What is the relevance of war resistance poetry? Culling hundreds of sources, poet Philip Metres examines the social and cultural importance of this form of wartime expression in America and its unique niche in the literary world.
"They have made war till we were dead from weeping."
The goddess Iris to Helen, The Iliad
In "Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941," English professor and poet Philip Metres explicates how war resistance poetry on America’s homefront in war time has made historically discernible the moral ambiguities of war and its detriment upon society at large. As such, Metres rightly credits the contribution of both the American soldier-poet’s first person witness as well as the poetry of war’s other tragic victims, including all “who live at the end of the missile trajectory.”
What is the relevance of war resistance poetry? Situated amid what has been known loosely as the peace movement, it contributes to the society’s broader pattern of literary and journalistic expression, deconstructing the official narrative of our wartime presidential administrations to offer a “collective subjectivity other than the nation-state,” with its potential of state-sanctioned patriotic lyric. Moreover, “No other literary genre has been as conducive a performative, immediate, and often homespun symbolic” medium. It thus becomes poetry not only of published anthologies, but of the street and the subway as well. As such, Metres clarifies how the poetry of the past is useful as “a vital resource for social change.”
In Part I, Metres covers the wartime internment and poetic activities of major American poets Robert Lowell, William Stafford, and William Everson – all conscientious objectors during World War II. These men used their poetry to extend ethical and artistic principles of the suffering individual, and to give voice and expression beyond dissidents as they worked out their resistance to war “in their own idiosyncratic ways.” The focus of Part II is the Vietnam War era, and Metres redresses the belief that antiwar poetry produced during that era was somehow non-memorable in the life of the literary canon. On the contrary, it confronted “the increasingly technological and bureaucratic formation of modern war itself,” as poetry readings made concrete the abstract and bureaucratic language of the U.S. government and military.
Moving into our current era, Part III opens with the Gulf War, and of special interest to current readers is Metres’ discussion of book-length poems on that conflict, especially Barrett Watten’s odd but telling work, "Bad History." Separate chapters on the war resistance contributions of poets Denise Levertov (1923-1997) and June Jordan (1936-2002) enhance Metres’ thesis, arcing the timeline between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Today’s readers will take special note of Metres’ study of post-911 poetry of grief and conspiracy, writing which continues apace today. In 2003 alone, the Iraq War saw the publication of four war resistance anthologies. Organizations such as Poets Against War were born, giving common Americans a wide venue of war resistance.
To be maximally effective, war resistance poems should be joined, when and where possible, to “placard writing, media press releases, writing to government officials, and song writing,” along with various modes of theatrical expressions. War resistance poetry is, above all, a populist movement. The current reviewer concurs with the assessment that the most vital purpose of the poetry is its potential for rendering “the poem as an instant memorial against the hegemonic version of a clean war.”
Metres culled hundreds of sources and includes excerpts of dozens of poems that illustrate that war resistance poetry served, and serves, American society by producing “counternarratives, images, and linguistic play in ways that created afterimages as powerful as the photographs that would begin to alter public opinion” about the morality of war.
Metres does not foster an uncritical acceptance of all war resistance poetry; for some of it “seems too often shrill and veers into a circular address.” Too much of it is bland or clichéd polemic, better suited to being letters to editors than inscribed as poetry. In the end, Metres goes far beyond giving us a chronology and description of America’s war resistance poetry; rather, his work proves an incisive cultural critique. This book is highly recommended not only to those interested in poetry but also to students of literary and sociological studies of war and peace.
Jeffrey C. Alfier, a Southwest regionalist poet, divides his time between Tucson and Germany. In 2006, he received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. In 2005 he won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. A former Air Force officer, he has also served as a functional analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, and once taught history as an adjunct faculty member with City College of Chicago’s European Division. A member of Poets Against War, he has been reviewing books of poetry for several years. His first chapbook, "Strangers Within the Gate" (2005), was published by The Moon Publishing and Printing, based in Tucson.
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