- Last seen on Oct 10 2:02 PM. Member since October 7.
- I am a 57 year old person
- I have 154 poems, 4 stories
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1 - Immigrant Stories at storywrite
You Cannot See All The Way To The End 1 - A Remarkable Day at storywrite
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on Constant Beauty by Edgar Albert Guest, on July 6The world goes on without us and some how that makes me feel calm.
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on Ode To The Book by Pablo Neruda, on July 4Amen!
I firmly believe that poetry that is going to have power in this age has to be grounded in everyday experience, and specific moments. The world is always true. Just describe the world faithfully and your work will be true as well. The rest is as meaningful as a crossword puzzle. Which is to say clever but empty. -
on The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon, on July 1The response to this poem gets me going.
We are constantly romanticizing war. Pretending that it is a glorious and nobel activity, that everyone involved is a hero blah, blah. blah. I suppose the people who have lost someone in war have to believe the lie just to keep going (the mother in the poem). Time and time again the people who have actually been in combat (Sassoon was one of them) and survived come back to tell us the truth, that war is stupid and brutal, that it destroys peoples humanity and reduces them to animals. We shout them down or ignore them (Nico, below) and another generation of young men and woman is sent to the front to be ground into physical or emotional hash.
The fact that people go to war does not make them by definition heros. The military forces of any time or place are made up of people, some of whom are cowards, liars, cheats, rapists and murderers. the fact that they are in uniform doesn't change anything. The machine gun kills the moral and the immoral, the nobel man and the monster without distinction.
These themes are dealt with in the movie "Platoon" (the director was in combat in Vietnam). It should be required watching for any dumb ass nineteen year old who is planning to enlist.
As for judgement; since Adam eat of the apple and learned to know good from evil we have been doomed to judge our fellow men. English officers in the First World War went over the top first. They suffered a far higher rate of casualties per capita than the enlisted men did. I am confident they knew a slacker, fuck up when they saw one. -
on The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon, on June 30Sassoon served in the trenches on the western front in the First World War. He was in combat most of the time he served. His nick name in the line was Mad Jack because of his nearly suicidal bravery. He came out publicly against what he viewed as the stupid wastefulness of the war and was sent to a mental hospital rather than be court marshaled.
