Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Eleanor Wilner's objections to Operation Homecoming ("Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance?" October, 2004) has validity, but not in the way she intended. The involvement of the military chain of command and defense related industrial concerns in the project is not alarming, but rather ridiculous. The idea that intelligent young combat veterans will sit still for instructions from anyone on how to express what boils inside them is just plain dumb and can only have originated in the mind of a bureaucrat. Some may participate, but the brightest among them will not be satisfied and will seek outlets that do justice to the intensity of their experience. This intensity will make controlling those who do participate in the formal program a difficult thing at best, as anyone who has been around combat veterans, a group less respectful of authority than almost any other, can attest. The NEA, Department of Defense, and corporate sponsors should be commended for providing opportunities, but if they do so in the hope that they can contrive a given outcome, they do so in vain.

What Wilner advocates as an alternative is in fact only an alternative variety of control. Placing soldiers into "bona fide writing programs" to give them the opportunity to "contextualize" and "develop historical insight" is, of course, politically freighted. What constitutes the bona fides of a program and who grants them? Who provides the context and historical insight? The difference between Wilner's "bona fide writing programs" and Operation Homecoming is that she approves of the freight hauled by the one and disapproves of the other. Wilner notes that the NEA is an arm of the government and then (completely without irony) quotes its director, Dana Gioia, on the similarities between the shuttered mindsets of the military and literary worlds, saying that he must have relied on this to slip a politically charged program past the blinkered inhabitants of literary academia. Wilner's real objection, though, is clearly the political charge she alleges of the program, for which it seems she would like only to substitute a charge she finds more palatable. Efforts in either case seem sure to be ultimately self-defeating: poetry that carries anything other than truth, political or otherwise, will be bad poetry; the proper arbiter of that truth is not a poetical officeholder answerable to some institution, but the poet answerable to his readers.

Lost in this discussion are the young men and women, home from the wars. With or without programs of whatever variety, the need to understand and order what they have returned with will drive some of them to poetry. Asking them, of all people, to sit in ranks facing front for poetical basic training, whether in a government or university setting, seems a gratuitous cruelty, if only a small one. We might rather hand them the best of the war poets of the past to help them discover their comrades-in-arms from every era, and then consent to take our instruction from them.