Poetry And Vietnam Essay Research Paper John

Poetry And Vietnam Essay, Research Paper

John Clark Pratt

Poetry that documents the attitudes toward the Vietnam War–as

well as the origins, development, and conduct of the war–is both pervasive and

significant. Although only a few poems by French writers reflect that country’s

involvement, the Vietnamese tradition of poetic expression produced a large body of work,

both personal and political, written by soldiers and civilians of the Democratic Republic

of Vietnam (DRV) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Unfortunately, except for the efforts

of American poets John Balaban, Yusef Komunyakka, Kevin Bowen, and Bruce Weigl, most of

these poems are not available in translation. Only the Vietnamese expatriate Th.ch Nh.t

Hanh published a significant collection in English. His The Cry of Vietnam (1968)

contains 15 poems about the devastation of war and the horrors inflicted by all sides.

Also a number of poems by Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao refugee poets appeared in the

numerous volumes of the Vi.t Nam Forum Series and the Lac-Vi.t Series published after

1983 by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. In Vi.t Nam Forum 14

(1994), for instance, Vi.t Thanh Nguy.n, then a Ph.D. candidate at

the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a moving poem about a burning ash heap

that he was "yearning to find a clue/ in the ash to my people,/ severed from me with

the finality of a butcher’s cleaver."

More than any other group, however, American poets, both veterans and nonveterans, in

thousands of poems written during and after the war best chronicled the changing, often

conflicting attitudes and experiences of men and women fighting in Southeast Asia.

Their poetry ranges from often bawdy ballads sung by American fighter pilots, collected

in Joseph E Tuso’s Singing the Vietnam Blues (1990), and the short, sometimes

humorous verses published in publications such as the satiric Grunt magazine or the

Pacific Stars and Stripes, to immensely ambitious and moving works that rank with

the best poetry of the age. Poetry about Vietnam falls into three general categories:

political protest poems, usually written by established poets who had not been to Vietnam;

verse novels, in which chronologically linked poems depict one person’s experiences

at war; and the hundreds of usually short, personal lyrics that present individual scenes,

character sketches, or events.

The first significant protest volume was A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War (1966),

edited by Robert Bly and David Ray. The next year, Walter Lowenfels edited the anthology Where

Is Vietnam., in which the 87 contributing poets include James Dickey, Lawrence

Ferlinghetti, and Denise Levertov. Two more collections followed: Out of the Shadow of

War (1968) and Poetry against the War (1972). Although a few poems are set in

Southeast Asia, most of the works presented in these anthologies reflect the writers’

attitudes to U.S. involvement in Vietnam by references to the political scene, the war as

seen on TV or reported in the newspapers, and to antiwar themes in general. These

anthologies and the numerous individual poems that were published served to define and

sustain the general intellectual opposition to the war.

Of the verse novels, three stand out: Vietnam Simply (1967) by Dick Shea, How

Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam (1972) by McAvoy Layne, and Interrogations (1990)

by Leroy Quintana. In discursive, often sardonic selections, Shea presents the

observations of a Navy lieutenant about the entrance of U.S. Marines into the war and

other scenes and events in 1965 Vietnam. By means of short, staccato verses, Laynes book

traces a Marine recruit (who bears the name of the legendary American war hero) through

basic training and combat, then becomes allegorically fanciful as "Audie is captured

by the Vi.t C.ng and holds telephone conversations from H. N.i with the president of

the United States, yet still hums "The Theme from Marlboro Country." Quintana,

the only Hispanic veteran to publish a major collection of poetry, shows how a young army

draftee experiences training, combat, and the aftermath of the war, where even "on

city streets, in restaurants, bars" he "still walk[s] the jungle in

camouflage," his "M-16 mind still on recon patrol." Each of these verse

novels presents young men whose innocent acceptance changes to experienced disillusion

about the American presence in Vietnam.

This subject–the movement from innocence to experience–was perhaps the most universal

theme explored by American poets, most of whom served in Vietnam, either in the military

or as conscientious objectors. Many of them interrupted their college educations to go to

war, then returned to earn graduate degrees in various writing programs and teach in

universities. Before the 1975 fall of S.i G.n, many poet-veterans join

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