Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford English Monographs) [Paperback]

Subarno Chattarji (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0199247110 | ISBN-13: 978-0199247110

In this unique and significant addition to Vietnam studies, Memories of a Lost War analyzes the poems written by American veterans, protest poets, and Vietnamese, within political, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wealth of material often published in small presses and journals, the book highlights the horrors of war and the continuing traumas of veterans in post-Vietnam America. In its inclusion of Vietnamese perspectives, the book marks a departure from earlier works that have largely concentrated on Vietnam as a war rather than a country.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Refreshing, updated, and unflinching... Memories of a Lost War sheds light on poetry written from btoh sides of the political spectrum...Chattarji's argument provides a fascinating opportunity to compare little-read prowar veteran poetry with aniwar poetry, which has enjoyed more critical acclaim. ...makes a substantial contribution to critical work on poetry of the Vietnam War era.--American Literature

About the Author

Subarno Chattarji is a Reader in the Department of English, University of Delhi

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199247110
• ISBN-13: 978-0199247110
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,562,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stateside Poetry versus Veteran Poetry in Memories of a Lost War, September 26, 2005

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Jordan Collier "sanityisrelative" (Lubbock, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford English Monographs) (Paperback)

Subarno Chattarji introduces his book with historical and political information about the rising struggles within Vietnam and the United States that ultimately lead to war, briefly introducing American fears of the domino theory, where one Southeastern Asian country falling to communism would result in the rest following suit. Chattarji quickly divides the poetry of the Vietnam War era into three categories: stateside poetry, which largely focuses on the anti-war movement, and veteran (or soldier) poetry, and Vietnamese poetry. Chattarji’s division focuses mainly on the stateside poetry and veteran poetry, and, by clearly demarcating the strict line that separates the two, he upholds the division that veteran poets such as W.D. Ehrhart regard as essential: “‘The few poems I read about Vietnam after I came back only made me angry: What the hell did these people know about it, for chrissake?’” (92). Chattarji furthers his divisions by dividing veteran poetry into three categories: protest and anguish, combat experience, and the aftermath, with each chapter highlighting poetry representative of the chapter’s title. The final chapter, dealing with Vietnamese poetry translated into English, is Chattarji’s attempt to represent all different sides of the Vietnam War: American soldiers and protestors and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, though Chattarji cannot directly correlate Vietnamese poetry to traditional western poetic influences evident in stateside and veteran poetry. Chattarji emphasizes American soldier poetry, establishing it as the crux of the book, but also introduces a hint of resentment by soldier poets against stateside poetry figureheads such as Ginsberg, Levertov, and Bly. Carefully straddling the fence on whether one holds more impact over the other, Chattarji introduces and juxtaposes the ever-changing stances of Erhart, a prominent soldier poet of the Vietnam war, on the stateside poets: “Although the essay [of Erhart’s] does stress the problems with stateside poetry, it is largely an endorsement of protest poetry in times of crisis such as the one represented by Vietnam” (93) and “[Erhart] stated that poetry by Bly, Levertov, Ginsberg, and others, had ‘served a political purpose,’ but it ‘doesn’t work’ as poetry and is ‘not durable’” (93). Therefore with the line established between veteran poetry and stateside poetry, Chattarji draws a connection between the two (i.e. the poetry that both sub-genres draw from) and uses the poetic background and influences of each to found the principal that the two—though in opposition—work toward a similar poetic expression, or goal, that uniquely identifies the horrors of the Vietnam War in order to prevent their reoccurrence in future wars.

Chattarji avoids associating stateside poetry, and its traditional anti-military sentiment, with the awe-inspiring images of the terror of first-hand experience associated with veteran poetry, but he links the two by drawing their poetic roots and foundations to earlier American/British wars (i.e. World War I and II) and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Howard Nemerov, and Randall Jarrell. By tying the two somewhat opposing types of poetry together, specifically emphasizing the rich poetic background from which anti-war and soldier poets draw, Chattarji extends his idea that, “American poetry on Vietnam does not exist in a critical, literary vacuum” (25). Chattarji clearly establishes Bly, Levertov, Ginsberg, and Nemerov as strong stateside poets during the Vietnam War. Chattarji opens his chapter on stateside poetry by introducing several of Nemerov’s poems about World War II, which actually provide connections to his later poems: “The connections are interesting and evident, particularly the ways in which Nemerov highlights the instrumentalist nature of state language in his poems on Vietnam” (31). Nemerov, whose main work is emblematic of the combat he experienced in World War II, also writes about the Vietnam War, drawing specifically from influential poets such as William Butler Yeats. Chattarji introduces Nemerov’s poem, “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem,” and then quickly points to the title’s allusion to Yeats’s poem, “On Being Asked for a War Poem.” Nemerov uses the title to depict the social advancement from a focus on war to a focus on peace, borrowing from Yeats and expanding his own poem into, “a less terse, more complex and humorous insight into the relationship between a poet and war” (70). Nemerov is the only major stateside poet, who had actually experienced combat, which Chattarji addresses in his chapter on stateside poetry. Chattarji uses Nemerov as a transitional figure between soldier poets and stateside (or anti-war) poets. Chattarji shifts focus from Nemerov to other stateside poets whose poetry is clearly based on a political agenda such as Bly’s poem in his book The Teeth Mother Naked at Last:

This is what it’s like for a rich country to make war

this is what it’s like to bomb huts (afterwards described as ‘structures’)

this is what it’s like to kill marginal farmers (afterwards

described as ‘Communists’). (53)

Chattarji points out that, “The agenda is not one of unearthing ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ information, it is one of highlighting the proliferation of the war, and the polyphony of that spread. The poem counterpoints brutal destruction with clinical military jargon” (53). Bly’s poetic enjambments and his mingling of “military jargon” combined with overarching statements of destruction prove his poetic talents, but his poem strays in effectiveness because of the lack of gruesome details prevalent in soldier poetry. Chattarji defends Bly’s poem by stressing that the poem’s agenda is different from the traditional authenticity of soldier poetry, but W.D. Ehrhart’s statement that the political poetry “doesn’t work” rings true when comparing Bly’s poem to the vivid images, smells; sounds of soldier poetry. Erhart’s statement that the political poetry is “not durable” is clearly evident from post-war perspective of over thirty years. Bly’s poetry, like most stateside political poetry, clearly loses its impact when taken out of the time period in which it was written, whereas soldier poetry, with its grisly portrayals of atrocities, stands out past its historical context, actually gaining popularity as the years of the war sink further into the past.

Chattarji introduces the same poetic influences in soldier poetry as in stateside poetry early in the first section of veteran poetry with a quote from W.D. Ehrhart: “The main thing that happened in the early writing when I was trying to figure out how to write about the Vietnam War, was the influence of other writers I read—some of Sassoon, but everything of Owen…I knew his work very well…so when I began to write about my war, that was my reference point…So, early on, you find me completely missing all the rich imagery of my own war and, instead, inserting images about blood dripping like tears from the blade of a bayonet” (113). Chattarji even goes as far as comparing the trenches at Khe Sanh to the stalemated trench warfare of World War I, but he emphasizes that, despite the loose historical correlation between the trenches, the early images in the poetry of the Vietnam War come directly from the soldier poets like Owen and Sassoon of World War I—images borrowed to express the horrors of a new war until soldier poets of the Vietnam War could find their “own language” (113) and “come to grips with the peculiar reality of Vietnam” (113). Chattarji’s first chapter on veteran poetry mainly deals with protest and anguish, though he includes some immature poetry in support of the war, and Chattarji accentuates his emphasis on protest and anguish by pointing out the soldier poet’s early inability to create a unique images of the Vietnam war, simply relying on and borrowing poetic devises popularized by earlier poets.

In Chattarji’s second chapter of veteran poetry, he underlines combat experiences, where the soldier poets have found their unique poetic voices and expressions, often dealing with internal struggles of morality and ethics and the basic human struggle to stay alive. The first poem Chattarji introduces in this section is David Connolly’s “After the Firefight,” where Connolly clearly uses images unique to the Vietnam War and also deals with the soldier’s ability or inability to deal with the horrors of a new kind of warfare:

Afterwards, with the gunfire

still ringing loudly in our ears,

but not so loudly

that it drowned out the screams.

And afterwards,

still blinded by the tracers’ flashes,

but not blinded enough

by the pumping or sucking or gaping wounds;

we’d come to our sense,

what sense were left.

When the rush of adrenaline,

and the haste to stop the life

from spilling out of a Brother,

and the hesitancy to touch

what was human,

was over,

we’d strut and brag and bluster

for each other.

Later, we would weep,

separately,

for the little

that was left of us.

Much later

we would weep together,

when it appeared

there... Read more ›