Four Against The War

Author: Milwaukee Poets Against War In Iraq, 2-12-03

War Is Bad, It Makes Me Sad, Drop A Bomb, I Run To Mom

Easily one of my worst efforts, but better than any of this. The Four Against The War are Milwaukee poets Antler, Josh Gilman, Jeff Poniewaz and Stacy Szmaszek. They've mustered their literary skills in an effort to express their thunderous outrage and opposition to Bush's war – shame they do a lousy job of it.

For the quick-tour, Antler takes the shock-the-masses approach - in Pretending To Be Dead, he compares the difference between playing army and the real thing, wondering if any kid would play army "Knowing if he's discovered/they'll cut off his cock and balls/and stuff them in his screaming mouth" – such comparative anatomy lessons making up the bulk of the five poems he contributed. The images aren't pleasant, but neither are they emotionally or politically compelling. As General Carl Claus von Clausewitz said, "If a bloody battlefield is a horrible sight, that's not a reason to avoid war, but a compelling argument to give the subject the respect that it deserves", so I can't say that these poems would influence anybody one way or the other.

His final poem, Draft Dodgers vs. Poetry Dodgers, does come up with a creative idea, speculating on what would happen if people were drafted in equal numbers into both the Military Service and the Poetry Service (An intriguing idea – would people burn their poetry books in protest?) Personally, the idea of "Make Love, Not War" is much more motivational than "Make Poetry, Not War" – can I join the Love Service?

Josh Gilman's poetry comes across better – he has a nice ear for sound and a flair for building up dramatic tension. Deities speculates on the implications of an arms race between Budda, Christ, Mohammed and other religious figures, which is a nice twist – some wry humor in anti-war poetry is rare, the only example I can think of being Pete Seeger's The Vietnam Rag.

Jeff Poniewaz goes overboard with the personal approach, and hasn't learned to write with any sort of economy of word – for instance, the overwritten SuperAmerica Wins The Oil Bowl goes on and on as a prosaic rant without a single compelling concrete image in it. Stacy Szymaszek's poems are the best of the lot, though none of it seems to be anti-war poetry – her Sex, Consolation for Misery, is a small masterpiece of sensory stimulation, but is definitely a personal expression of social alienation, not an outcry against conflict.

The main failure is the obvious fact that none of these poets have actually smelled the smoke, and are writing from imagination instead of knowledge. The best war poems, pro or con, have always been written by soldier-poets – the First World War easily supplying the best of this genre. Where are Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon when you need them? Comparing across the decades, none of these poems comes close to Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, with it's startling imagery, sensuality and revolutionary use of near rhyme (with chemical warfare coming back, this poem suddenly becomes relevant again). I'm sure FOUR AGAINST THE WAR was meant as an earnest effort, but if they're going to reach people with the reality of what's coming, they're going to have to do better than this.

Write a poem against the war; But first make sure you're not a bore.