Can civilians write war poetry ?


http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-37267521_ITM


(From Guardian Unlimited)

Last month saw the return of soldier-poet Brian Turner to the UK. Turner's 2007 collection, Here, Bullet, is a graphic account of battle drawn from his time serving as an infantryman in Iraq. As both professional soldier and professional poet, Turner occupies a place in a tradition which stretches back from Keith Douglas to the Greek soldier-poets Archilochus and Alcaeus .
But what makes Turner a product of our age is that he received training and accreditation as a professional poet before becoming a soldier; earning an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US army as a team leader with the 3rd…


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Turner_(American_poet)

Ever an interesting question, SL. I tend to the opinion that it's nigh impossible without real experience, whilst peripheral poetry, such as protest poems, can be effective. But maybe, after serious study of writing from those with the experience, it can be done. Generally, I guess, the advice to write of subjects you know about is wisest. I don't think film of events come into the category of knowledge through experience, unless only the visual aspects are employed in a work. But 'the exception proves....'

milner

More civilians have direct experience of war than soldiers do. So, there's one slice of the civilian world that can definitely write war poetry, without any disagreement.
Beyond that, my own opinion is that good writing has never been confined to direct experience, and civilian writers put themselves in the head of all kinds of other people, including soldiers in and out of combat. I don't know everyone's military records, but were Homer, Shakespeare, etc. soldiers? If not, they seem to have gotten away with it!

This makes me wonder how much the change in the nature of war and society has affected this. When war was mainly hand to hand conflict, most would have experienced or have witnessed this in ordinary life, also. Society itself was more patently brutal, with public executions and maiming a part of life. But the stresses experienced in 'modern' warfare are perhaps further from common experience, in most parts of the world. Just a wayward thought.

milner

Rules! We crave the clear limitations of definition. It seems that writing is best judged by the experience of reading it. I remember hearing WWII veterans lament how the portrayals of their experience in film and literature were shallow and missed the target. There were exceptions and those works are read today. Most are works that come from the experience of the writer. However, note that the value ascribed to those works is their veracity, their likeness to the circumstances of the venue described. This is surely a property of prose, but is it also a property of poetry? Or perhaps, it is better stated that poetry can incorporate the property, but not be defined by it. Poetry it seems can be used as catharsis, but I bristle at the idea of that being a defining value. Writing is most often the exploration of the writer’s memory. Those memories can come from experience as well as the imagination. I can imagine being haunted by the nightmare of being carved into bite size morsels to be eaten with parsley and writing of it. It is not an experience that one could survive and arrange in chapters and verse.

Poetry gets its categories from the editors trying to arrange a book, trying to appeal to a group of readers based on the assumption that these groups would have anything in common. People who like mysteries seem to me to not look a like. But categories persist, and from their pool comes the notion that there is something common between poems that speak of love, war, food, religion or heaven forbid, cats. Alas, it is so and with the polished words come wonderful pictures from which a calendar can be made. So it is that rules are tools for the commerce so that writers can sit under the eaves and try to shoot a rabbit with a slingshot. He needs something to write about.

Postnote: Do we need to stick our hand in the fire to describe the flame? Yep.

Two words:  Miklos Radnoti.

I have written poetry out of my experiences with soldiers at war. Soldiers close enough to me that I feel empathy for them. I am, of course, expressing my reactions to their situations but they are war poems, never the less.

dear Eric

thank you for sharing the soul of this poet
i am grateful to make his acquaintance.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/radnoti.htm

silent lotus

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dear Larry

thanks for offering this wonderful image.

so that writers can sit under the eaves and try to shoot a rabbit with a slingshot.

silent lotus

.

Boy you said it there Dax.