Poetry dishonors our fallen servicemen

So, it’s Memorial Day next Monday, May 31, and in my quest to find the poetry in everything, I started thinking about the relation between poetic dialogue and remembering the American war dead.
Yeah, I know, too much time on my hands.
Anyway, since it’s pretty much a truism that everything has had poetry written about it, it seemed at first blush like a simple task: find good poetry dedicated to Memorial Day. As it turns out, “good” is the key word in that sentence.
Because while there are reams of poems about dead soldiers – no I mean thousands, hundreds of thousands, likely more poems about fallen soldiers than actual fallen soldiers – it turns out that painfully few are actually worthy of the sacrifice those soldiers made.
Before we get into the pitiful details, a history lesson. Memorial Day is really a holiday custom made for poetry. Early incarnations of Memorial Day centered around post-civil war Decoration Day, honoring Union dead. The name was changed in the 1880s to Memorial Day to make it more palatable to the South, but it didn’t become common until after World War II. In fact, despite that fact that it seems like Memorial Day has been around forever, it was only in 1967 that it became official.
I put the call out to two friends steeped in poetic language and university and asked them if they could unearth some Memorial Day poetry worthy of mention. From one, I got a simple message, nothing that wasn’t over-the-top or depressing. The other, a professor in Michigan, reminded me of a whole host of early American memorial poetry. Whitman in particular wrote eloquently about the Civil War, most famously in “O Captain! My Captain.” Melville wrote some decent lines and Robert Lowell.
But the vast majority of Memorial Day poetry sounds like this, from William Henry Clay Dodson:
“And in this sunny land of ours, / Now sleeping side by side, / The Union Blue and Southern Gray / Lie buried side by side.”
Here’s another verse from “Freedom Is Not Free” by Kelly Strong:
“I heard the sound of taps one night, / When everything was still / I listened to the bugler play / And felt a sudden chill.”
It’s as we need simplistic patriotism to lessen the terrible cost of celebrating such terrible things: not the sacrifice of soldiers but the fact that they had to be sacrificed at all. Those early poets came straight at the cost of war, the honor of the dead and gallantry of the sacrifice. Now, it’s just crass platitudes and blind flag waving.
Evoking 911 is a cheap substitute for actual dedication.
But maybe that’s just the nature of poetry in relation to our modern Memorial Day – you know the weekend that starts summer, which the Indy 500 is run over, that used cars and mattresses are sold. Ugh. Maybe we deserve the poetry we get. The soldiers who died so that we could celebrate this day, however, certainly deserve better.

On Purpose, Nick Laird, Norton, 2010, 65 pages

Nick Laird’s poetry is like a Robert Parker novel: spare and raw, but dignified. Like an old boxer who still has a wicked right. On Purpose is fast and merciless. It works, mostly on adrenaline, and that’s ok.
In “Hunting is a Hole Occupation” the Irish poet offers a flurry of images from squatting toads to being beaten in the forest and finishes his machine gun diatribe with, “I’ve come alone and naked, aching / liking my hands after eating, waiting / to learn if God exists, I hate him.” Read that out loud and listen to the matching of aching and waiting. It’s perfect timing.
Most of this slim volume works at that level with short, powerful punched that the reader rarely see coming. Sometimes, it backfires, but mostly the punches land.
B+

In defence of the worst poem ever written

It’s the Plan Nine From Outer Space of the poetry world. Remember that Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny it could never be told for fear of harming the listener? This poem is like that.
It’s a poem (and a poet) that few actually know, but nearly everyone has heard some variation, some parody or song or take on it.
It’s Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, and I’m here to tell you that it is the worst poem ever written. But that doesn’t mean Kilmer was the worst poet. Nor does it mean we should forget it. In fact, it’s important to remember.
First, it’s not just me saying it’s the worst. It really is the worst. It is held up in popular culture and academia as the most over sentimental, most archaic, most painfully traditional English poem ever written. I know you have heard this poem. Here’s the first lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast

There is so much wrong with this poem’s imagery, its meter and its personification of earth’s breast feeding the tree its life. Kilmer concludes that “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” The poem was a giant hit in when it was first published in 1914. Kilmer gained instant fame and notoriety. The criticism also began almost immediately, with other poets like Ogden Nash penning parodies. Everyone from Our Gang to Victor Borge to Walt Disney got in the act. The poem was set to song, put in musicals and repeated in universities as the example of what a good poem should not be.
And what did Mr. Kilmer have to say about all this? Not much. He was killed by a sniper in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31.
Of course, there’s a point to all this. I lived in New Jersey for a while. (Come on, it wasn’t that bad!) If you spend more than 20 minutes in New Jersey you are likely to wonder just who the hell this Kilmer guy is. Alfred Joyce Kilmer was born in Jersey. There’s a museum there, his birth house, a bunch of schools named after him and some buildings on Rutgers University. Most importantly, there is a Rest Stop along the Jersey Turnpike named in his honor. In New Jersey, that’s the equivalent of being crowded king in most eastern European countries.
But that’s not all. He has a park and a square in Brooklyn, a memorial in St. Paul, an intersection in Chicago, and a Memorial Forest in North Carolina.
He also has an annual Bad Poetry contest named after him at Columbia University.
Ed Wood does not have any intersections named after him.
So, how does the worst poet ever (or eveh for you Jersey readers) get such respect, not to mention naming rights? There’s a few reasons for this. First, Kilmer isn’t defined by that one poem. He was a powerful literary critic and lecturer. He was a brilliant journalist. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he died. He went to France to write about the war. Had he not died, he may have had the time to overshadow that one poem.
Second, he was also a deeply faithful man. At the time, he was known as the poet laureate of the Catholic Church. I’m not saying faith makes you a better poet. But maybe, sometimes, it’s not that bad just being a sentimentalist. Like his poem or not, Kilmer was earnest, he wrote what he felt.
Finally and here’s the real point, there was a time when it was ok to be a poet. The guy was a soldier. His oratory skills were compared to G.K. Chesterton. In other words he was no pantywaist, and yet, he wrote the most simplistic, overwrought poem of all time. And they still named a Rest Stop after him.

Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs, by Ron Koertge, Candlewick Press, 2010, 170 pages

Here’s the conceit; teenage Kevin Boland like baseball, poetry and his girlfriend Mira. Then he meets Amy at a poetry reading and likes her to. What’s a tween to do? Why write in his story in his poetry notebook of course in a series of sonnets, prose and quatrains.
And just like the first book in the series, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, Ron Koertge makes it work. A little cheesy, sure, but it’s nice to find a smart young adult book that isn’t about vampires or wizards. Koertge’s story is direct, his protagonist appears realistic, and for a teenager who likes poetry, Kevin Boland is decent role model. There’s also emails between teachers and Kevin to move the story and provide some poetry lessons.
If you’re looking for a way to get your sports obsessed kid into poetry, this may be it.
B+