And Isn't It the Most?

I didn't open the floor to comments in a recent post about writers' stances on Iraq because I feared the political fracas that would ensue. But one reader wrote in to tell me what he would have said, including a very apt quote from Nabokov:

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

That sums up a major plank of the pro-invasion platform pretty effectively, and I can certainly sympathize with it. Although I'd like to be a complete and utter pacifist, I do end up thinking there are times when war is necessary or perhaps even justified. I also believe, though, that you cannot justify war by making a false case for it, and it seems increasingly clear that the Bush administration did so, though whether through outright deception or incompetence or a combination of the two I wouldn't venture to say. But let's steer things back to literature...

Brandywine Books and Our Girl in Chicago both have favorite passages from a Bruce Bawer essay (60K PDF file) in the Hudson Review critiquing an anthology of poets against the war in Iraq as a batch of "smug, trivial verses in which their principal goal is to proclaim their own sensitivity." Here's one of mine:

This book is a riot of first-person singular pronouns; inconsequential autobiographical anecdotes abound ([Sam] Hamill writes in his introduction of the poet's "obligation to assay the human condition from an intensely personal, often subjective perspective"). What few images there are of life in Saddam's Iraq, are idyllic and rich in atmosphere that feels derivative of National Geographic photos: "She rises in the glow of a red sun / to make strong coffee ... She sits / drinking slowly, beneath her lime tree" (Patricia Monogham, "The Woman of Baghdad").

It's not that Bawer's a diehard Bush supporter; he's not. Nor is he against poets grappling with social issues; in this same essay, he offers up a textured personal appreciation of Robert Lowell that makes me sorry I haven't broken down and bought the Collected Poems yet. No, his complaint, and it seems like a legitimate one, based both on the excerpts he quotes and a couple of the poems I've read on the web site (focusing only on the "prominent poets"), is that a lot of these poems just aren't any good. It would certainly be hard to take the antiwar movement seriously if Robert Bly were its chief spokesman:

Don't you see them? They are coming to blind Samson!
But some of us don't want the day to end!
If Samson goes blind, what will happen to the sea?

Bad rhetoric serves no one well. The last thing the antiwar movement needs is cheap pastoralism masquerading as a critique of national affairs and global capitalism, or Katha Pollitt's slice of family life with near-random line breaks. But by the same token, I admire Robert Pinsky for his direct statement to Laura Bush about why he could not attend the proposed White House event that set all this hullaballoo in motion, which read in part:

To participate in a poetry symposium that speaks of “the” American voice, in the house of authority I mistrust, on the verge of a questionable war, is impossible— the more so when I remember the candid, rebellious, individualistic voices of Dickinson, Whitman, Langston Hughes.

(Aside: Bawers holds a special place in my reading memory, since his Stealing Jesus showed up in my life at a time when I needed to hear what he had to say, although I wasn't all that good at saying so back then. Hopefully I've gotten better.)