War is a force...
There is a Veterans day event that the organization I work for, University of Maryland College Park, Libraries, is carrying out. A day-long marathon set of readings on the theme of war in literature:
War in Literature: Public Readings, UM Libraries. This is our part in the grander scheme of a Semester on War that the whole university is participating in. There is a web site to this effect:
Semester on War and the Representation of War - Fall 2008 - University of Maryland. I confess linking it here is the first time I've been to it. I knew all this was going on -- a speaker here, a seminar there -- but I didn't realize how coordinated it all was. I'll have to take a moment when I have time and go through that web site in detail. When I looked through the schedule of readings, I noticed that no reading of any of Karl Shapiro's poems were on the list. I see this as something of an omission. I would have voluntered to read something had I known; V-Letter, perhaps, or Sunday: New Guinea. These were written during the period he was with MacArthur's army in the South Pacific.
At the beginning of the semester I read the book War is a force that gives us meaning, Chris Hedge's book from 2002. I read it because it appeared interesting and because there were posters for it scattered across campus. It is part of a concept of theme books at Maryland. This is the book themed for the Semester on War.
Hedge was a foreign co-respondent for the New York Times covering various Central American and Balkan conflicts in the 1980's and 1990s, giving him a long term and close vantage of the slide into and conduct of these wars. At the end of this period he found it neccessary to step back and examine what meaning and passions-proof humans find, or believe they find in war. His essential critique is that war is engenderd out of myth and lies, virulent but romantic nationalism, the exuberance of hatred. It is electrifying intoxicating and damaging. It solves nothing. Leaves no higher organization of affairs in its wake, and carries with it only the pervading presence of death and the reality of loss. It's sole power: a false blinding sense of clarity and certaintly. Which is invested in a mode of being where one is raised from the reclining mind to the absolute surface of all the body's senses and immediate cognizance. Unless a center of original humanity is kept it leaves one disparaging ordinary living, and often unable to live ordinarily.
I long for our dishelved Sundays home,
Breakfast, the comics, news of the latest crimes
Talk without reference and Palindromes
Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous Times [From] Sunday: New Guinea
Karl Shapiro. Collected poems, 1940-1978 [WorldCat.org]
11:22:57 PM  ;;
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