Author: echenberg

Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan: Forged in war, fueled by hope

 When Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan started middle school in the central Iraqi city of Najaf, the school director gathered her class together and told them the government had decided to close the school for 10 days, just until Iraq had won the war against Iran.

“But the war did not end in 10 days,” Hassan remembers. “It lasted eight years, and all my friends were killed in the war or went missing in it.”

It was the first time war had interrupted Hassan’s life, but it was not to be the last.

Source: Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan: Forged in war, fueled by hope – NonDoc

Jim Atherton, award-winning East Lancashire dialect poet and war veteran dies –

Jim Atherton  served in the Army as a driver and mechanic in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers unit in Europe during the Second World War and in Malaysia just afterwards.His son Clive, 62, said: “The fact that he served in the Army was an important part of his life as well as his poetry. He was always a family man and I have fond memories of our holidays and walks on the moors. He was the best dad I could have asked for.”

Source: Award-winning East Lancashire dialect poet and war veteran dies – aged 90 (From Lancashire Telegraph)

WW1 poetry does not help children understand the Great War, says Jeremy Paxman 

Source: WW1 poetry does not help children understand the Great War, says Jeremy Paxman | Daily Mail Online

‘All that is taught is about the pointless sacrifice,’ he told The Times. ‘It’s not helpful to see the whole thing through the eyes of poetry.’Such an introduction to the war could lead to people ‘passing on half-baked prejudices’, he went on, adding: ‘The big question is why Owen, after writing his anti-war poetry, and Sassoon, after his letter of protest, decided to go back and fight.’

 

A War Doctor Turned Poet Treats PTSD with Literature | VICE | United States

Source: A War Doctor Turned Poet Treats PTSD with Literature | VICE | United States


We spoke with war poet Frederick Foote, a neurologist who’s making poetry a required course of treatment in military hospitals.

Captain Frederick Foote: “I always wrote it, but more urgently after treating the wounded—both American and Iraqi—on the hospital ship Comfort during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That was the origin of many of the poems in the book, which focuses on the wounded of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Joseph Langland; Spring Grove celebrates famous driftless poet 

Source: Spring Grove celebrates famous driftless poet – Winona Post

“War”, one of the seminal poems of World War II. In it, Langland recalls quiet,ly mourning in a barracks in France when he learned that his brother was killed fighting at Luzon in the Philippines. “Buchenwald, Near Weimar” recounts Langland’s experience of seeing mass graves and starved survivors at the Buchenwald concentration camp”

 

Japanese Women’s war poetry of the 1930s and 1940s

Source: Propaganda and the Home Front: Japanese Women’s war poetry of the 1930s and 1940s – CHL – ANU

Abstract: Presenting annotated translations of Japanese women’s free-style war poetry, we will demonstrate the multiplicity of women’s voices writing about the 15 Years War (1931-45). We will demonstrate a shift from pro-war propaganda through to anti-war works and finally explore a number of poems that express hope for a new world beyond the darkness of war. Including works from well-known women poets such as Yosano Akiko, Fukao Sumako, Nagase Kiyoko and Kurihara Sadako, we also include lesser-known poets to show the breadth of women’s engagement in war poetry.

This new opera  based on David Jones’ epic war poem “In Parenthesis” had the audience in tears 

Source: This new opera had the audience in tears » The Spectator

In Parenthesis is a multilayered thicket of fractured modernist language and Celtic and Catholic myth, with a verbal music that should really be a warning light to any composer, let alone a librettist.