems to me that many political poems seem to be written with ambition: that they will noticed, that their voices will be heard, that they will survive the judgment of history. Think about it: it takes a certain amount of necessary ego, even necessary hubris, to imagine that anything one writes as a personal protest poem will survive the test of time. Ego is not inherently bad in itself, but neither is ego-inflation the same as self-confidence. There's a difference between mature self-confidence and raw ambition.

The irony is that most political poems don't survive the judgment of history. Of course one is perfectly free to write whatever one wants to write, for whatever reason, whenever, however, whoever, whatever. One is also free to believe that one is in fact contributing to the course of history by using one's art to make comments about that historical course. One might be right, and one might be wrong. I don't think one can know, in advance.

When I look at the art and poems that have survived the test of time, whether or not their creators ever intended them to is almost irrelevant. You never know, and you can't. I'm not saying that poets should write with the test of time in mind. I'm not saying that at all. Poets shouldn't think about the judgment of history, when they are writing, because they can't do anything about it. Not only that, worrying about the verdict of history can skew up what one does write: it can lead to self-censorship, but it can also lead towards personal ego-fulfillment, rather than about serving one's muse.

I'm all for artists using their creative voices to persuade, cajole, entice, subvert, teach, learn, practice, invoke, etc. I am less sanguine about artists using their creative voices to castigate, lecture, vilify, control, harangue, etc.

Most political poetry, by its very nature, is pedantic, polemic, and lecturing. That is another good reason it tends to have a short shelf-life.

But if you wrote a poem about the redwoods that makes people think about them, love them, and want to conserve their habitat, that might become an enduring political/social poem. Perhaps more enduring than a topical political poem, because the environment is a bigger, more enduring issue itself. There can be a ripple effect: if you photographed or painted them in all kinds of light and weather, your artwork might touch a few who are new to wanting to save them; the same could happen with a poetry of natural existence, such as Robinson Jeffers'.

I think that's how real, enduring change happens. I don't think real political change happens from the top down, but from the bottom up. It can be slow, and apparently indirect, but when you change someone's ideas about their place in the universe, you have changed their lives, and their zeitgeist, and their politics. I think that's far more enduring than who's President right now, or who's in Congress. It's the Native American idea of stewarding the earth so that it will still be there to be lovingly inhabited by the seventh generation. I think art can make a difference in this particular arena of political action, in a way that the topically-political cannot. Rather, the topical, Washington D.C. Beltway-level of the political status quo is what I think poetry can have no impact on, because those people in D.C. don't read poetry anyway, or really care about the arts, or think they mean anything.

The philosophy of change and action at the grass-roots level is something the D.C. insiders always discount, and underestimate. (It's one reason I can never take them very seriously.) Grass-roots action is the philosophy behind eco-friendly publishers such as Sierra Club Books; to be honest, those earlier books, especially under David Brower's editorship, really did make a difference to a lot of people, and helped ignite the conservation movement, influencing such legislation as the Clean Air Act. (Which Nixon signed into law, one might recall.) I collect old Sierra Club editions, and treasure them. I have several books of photos by Elliott Porter, a great nature photographer; I also have been reading Not Man Apart, which is a book of photos accompanying the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It's an excellent edition, and in some ways a better introduction to his occasionally challenging poetry, than are his own purely poetry books.

Art about conservation is inherently more enduring than art about war or politics, because the earth is more enduring than nations. Stewardship of the earth is an ethical value I think worth promoting, and is more likely to effect long-term political change, from the grass-roots, than the growing body poems about the current war—and there have always been poems about the current war, because there has always been a current war.

I should point out at this juncture that there is often a conflation between "war poetry" and "political poetry," which is ultimately misleading. War poetry is poetry about war, or against war, or about the horror of war. One keeps returning to Wilfred Owen's famous statement, My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. His poems are about individual, specific moments, with specific characters and specific moments. They are true to human experience, specific rather than general, reportorial rather than ideological. That's why they're memorable poems. They're not vague philosophical generalities, they're not abstract, they're specific. Strange Meeting, one of his masterpieces, is all about how the universal emerges from the specific:

. . . 'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. . . .

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . .'

Generalities are not what make a poem universal and enduring. Many poets will likely agree that what makes poems endure is the way they evoke the personal and the specific in the reader, almost somatically or empathically, if you will. The main problem with political poetry, again, is the tendency to make Grand Philosophical Statements—most of which tend to be familiar to the point of being clichés, abstract to the point of being disembodied, ideological rather than ethical, ineffective simply because they are clichés. Politicians use soundbytes to distill their messages—poets can do much more than that, and probably ought to at least make an attempt.

War poetry is as Owen indicates: it's reportorial, it's about pity, and it's often a response to the experience, and the horror. (Keith Douglas, Steve Murphy, Michael Casey, other "war poets," most of them vets exemplify this. Some of them even survived.)

Political protest poetry, I have noticed over many years, is not often written by veterans; it is often written by those on the home front. (There's no judgment here, just an observation.) Political protest poetry, which is what most think of as "political poetry," is often about disagreeing with those in political power at the moment: but it often reads as a screed, a diatribe, a broadsheet, a polemic, a sermon, a heckling, and not much as poetry. That's fine, that's its purpose. (If you assume that I'm saying that all political protest anti-war poetry is a priori bad and wrong, go back and read what I said again: I said, it's often not very good, and it often fails to endure past the topical moment.) The purpose of screed, diatribe, protest, polemic, and propaganda is to change peoples' minds, change their opinions so that they agree with your own. Convince them of the truth of your own viewpoint. Yelling at them only makes them clamp down and ossify their opinions. If you really want to change someone's mind, cajole them, entice them, get them to walk a mile in someone else's shoes—get them to think of something outside their usual circle of awareness, get them to appreciate the viewpoints held by the Other. One of the best ways to do this is through a poetry of embodiment—rather than a poetry of ideas.

Again, I refer the reader to Robinson Jeffers; he embodies both aspects of this issue, in different poems. His best poems succeed because they are specific, evocative, full of fresh imagery; they convince one to love and care for the earth simply by making us fall in love with it all over again. His worst poems, among them his most overtly political poems, and his most screed-like, tend to be built on ideas rather than images, abstractions rather than story, satiric devices (his much-maligned and often-misunderstood ideas about "Inhumanism," for example) rather than personal contact with the reader, and so forth. His work is an interesting case study of the best and the worst aspects of political/polemic poetry. Jeffers was a WWI veteran, and his experiences in that war colored the rest of his life and work.

Good poetry must be true to the experience it communicates. It needs to come from the heart, yes, but it needs to include the head and the hands in the mix: intellect, empathy, and artifice combined.