December 31, 2002

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Gemini papers

Happy New Year before a war

William Sylvester on “Michael Casey’s Poetry and Reception Theory”
Bill Sylvester on “Poems Blighted by Professors”

 

WILLIAM SYLVESTER

Will there be a war?

Why not?

There always has been. War II never really stopped, there has been warfare somewhere in the world…

The purpose of war has become ultra Napoleonic: kill civilians as much as possible, and spare the soldiers if you can.

More fundamentally: will the war be one we notice? We can’t expect politicians to answer that question, so we must turn to poets.

The only poet we can expect to imply and answer is Michael Casey.

He is our only war poet.

His poetry concerning the Vietnamese war was selected by Stanley Kunitz for Yale Younger Poet Series in 1972, and sold over 200,000 copies. After the war, interest slackened but is now picking up considerably. In fact, his notoriety is merging into fame.

His first book,Obscenities has been reprinted, his second book, Millrat, is now in its second printing and deals with a textile mill in Lowell MA. His third book, The Million Dollar Hole, was published by Orchises Press in 2001, His poems have appeared in three anthologies in the past year.

In the past two years, he has reached a wide audience: the Boston Phoenix tends to be informal, in tabloid form, with a familiar newspaper feel and concerned with literary sensibilities that question comfortably received opinions, such as Brecht’s Mother Courage, a portrayal of her suffering through the obscenities of the Thirty Years War. Such an audience is open to Michael Casey’s poems, but so too is the more formally printed and traditional Massachusetts Review. His poems have appeared in range of venues in between: Salmagundi, Washington Square, Larcom Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Stars and Stripes, and some places in California I’ve forgotten about.

I suggest that his poems evoke questions, and his questions, I believe, are based upon an assumption, so well expressed by David Steiner in Salmagundi (albeit in another context):

To envisage the face of the other is to hear the call that constitutes my subjectivity and prefigures my capacity to know.

This is in an article about Levinas, but it comes close to the sense of a Casey poem, particularly if we allow "envisage" to be generated by what comes through our ears.

What do we accept?

What do we deny?

What do we learn?

The answers which his poems imply are: that we accept war and brutality, we deny what we actually experience, and we learn nothing.

And that is why people turn to his poetry now, more than ever.

BILL SYLVESTER RESPONDS:

William makes Michael Casey sound like an Administrative Assistant rather than a poet.

War poet?

What a dreadful oversimplification.

Just think of the title, Obscenities. That was commonly used for people against the war. But these “obscenities” are also from a man who was in the war as a military policeman, and obscenities are part of the lingo. The freedom to use that lingo was a war of words in California some years earlier, where the Free Speech movement carried banners in honor of the U.C.’s Presdent, Clark Kerr.

    Freedom
    Under
    Clark
    Kerr

Is the F word established in the military?

You fucking well better believe it: it can be used as a threat or promise or both

Accept?

Deny?

How in the world did William ever get such notions?

I had to scrounge around to find anything remotely relevant such as the lines at the end of the poem in the Boston Phoenix. A soldier in a jeep, who watches the Vietnamese children herding ducks, says:

                You ask why one kid can herd fifty animals
                 each with its very own brain albeit dim
                 why those animals don’t go every which way
                 I answer the thing is
                 you just herd the chief duck
                 and all the stupid buddies follow
                 yoyoyoyoyo 

Is that an “acceptance” of the military? 

Or is there a “state of denial” in his prose poem in the Masschussetts Review? A soldier is talking about another soldier who has lost a lung:

      In total he did not seem that
      tense about it though. He taught me that you know how
      some people are left handed or right handed? The same for
      lungs...so all he lost was his left or minor lung..

You can force questions upon a Casey poem, but you have to cut it up and extract parts, and what you miss is that voice that speaks out. Take a poem in its entirety, a recent poem called "Unit Chief":

                  did I say any swear word?
                  this morning all I said was
                  did you have sex with husband
                  this morning?
                  I don't know why
                  she had to get so upset
                  I was just making a joke
                  why did she have to run crying
                  to the ladies room?
                  I didn't use any bad words
                  or anything like that did I
                  did I mention her boyfriend

Now that is how people really speak, in all their shifting voices and contradictions, and that is Casey’s great talent. Even in a meditative poem, the words come across as spoken:

Learning

                  I like learning useless things
                  Like Latin
                  I really enjoyed Latin
                  Caesar and the Gallic Wars
                  Enjoyed his fighting
                  The Helvetians and the Germans
                  And Gauls
                  I enjoyed Vietnamese too
                  The language
                  Its five intonations
                  Its no conjugations
                  A good language to learn
                  Vietnam is divided in
                  Three parts too
                  It makes me wonder
                  Who will write their book

One detail follows another, and at the last an intensity makes every detail feel necessary.

Consider the ordinary beginning and jolt of:

                  The Response of Alvaro                   

                  Alvaro’s wife called and left a message
                  said she never wanted to talk to him again
                  I told him this
                  I gave him the message
                  I wanted to know what he’d say
                  he says
                  we even now
                  we even

      I suppose William would tell us “what the poem means” something like “Welcome to our New Year, when we will all get even.”

 

copyright 2002 by Buffalo Report, Inc.