Poetry and the American; American war poetry

This is poetry and the American produced and recorded by KPFA in Berkeley California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters. This program is a discussion by Robert Iran Anthony Ostroff and Robert Bellew of American war poetry. The death of the ball turret gunner from my mother's sleep I fell into the state and I hunched in its belly telling my wet fur froze six miles from earth loose from its dream of life. I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighter when I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. This poem by Randall Darrelle announces the theme

or a subject of our discussion which is American war poetry. We're going to consider several American poems about war. This one by Mr. Darrelle death of the ball turret gunner. Another called range finding by Robert Frost. The U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull by Winfield Townley Scott the bloody sire by Robinson Jeffers and Air Force also by Mr. Darrelle. This poem by Darrelle called The Death of the ball turret gunner with which we've just heard seems to me an awfully good one with which to start any discussion of the modern American. Predicament with regard to war or the predicament I should say of the honest and acute sensibility with reference to war. I think in the first place it's the stream compression and the honesty that

you remark about and also its understatement in the midst of terror. The poem is abrupt. I think shocking and yet not to me in any respect melodramatic. The image of the fighter the person speaking the poem falling from his mother's sleep into the state remarks terribly the hopeless predicament of modern man with regard to war. I suppose this isn't really necessarily just the predicament of modern man this is the predicament of the common man or the ordinary individual through his throughout the whole history of war isn't it. And the loss of youth immediately Alling immediately into the state they are as of this I think there must have been a time in the history of war when. No matter what the overall moral imperative of the value of any human life none the less a man might say in a tribe grabbing a spear or rushing out to defend his his HOTMAN if you will. Must've not fell apart of a machine. He must not have felt as if he were retreating into a

womb again. But again I think that individual combat that's that's not the great organized enterprise of war that you refer. I think that's right and I think the significance here is that not only does he fall into the womb of the state but into a particular mechanical womb which is as this altar at the belly of a bomber the remoteness the anonymity. Yes as well as the immense increase in destruction I think has alienated the soldier as well as the poet soldier from a sense of participating and protecting community or culture not just personal heroism but that dedication to an idea. Yes so that in the end when he dies for his country Pro Patria Mori he. Does not die hero's death in a sense but the image is one of abortion of a birth which does not come to pass and we have all of these womb images of the mother's womb the womb of the state the womb of the plane

that blister or a ball yet in which he is. That's a terrifying equation isn't it that this ball turret is presented as the womb of the state. It may be worth three marking the something about the physical references here although these were well enough known during World War Two they seem it seems to be a knowledge somewhat forgotten or lost to succeeding generations now that ball turret bombers during the early days of the war at least was so small that only small men could be used as Gunners in them. And once a man was inserted into this tiny space if a shell did explode there. The results were quite horrifying and the remains were not recognizably human the only way to get them out was literally to wash them out with a hose it's a you know I wonder if having all this discussion if perhaps the best way to further eliminate the problem wouldn't be to read it again.

I think that's no doubt the best way to approach any problem. All right. The death of the ball turret gunner. From my mother's sleep I fell into the state and I hunched tenets of ballet till my wet fur froze six miles from Earth loosed from its dream of life. I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters and I died. They washed me out of the turret with a hose. It's interesting to move from the direct shock of that poem which is so explicit to something like frost range finding which we thought we'd discuss along with these other poems about war. Yes in a way. The Frost poem presents an antithesis in that we see nothing of the literal battle field lives. The scene is of course of the battlefield just as

the first shots are being fired and the guns are finding the range. And yet I find it in a way a more horrifying than the Jor-El pawn because where is the general the vision of war and the Jor-El is confined to the human dimension and the human dimension a particular time that is modern man in modern war. I find in the final images of the involvement of the spider and so forth a moral vision of the universe somehow engaged in a constant and larger worth of attrition does this scene. I think that if I had one I agree with all you say about the poem although I don't find it more horrifying than the droll poem. This depends of course entirely on oh I don't know either I do know that disparity between the bullet and the cobweb in the poem between a major and a certain kind of piece and this. Destruction Yes. Well I find very tense and I find it isn't just peace

in the poem. You have the beauty of the butterfly and the flower and then the little tiny shock of the flower being shot into. But then the spider introduces a totally different element into the natural world life to live. I have lines I think that for me makes fun more powerful in that and yet the way I think the earlier images personally to me are a bit softer a little but I think I would present a simpler contrast here. Now the peacefulness of nature but I think the deliberate and slow intrusion of the spider into that peaceful image is a deliberate one and gives a card to that rather soft texture. It's certainly a completely different. Yeah. Yes and a very interesting contrast to it. But you know I think some of our discussion here would be hard to follow for anyone unfamiliar with this poem by Robert Frost. So it might be a good idea to pause now and listen to the poem itself. Range finding.

The battle rent a cobweb diamond strong and cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so and still the bird revisited her young. A butterfly its fall had dispossessed a moment sought in air his flower of rest then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung on the bare upland pasture their heads spread or night twixt my one stocks a wheel of thread and straining cables wet with silver do a sudden passing bullet shook it dry. The Indwelling spider ran to greet the fly but finding nothing solemn lay with dro.

You know a point that has always struck me about this poem is that ending where what we see is the whole universe of all of nature engaged in this terrible warfare that somehow implied by this for me I don't know what how I bring this from outside the poem or whether Frost really wants me to think this. I feel that if insect life is engaged in this struggle and humanity engage in the same struggle there is pathetically and tragically no distinction between man and the very lowest forms of life. I wonder if this analogy outside of its poetic vitality is real for us. However if there isn't a distinction that moral one which we sometimes attempt to exercise as well that seems to be very much what Scott is concerned with in this next point we're going to take up the

U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull where we get a picture of one of our own soldiers or a sailor in this case one of our own military. One of the nation's heroes who went out to save us again in another great holocaust and finds for himself a souvenir of this great battle to take back home with him and the poem describes the finding the preparing of the skull of a Japanese soldier and finally his his. Relation to it. By the end of the poem I think it's a fearful fearful image that he presents here. Well I think it's a very fine pun. I'm afraid I'm less moved by the macabre quality in this than I am by the simple straightforward factual naturalism of the Frost poem. But I do find that it gathers a lot of power in the end and for me

principally from the moment he says from that line bottomless flush fleshless nameless yet and the sun offending each other and strange fascination there you get a polar scarlet. Yeah a whole other that's just where it passed out and I think there's really an excess of detail of the macabre sort which tends to cancel itself the early part of it. Well I may be quite true but don't you think that at least some of that. Oh what shall we call it foreground of the poem is necessary to those closing sections which are undoubtedly where the point does finally achieve itself fully. If I may let me read the poem and perhaps I can suggest some of what I find in those beginning sections. The U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull. Bowed bare bone Bad hair and ivory yellow

skull carried by a US two headed U.S. sailor who got it from a Japanese soldier killed while canal and the ever present war. Blue Jacket I mean age 20 in August strolled among the little bodies on the sand and hunted souvenirs. Teeth tags diary's boots but both are still hacked off this head and under Leopard 3 skin and peeled with a lifting knife the jaw and she looks bare the nose ripped off the black haired skull and gutted the dead eyes. To these thoughtful hollows a scarred but bloodless job unless it be said brains bleed. Then his ship underway dragged this aft in a net. Many days and nights the

cold bone tumbling beneath the foaming wake. We'd walk on and salt cut it rolling safe among fish and washed with Pacific till on a warm and level keel day hauled in held to the sun and the sailor back to a gun rest scrub the cured skull with life perfecting this knot foreign as he saw it for us. Death familiar. CAS. Body less fleshless nameless it done the sun offend each other in strange fascination as though one of the two were mocked but nothing is in this head. Or it fills with what another imagines as here where love and hate and the will to deal death or to kneel before it. Death and birth recorded orders without reason

bless. Still a child's morning remembered moonlight on Fujiyama all scoured out now by the keeper of the skull made elemental historic parent lists by a sailor boy who thinks of home voyages Laden. I will not say alas I did not know him at all. It's interesting that in our discussion of this before the reading we seemed to feel that there were some plausible or rather serious flaws in the poem in spite of its great interest in the statements it does make about the war situation and the attitudes it presents toward it and I think it's worth remarking

that American Poetry is extremely. What's the word I want spare or sparse in war poetry. That is I think we find very little good war poetry very little poetry dealing with war at all in America. We don't have our Wilfred Owen or a sick princess soon. The poets who talk of essentially war. Well I think that if you really look at the Great War poetry of the 20th the 20th century grew out of the First World War which had a peculiarly powerful impact on the people engaged in it because of that trench warfare which was so brutalizing. And I think illusion of glory has been man's great illusion with reference to the whole business of war through the ages and the illusion was finally shattered in World War 1. Of course we put the pieces together again and I see Hollywood's doing it now once more. We're beginning to find glorious looks at World War Two in current

films being calm and glorious one yet but works and so is the most ironic things are happening now though the only glory that came out of the First World War was in the Air Force sort of you know this is the new knighthood and the recent decision by the British that in the forseeable future they will have no air force but will depend entirely on guided missiles both often civilian defensive play is another mechanization of destruction I mean this is truly the end of any kind of heroic bravery isn't it I mean you do push the button and that's war and you know in that connection there is an interesting poem by Don Geiger called speed of sound we don't really have time to read the whole poem but. Apropos what you were talking about the Air Force as a kind of model of the new hero or providing a place for the new hero to appear in war that this is a poem in which he describes himself as a man who has been engaged in that in World War 2 as a

flyer. Meeting with a young friend who has just come into the Air Force and has been a fighter pilot in World War I well have to say UN War One and the war in Korea where now everything is super mechanical The Jets are faster than the speed of sound and so on. And the last bit of this is interesting the boy tells him about his experience flying in battle and the strange dissociation but also I think you have to know something about the background there in that war. The enemy wasn't so tremendously powerful. The hazards were not so great to our flyers as in World War 2. The deaths of course not nearly so numerous and the poem ends with it seems to me some very fine and moving lines. He's talked about the boy and then he talks about his own recollections of the war and then he says Ten years ago. Still the hooded airman come and I murmur in sleep of our barbarous Brotherhood silent sentinel images. They brave my memories were torn cities the gun it's all else

smugly drift. What can his stories of silent flights tell me of solid things that vanish in a magic smoke. What can I tell him I've abstracted faces that turn on darkening silence there and extinguish will. Eyes are beautiful and that that last is just beautiful ending I think one of the things I think we found in looking for poems was that it was hard to find an American poem that was a kind of glorification of war in any terms. I think in this poem by Jeffers though the bloody sire he did find some moral value in more. Yes I feel very strongly about it. The poem seems to me mocking at times and easily ironical but even worse it seems to me cynical and condescending and except as a kind of fatality. That violence as he says is the sire of all the world's values ignoring I think quite remarkably

the violence which destroys so many of the world's values and putting Helen in the halo of spear and Christ in the court of Caesar or Herod as if this were some kind of instinctive and inevitable development in history. And this seems to me rather like the poems on an exploding over Ethiopia like flowers. To be an indulgence and the cynicism of the of the worst sort. I know MS is not in that sense to me powerfully integrated. Yes I agree and there's a pretty terrible presumption in saying that Herod and Caesar formed terrible that's just not true. And the violence of the world's value and even all not even occasional. And it also I think is somewhat of a defense of the kind of

international bloodletting like those Malthusian theories of the 19th century you know that you related the starving world by war which at least we now have the courage nothing else to call genocide. Perhaps I could read Jeffers on the bloody side there. It is not bad. Let them let the guns and bark and the bombing planes be his prodigious blasphemies. It is not bad it is high time star violence is still the sire of all the worlds. Well but the waltz to just five in the fleet limbs of the antelope. But fear of the birds and the hunger with such

as the great goshawks and violence has been the side of the world that you who would remember Helen's face lacking the terrible halo of the spear who formed Christ. That Herod and Caesar the cruel and bloody victories of Caesar. Violence has been the sire of all the worlds that. Never we left them. Oh violence is not too old to be get you that. You know listening to the reading of that poem. I do feel that one has to resist the idea finally that comes out of it most vigorously.

And yet when he says who would remember Helen's face lacking the terrible halo of spears at at this point when he's talking of this in terms of all the world's values it seems to me a terrible indictment of humanity because their values are formed in terms of the sort of high drama. And but this seems to me that a problem that beauty value culture progress can only take their energy and their emphasis from the kind of destruction. Well this is curiously. At once fascistic nihilistic and communistic I mean it's a kind of there's a kind of strange core of thought here. You got all our things in there and well I did but I think I although I think I'd love to reside in a kind of core idea that somehow out of destruction good can come. And that means our means and ends our ends instead of seeing that there are no ends and there are no me. Yeah or simply continue out of

action. I feel that the irony of the tired one and the resigned one you know I find that beautiful line and that may be one reason that's interesting and you answer it in a fragment from this poem of Carl Shapiro who has also written a good deal of war poetry I think he was the first came really to national attention with his war poems. I recall a few lines out of one of his long poems called Elegy for a dead soldier. He said he's talking about this boy and says this worthy flesh this boy laid in a coffin and reviewed. Who has not wrapped himself in the same flag heard the light fall of dirt his wounds still fresh felt his eyes closed and heard the distant brag of the last volley of humanity at last line the distant brag of the last volley of humanity spine chilling one I think. And it answers this terrible proposal of Jeffers in that poem of his I think very directly I think the first Darrelle man says it and

I think the last poem the Eighth Air Force says that perhaps or most beautiful and compassionate but humane center of the terrible ambivalence. Well I think what the juror this ate there for us does indeed is to make the more moral grasp of the bloody sire appear childlike and petulant that this is the Eighth Air Force in this in its moral grasp is attempting to see a whole or more whole humanity then and then the bloody syre. I wanted to confess as really the man and not the machine or the weapon or the war. Only in that terrible expedient. And disastrous moment that the acceptance of it. Yes I think it's in this poem's focus on man from Inside Man situation not from outside as in the case of the Jeffers poem. That's really

important. What we see here is a man preserving his essential humanity in the fact of his moral awareness of his situation despite the desperate nature of that situation. And this is what gives upon as you suggest Bob it's great moving force. Of course there's a great deal we might say about this poem but I think finally it's ironies and poignancy if I may use that term make themselves felt even on first hearing and before we close this conversation with a reading of this last point I'd like to mention one thing that's been troubling me since our discussion is to be broadcast I'm afraid we may have seen much concern with some of these points failures as well as their successes. And so I think it's important to remark that behind these natural critical interests is an essential interest which celebrates all of these Bowen's for their ultimate successes. Unfortunately we're all agreed on Randall Jor-El's Air Force. And certainly it is a fitting poem on which to end this discussion of

American war poetry. Eighth Air Force if in an odd angle of the heart when a puppy laps the water from a can of flowers and the drunk Sergeant shaving whistles o parodies of shall I say that man is not as men have said a wolf to man. The other murderers troop in yawning. Three of them play pitch. One sleeps and one lies counting missions lies there sweating till even his heart needs one one one. Murderous still this is how it's done. This is a war.

But since these play before they die like puppies with a puppy since a man I did as DS have done but did not die. I will content the people as I can and give up these to them. Behold the man. I have suffered in a dream because of him many things. For this last Savior man I have lied as I lie. But what is lying. Men wash their hands and blood as best they can. I find no fault in this. Jus man.

Poetry and the American was produced and recorded by station KPFA in Berkeley under a grant from the educational television and radio center and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the NYU Radio Network.