Brian Turner, #2

So Brian Turner came to visit our humble campus today and it was good day. First, and most important for me, a few of my journalism students were able to sit down with Turner before his reading and ask questions about his experiences in Iraq, and of course, about his volume of poems Here, Bullet. The meeting took place in my office, and I tried to record all of it on my MAC for a podcast later on (hopefully via Itunes university), but the results were mixed at best. Disparate audio levels, hissing on the recording, etc. It’s rough but workable. But this is another story.

I’ve never had the chance to sit down with a writer like Turner, and I appreciated his generous responses to all questions and his efforts to connect with my students beyond his own work. So thanks.

A bit later, Turner read the poems listed here in our theatre, with a sense of purpose that sought to heighten the drama of those events. He even managed to call out my journalism students for taking notes, saying jokingly that the pressure was on “to be eloquent.” If you find your way to this page (and we know you get around on the net), Brian, please know they had an assignment due the next class after your visit. The poems…

1. Here, Bullet

Without a word of introduction, he jumped in to this poem, later saying it was mostly bravado masking fear.

2. What Every Soldier Should Know

This youtube vid has high production value.

3. Baghdad Zoo
4. Katyusha Rockets

Scroll down a little for the poem…The painting is beautiful, too.

5. 2000 lbs.

A favorite of mine in this volume, and a few of my students. They were happy he chose to read this, especially after he talked about it in our interview. One of the students said, “it breaks my heart every time I read it.” Can’t find a reading on the net, though.

6. Eulogy

Scroll down for poem…

7. Sadiq

A link to the poem…except that’s not Turner reading.

8. An unnamed poem (I’ll ask my students and fill this in later).

And for the last few minutes, he answered questions from the audience, and one of those was a student of mine. I confess: I required them to come with questions and offered extra credit if they asked one in public. It’s a little silly, but what the hell.

So for my working link that I require of my students, check out Turner’s recent work online at the New York Times Homefires blog. It’s an excellent companion to Here, Bullet.

Brian Turner

I’m taking a one post break from the work of this blog and I’m joining my students in a post about Brian Turner. He’s an Iraq war veteran and author of a volume of poems called Here, Bullet and he’s set to visit our campus this week. I read it over the summer at the beach of all places, and was not prepared for all the jabs, the alternating body blows, and round house knock out the volume delivers. In short, if I’d been wearing socks, they would have been knocked off.

Some notables from the volume include Sadiq, a meditation on…killing, and 2000 lbs. which I hope he reads when he comes to campus, as it invokes a kind of Whitman cataloging quality that probes at the edges of the conflict in unexpected ways. I mean, how can a reader not be moved by the image of an old woman near the end of her life, who says “…To have your heart broken one last time / before dying, to kiss a child given sight / of a way of life he could never live? It’s impossible, / this isn’t the way we die.” It’s unexpected, and brings into focus the cost of it all.

So here’s my working link (as I require my students to have). It comes from a reading at a college in Maine where Turner gives background on the origins of The Hurt Locker. He details a conversation he had with another solider about people trying to kill them, and the frustration in not knowing where they were to stop them.

“We just need to put them in the hurt locker,” he said.

Carentan O Carentan (1949)

For those who recall Episode 3 of Band of Brothers…

Louis Simpson gives us a glimpse of fighting that pairs the pastoral with a death scene. It’s an unusual pairing, with a reserved tone all through the poem, even when the action shifts. Think about any war movie you’ve ever seen and there is always that sudden, jarring moment when innocence is lost and that new reality sets in. That shift is seamless here, especially toward the end.

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.

This was the shining green canal
Where we came two by two
Walking at combat-interval.
Such trees we never knew.

Here at the start, we see a connection to the known (romance) and new experience, and in the following stanza, we get our first inkling of trouble with this:

The day was early June, the ground
Was soft and bright with dew.
Far away the guns did sound,
But here the sky was blue.

Guns in the distance…blue sky. Sounds decidedly more like a walk in the park. The poem continues with some additional background concerning the invasion: “ships together spoke / to towns we could not see.” This, it seems, is a metaphor I didn’t catch initially, where “speaking” might stand of shell fire.

But Simpson is building toward something. The action then shifts…

The watchers in their leopard suits
Waited till it was time,
And aimed between the belt and boot
And let the barrel climb.

I must lie down at once, there is
A hammer at my knee.
And call it death or cowardice,
Don’t count again on me.

So then we have gun fire and the speaker is down. And then this part…it’s the even handed tone, the same as in previous stanzas that really stands out for me. It’s nothing but calm.

Tell me, Master-Sergeant,
The way to turn and shoot.
But the Sergeant’s silent
That taught me how to do it.

O Captain, show us quickly
Our place upon the map.
But the Captain’s sickly
And taking a long nap.

Lieutenant, what’s my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too’s a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.

Two other metaphors here: death as a “tune” and death as a “nap.” And the last stanza, where this pastoral becomes a lament…Also, stanza breaks at “O Captain” and “Lieutenant” (some wordpress formatting issues I can’t fix…)

Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do.

I’ve read this a few times over the years, but never really considered it a coming of age poem, but it is. In other poems, the subject might be about sex or driving a car, or some other kind of youthful epiphany. But here that epiphany is _the moment_ that changes everything, where the speaker finally understand the nature of it all.

More about the author here. The complete text of the poem is here.

Randall Jarrell

In the 102 class I teach (comp and lit), I have a section of “conflict” poems. For me, it’s not enough to include all the old standards about love or death, identity, or the many in that fat anthology about animals. That’s too easy. “Conflict” types of poems are important to read as well. Among them…

* Hardy: The Man He Killed
* Owen: Dulce et Decorum est
* Reed: Naming of Parts

There are others, of course, that show different things, but mostly I want my students to get a close up look at _irony_. And the war poets do this well. But the one poem that most students say is the most dramatic of the bunch (and it’s the shortest), is Randell Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner.” Here it is:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Above all, I want my students to see what a poet can do with so little, yet expand significantly on such a terrible thing so simply and with such power. Most of my students are surprised to learn that many of the poems in this section of the course go back to WWI. Most say they liked the other poem sections of the course better, but the “conflict” section was important to see as well. I feel the same way most days, but sometimes the best poetry is about the most uncomfortable things.