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Source: Pendle War Poetry Competition

New Competition Arrangements For 2016-2017-2018

 

 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  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)

It is no secret that Amichai was not a proponent of messianic expectations, or of the final efficacy of settling problems with war

Source: Theme of war underlies Yehuda Amichai’s poetry

Source: How to Tell a True War Poem | albeit.

If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terribl…

 

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.’

 

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.”

Source: ‘New-Generation African Poets’ is edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani.: reviewed by Elizabeth Lund

“Eze presents deeply moving poems about the lasting effects and traumas of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), which took the lives of more than 1 million people. Eze understands the nature of memory — described in one poem as a blind dog, a cat, and a tick — and the need to remember the past, no matter how painful.”

 

Source: The Scottish war poets | TLS

“My question about any such putative poem – good, bad or indifferent – written by a Scottish soldier in the First World War is this: would it seem particularly Scottish in any way? The answer has to be qualified: “yes, possibly”, if it were written in Lallans or Gaelic; but “surely not” if it were written in standard English.”

 

 

Source: Red Bull Rising: Listen up, Maggots! It’s National Poetry Month! by Randy BrownWhen packing for one of my first training experiences with the U.S. Army, back in the late 1980s, I knew that free time and footlocker space would be at a premium. I could live without luxuries like my Walkman cassette player for a few months. I also wanted to avoid avoid too much gruff from drill sergeants. So I stuffed a paperback copy of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” into my left cargo pocket, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, as my sole entertainment.

If nothing else, I thought, I’d work on my memorization skills. (“Oh, for a muse of fire-guard duty …”) Little did I realize that so much of my brain would already be filled, starting those summer months at Fort Knox, Ky., with the nursery rhymes of Uncle Sam. Training was full of poetry. Sometimes, it was profane. “This is my rifle, this is my gun!” Sometimes, it was pedagogical. “I will turn the tourniquet / to stop the flow / of the bright red blood.” There were even times that it was nearly pathological. “What is the spirit of the bayonet?! / Kill! Kill! Kill!”

These basic phrases connected us new recruits to the yellow footprints of those who had stood here before, marched in our boots, squared the same corners, weathered the same abuses. Every time we moved, we were serenaded by sergeants. Counting cadence, calling cadence, bemoaning that Jody was back home, dating our women, drinking our beer. We learned our lines, our ranks, our patches, our places as much by tribal story-telling than by reading the effing field manual. Even our soldier humor was hand-me-down wisdom, tossed off like singsong hand grenades. Phrases like, “Don’t call me ‘sir’ / I work for a living!” and “You were better off when you left! / You’re right!”

Nobody’s quite sure why April got the nod as National Poetry Month. I like to think that it’s because of that line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”: “April is the cruelest month.” Because that sounds like the Army. Besides, in springtime, the thoughts of every warrior-poet lightly turns to baseball; showers that bring flowers (“If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training!”); and the start of fighting season in Afghanistan.

Poetry, I recognize, isn’t every soldier’s three cups of tea. Ever since I entertained my platoon mates with Prince Harry’s inspiring St. Crispin’s Day speech, however, I’ve enjoyed sneaking poetry into the conversation. Perhaps more soldiers would appreciate poetry, were they to realize the inherent poetics of military life:

Every time you go to war, you are engaged in a battle for narrative. Every deployment—individually as a soldier, or collectively as an Army or nation—is a story. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Every story is subject to vision, and revision. History isn’t always written by the victors, but it is re-written by poets. Treat them well. Otherwise, they will cut you.

Every time you eat soup with a knife, you are wielding a metaphor. Every “boots on the ground,” every “line in the sand,” every Hollywood-style named operation (“Desert Shield”! “Desert Storm”! “Enduring Freedom”!) is a metaphor that shapes our understanding of a war and its objectives. If you don’t understand the dangerous end of a metaphor, you shouldn’t be issued one.

(There’s also a corollary, and a warning: As missions change, so do metaphors. In other words, when a politician trots out a new metaphor for war, better check your six.)

Every poem is a fragment of intelligence, a piece in the puzzle. A poem can slow down time, describe a moment in lush and flushed detail. It can transport the reader to a different time, a different battlefield. Most importantly, a poem can describe the experience of military life and death through someone else’s eyes—a spouse, a villager, a soldier, a journalist. Poetry, in short, is a training opportunity for empathy.

Soldiers like to say that the enemy gets a vote, so it’s worth noting that the enemy writes poetry, too. Like reading doctrine and monitoring propaganda, reading an enemy’s verse reveals motivations and values. Sun Tzu writes:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Every time you quote a master, from Sun Tzu to Schwarzkopf, you are delivering aphorism. I liken the aphorism—a quotable-quote or maxim—to be akin to concise forms of poetry, such as haiku. In fact, in my expansive view, I think aphorisms should count as poetry. In the world of word craft, it can take as much effort to hone an effective aphorism than it does to write a 1,000-word essay. Aphorisms are laser-guided missiles, rather than carpet bombs. We should all spend our words more wisely.

Reading a few lines connects us to the thin red line of soldiers past, present, and future. Poetry puts us in the boots of those who have served before, hooks our chutes to a larger history and experience of war. The likes of Shakespeare’s “band of brothers” speech, John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields,” and Rudyard Kipling‘s poem “Tommy” continue to speak to the experiences and sentiments of modern soldiers.

I am happy to report that more-contemporary war poets have continued the march.

Here’s a quick list to probe the front lines of modern war poetry: From World War II, seek out Henry Reed’s “The Naming of Parts.” For a jolt of Vietnam Era parody, read Alan Farrell’s “The Blaming of Parts.” From the Iraq War, Brian Turner’s “Here, Bullet.” In this tight shot group, modern soldiers will no doubt recognize themselves, their tools, and their times. Here is industrial-grade boredom, an assembly line of war, punctuated with humor and grit, gunpowder and lead.

Want more? Check out print and on-line literary offerings from Veterans Writing Project’s “O-Dark-Thirty” quarterly literary journal; Military Experience & the Arts’ twice-annual “As You Were”; the “Line of Advance” journal; and Southeast Missouri State University’s “Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors” annual anthology series.

 

Finally, you can buy an pocket anthology of poetry, such as the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition of “War Poems” from Knopf, or Ebury’s “Heroes: 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets.” Stuff it in your left cargo pocket. Read a page a day as a secular devotional, a meditation on war. Or, pick a favorite poem, print it out, and post it on the wall of your fighting position or office cube. Read the same poem, over and over again, during the course of a few weeks. See how it changes. See how it changes in you.

Remember: It’s National Poetry Month. And every time you read a war poem, an angel gets its Airborne wings.

*****
Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. He authored the poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire (Middle West Press, 2015). He is the current poetry editor of Military Experience and the Arts’ “As You Were” literary journal. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about military culture at: www.redbullrising.com.

Source: Red Bull Rising: Listen up, Maggots! It’s National Poetry Month!