WEAPONS OF THE WISE: An Adventure With Poetry
In this project we studied different styles of poetry and then wrote our own poems based on peace, war, or power. I wrote a poem that is personifying war to show how, although there are thousands of different positions and opinions about war, war is above them all. In my poem I compared him to a deity or part of the earth.
My Final Project (Audio):
http://martinapansze.weebly.com/war-poem.html
My Poem:
WAR
I have legs made of tree trunks, knotted toes anchored to
the ground.
Dry blood settles in the creases of my face, in the rims
around my nails.
I am eternally exhausted and impulsive and just a little bit
bitter.
I am as heavy as the ocean, I rumble inside the skin of the
crust
Through tunnels traveled too many times.
I swing from streetlights and crumble cliffs.
I am the monster in your child’s closet:
I sit on their shoes by the broken globe
And wait for them, they will come to me.
I snake the curved walls of teardrop buildings in India,
scale the crooked mountains.
Feel the padding of bare feet down my cobblestone spine.
A thick quilt of people, every step is a statement, a
drumbeat, a cry,
A collage beating with freedom.
I coil into one hundred guns, surrounding the crowd like
points of a star.
The quilt explodes in a kaleidoscope fracture.
Fabric rains down, no violins play, no cameras roll.
It is silent.
I visit a quiet suburb, I am a bathroom mirror flecked with
rust.
A woman looks me between the eyes and finds her husband
staring back.
I stroke her cheek, I kiss her forehead, I tell her it will
all be okay.
But at night she clutches her pillow and screams into her fist
and looks for meaning in photographs.
I watch her cry from inside the radio when she is driving
back from work.
Soon a folded flag arrives to collect dust on the wall.
Her skin cracks and the emotion pours out whoosh.
The flag’s colors fade before my careful watch,
But her eyes never scar over.
I am watching young people from embers in Ohio.
They surround the fire on lifeboats of dyed blankets.
“Peace,” they repeat again and again, “Peace.”
“Curious,” I whisper, and a hurricane twirls from my
calloused lips.
I see a girl painting the careful letters on a picket sign.
I laugh quietly at her absurdity and slip into the earth
again.
I am the ceiling above a room of men arguing over a spread
map.
My world, explored and pinned and stretched under light.
Rivers and tactics and carefully inked numbers.
Dots in the millions, checkers on a board.
The men shake hands.
It is very boring when they do that, nobody wins when they
do that.
I use a delicate finger to tip over a ship figurine.
It spins like a top across the painted paper and
topples thump.
I anticipate the drowning, the blame.
I am in a classroom in Colorado, peeking under the chairs
and listening through the cracks of the cement floor.
People try not to breathe too loudly and shift their weight,
Posters and papers dot the room like flaky wallpaper.
The students have ideas: they say "support" they
say "power" they say “propaganda.”
They try to pin me down; they try to comprehend me with
abstract phrases and similes as weapons,
They take an opinion and debate and write poetry, because
they have a lot to say.
Because the words of gum chewing sixteen-year-olds will
surely define me.
I exist. Not even the most intuitive young poet in the world
can change that.
Class dismissed.
I am the wet wind rustling Vietnamese vines.
Here there are men with no faces, green canvas hanging off
of hunched bodies.
They are a troupe of skeletons and they lean on each other
in small groups of tepees.
There, half of a boy on a cot, his back is mangled, clay in
my fist.
I am a fly swarming him like cantaloupe.
The muscle is torn and shiny and warm and I grin because it
really is awful.
His cheek is flecked with the thread pattern of the sheets.
His eye is glazed but open, and he looks at me straight.
He is not one but a thousand dying boys,
One thousand staring pupils.
The boy shuts his eye tight and screams white noise.
It is just so fascinating, this game I play.
Artist Statement:
Before I even
started my poem, I knew that I wanted to create a very powerful message. I
figured that the best way to achieve this would be through metaphor. I find
metaphors really beautiful because they leave the meaning open to loose
interpretation and create imagery. In seventh grade, I read the novel Animal
Farm and found it fascinating how the author could express so many political
perspectives through a story about pigs and sheep. I decided to try this
method, which I discovered was called an extended metaphor. Once this was
established, I thought very carefully about what intellectual message I wanted
to portray. I decided, using the content inspiration of the Walter Cronkite
special and Vietnam Peace Songs, to describe how many different opinions and
sides there are to war, and how all of these perspectives don’t really
influence war substantially. To demonstrate this, the extended metaphor in my
poem is War is a powerful deity or even part the Earth and is above the
opinions of anybody involved, although the meaning is open to the reader.
Once
I had this idea on the table, I completely ignored form and just tried to
communicate my emotional and intellectual messages. This ended up just being a
series of sentences, just one line at a time, not even organized into stanzas
or even including a real ending. I knew that this needed to be changed, so for
my form inspiration I chose to use T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion because it is a free verse poem with no rhyme or meter
scheme. I chose free verse because it is very open and allows for lots of
creativity. I could say what I wanted without being bothered by those pesky rhyme
schemes and syllable counts. For example, in Gerontion Eliot writes, “These with a thousand small
deliberations/Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,/Excite the
membrane, when the sense has cooled,/With pungent sauces, multiply variety.” I
mimicked the punctuation and meter (short phrases of the approximate length) of
this line style in particular when I wrote: “I
swing from streetlights and crumble cliffs./I am the monster in your child’s
closet:/I sit on their shoes by the broken globe/And wait for them, they will
come to me.”
However, I did still have to pay extra attention to flow because of this, and
perhaps work even harder to ensure the meter fit. I decided to make every stanza
a different story or demonstrate a different perspective, and I fixed my ending
by getting specific and as “direct” to war as possible with the experience of a
wounded soldier, because this was a particularly moving stanza that would
hammer home my points and leave the reader thinking.
I actually wrote it in third person to
begin with, until I got feedback from my classmates expressing that my
character seemed inconsistent. I realized that to fix this and in order to
create the full effect that War was an actual thing that was tangible and could
think and talk, I needed to change it to first person perspective. This would
clarify that instead of inconsistent War was really just impulsive and
unpredictable. I think that this greatly improved my poem because it seems,
when read aloud that War is actually speaking it. So, for my project I will not
focus on anything visual but rather make it an experience. My project
inspiration is “The Face Without Makeup,” a poem spoken and written by Victor
Hernandez Cruz. It inspired me because I found it interesting how so much
meaning could be portrayed with just sound. I too will record my poem using
Audacity, but I will also add sound effects and noises as well. During the
stanza about the Colorado classroom, I really do want the audience to feel as
if War is actually watching them. The somewhat fearful and creepy tone of my
poem is a really unique and important part of it, and that is what I chose to
highlight in my project.
VETERAN'S HISTORY PROJECT
This project was to interview a Vietnam veteran and submit the video to the Library of Congress to preserve history. I thought it was really cool to actually talk to someone who experienced the war firsthand rather than just learn about it. It was also interesting to hear our veteran's opinions and viewpoints on events that happened during the war that we studied, such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incedent. The USS Maddox, the ship that was allegedly attacked, was in his fleet at the time! It was a really neat experience to hear him tell the story, especially because we had been studying it and their are so many different opinions surrounding the issue.
To watch our video go to the Library of Congress website (http://www.loc.gov/index.html) and search for James (Jim) Mooney. It may not be up for a bit.
Reflection
1) The interview changed my perspective on the truth of war because it gave me greater insight into a soldier’s mind. It’s one thing to read a book written by a veteran; it’s a whole other thing to be able to ask a veteran questions and have a conversation with him. It confirmed my thesis from the ToW project when he talked about when he had so little control over his situation, and even used my exact pawn metaphor, which was very cool.
2) Our veteran talked about how important comrades are to soldiers; how they depend on each other’s lives, and how it is a different, deeper kind of friendship. James even said that that was the truth of war- his buddies. I thought that this was the most interesting thing said because I had never imagined how important your comrades would be in such an uncertain time as war.
3) As a historian, I could use my interview as a primary source both as an account of what happened during the Vietnam War and as an example of the effects of war on a soldier. I could use my handy Historical Thinking Skills and apply corroboration and contextualization to determine the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident by observing differences and similarities to other Tonkin sources, and contextualization to understand how soldiers in Vietnam were influenced. Also, they should consider the sourcing and keep in mind how this is first person and he experienced the events.
4) The most valuable part of this project was definitely the preparation. In order to have a successful interview, we needed to have release forms for everyone involved, sort out the technology situation, register with the Library of Congress, and write and organize the interview questions. Because I was in charge of logistics in my group, I had to be super organized and on top of it to make sure we didn’t miss anything, and these skills are important for group work and just life in general.
Tonkin Writing
Thesis: Although it has been proven that at least one torpedo was shat at the Maddox during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, it appears that the entire thing was both an overreaction and a convenient excuse to cover the US Government’s other motives for war.
There is no denying that something happened the nights of August 2nd and 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin. It has indeed been proven by multiple sources that the USS Maddox was shot at by North Vietnamese at least once during the incident. Captain Herrick, the commander of the Maddox, sent cables during the incident on August 4th that read: “(2:27 A.M.) Details of action present confusing picture although certain that the original ambush was bona fide… (6:00 P.M.)the first boat to close the Maddox probably launched a torpedo at the Maddox which was heard but not seen. All subsequent Maddox torpedo reports are doubtful in that it is suspected that sonarman was hearing ship’s own propeller beat.”(Doc. 7) Because of the source of this document, and considering the fact that Captain Herrick was actually present during the attack, it is probably safe to conclude that the information here is reliable, or at least that Herrick believed it to be true at the time. Also, the reader can use contextualization to conclude that the cables were sent during or immediately following the attack, so Herrick had no clear motives to lie about the events, and would want to relay truthful information during the time of bombardment to receive sufficient help. Keeping this in mind, Herrick said that many of the “torpedoes” shot at the Maddox, the event of witch caused the United States Congress to declare retaliation by all means necessary, were simply a sonic misreading. This makes some people rightfully question the motives of the Government to go into Vietnam, and, ultimately, wonder if they had been lied to as a citizen of the US.
Much evidence suggests that the US Government was aware of the actual events of the Gulf of Tonkin Crisis. Interestingly enough, though, they did not display it so to the public. In fact, the way that they responded so strongly and quickly to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident suggests an over-reaction. A taped phone conversation between President Johnson and Robert Anderson on August 3, 1964 reveals that “(Johnson) …we have been carrying on-- blowing up some bridges and things of that kind, roads and so forth. So I imagine they wanted to put a stop to it.”(Doc. 3) Using sourcing, we can conclude that, although both Anderson and Johnson were aware that their conversation was being taped, as is every White House phone call, they did speak truthfully, because they didn’t expect anybody to listen to it. Also using close reading techniques, we can tell that, because this conversation occurred the day after the first incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, they are responding to that incident. Considering this information, we can now conclude that the Gulf of Tonkin event was indeed in retaliation to United States actions, and President Johnson was very much aware of this fact. However, he told the media that the attack was “unprovoked” by communist North Vietnam. This suggests not just exaggerated over-reaction by declaring war, but it seems as if Congress and Johnson were jumping at an opportunity to cover their real motives to attack, and keeping this very much a secret to the public.
The question is, if the United States Government didn’t start the war in response to the North Vietnamese ambush, what did they start it for? Why did they need to so carefully shield their real motives with the Gulf of Tonkin attack? The answer, simply put, is control. President Johnson says in a 1965 speech, “Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American protection.”(Doc. 5) Contextualization proves that during this period in time many people were not impressed with the war, and Johnson is trying to gain support. Again using contextualization, Johnson needed to hide his real motive from the public because it would be frowned upon interfering for such reasons. Using close reading, it is evident that he believes that it is America’s job to protect Vietnam from communism. But as he says about power, Johnson doesn’t just want to stop communism (although that is certainly a large part of it) but wants to gain control in Vietnam as well, through the dictator that he assigned, and, later, through war. In conclusion, this proves my thesis that the Gulf of Tonkin was simply a convenient excuse for the Government to hide a second motive for war: power.
TRUTH OF WARThis project, although somewhat depressing, was very eye-opening and interesting to me. Here is what I spent the last few months of my life doing:
Project Reflection:
The assignment of this project was to write an essay depicting your perspective on the truth of war for soldiers, and make some other kind of project to reflect the same perspective. Before we started on this project, we read and seminared on two anti-war books from the perspective of soldiers: Slaughter-house 5 by Kurt Vonnegut and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. We also learned a bit about the politics involved in the wars and what happened in them (dictators, specific events, and types of fighting). We focused specifically on World Wars l and ll.
I think that of the five Habits of Heart and Mind (Perspective, advocacy, perseverance, evidence, and refinement), the one that I used most well in my project is refinement. I spent I good amount of time covering my model soldier with newspaper, carefully cutting pieces for the collage, smoothing my plaster hand with sandpaper, and attaching the strings to the hand in an aesthetically pleasing way. I worked very hard to make sure that my project was a piece of beautiful work, and this included a good amount of refining.
The first substantial revision that I made was an organizational revision. I decided to organize my essay by types of harm on soldiers instead of the rather organization-less version I had before. This organization was much more logical, and helped the reader because it was more concise and easier to follow. The second revision I made was I eliminated a paragraph about whether war is morally justifiable because that is more of a conclusion than a body paragraph, and again this strengthens my essay by making it more clear for the reader to understand my position.
If I had another week to work on this project, I would probably construct a stand to hang my project out of wood and sheets, instead of hanging it from an easel. This would add to it’s cohesive-ness because it wouldn’t need an easel and a sheet to be set up and look good. One addition I would make to my essay would be I could add a bit more analysis on the body paragraphs. This could really re-enforce the point that I am driving to the reader.
Essay:
A Game of Frightening Consequence
In some ways soldiers are just pawns in war. They are treated as disposable weapons, but there is more of a cost for them than it appears. Around the world, it is the governments who make the bulk of the decisions concerning war, but the soldiers are the ones who carry out the orders. Unfortunately, because of this separation of status, government choices made in war are sometimes misguided, or made, quite mistakenly, for the ‘greater good’. Of course, the governments have the interests of an entire country to consider, but it is also important for them to understand the situation of the very people fighting for them, who also belong to the country. With all of the drawbacks of war taken into account, however, it is debatable whether or not the greater good-the reason for war- is even justifiable, especially considering the toll that war takes on the soldiers in it. Due to the frightening experiences of war, soldiers often face physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral damage. The main character Paul from All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, demonstrates such damage very truthfully. Remarque was a soldier in World War I himself, and although the book is fiction, most of Paul’s experiences are based off Erich’s own. Perhaps if the governments were to understand the benefits and drawbacks of war without bias, they could make fair decisions that more appropriately profit soldiers. The truth of war is that government-run wars take a large toll on soldiers fighting in them, such a large toll that government orders often cannot be justified.
The first damage of government-run war on soldiers is intellectual. Often, soldiers lack freedom of choice in war. Paul says in All Quiet on the Western Front, “‘Prepare to advance’ and ‘Lie down.’” We obeyed each order, since an order’s an order and has to be obeyed.” (Remarque, 25) In this quote, Paul is saying that soldiers have a lack of free will, and emphasizing how, as a soldier, he is not supposed to think for himself. They must do what they are told and believe it is simply left to chance what happens to them. In fact, an extreme example of this is that a US Army General is not allowed to publicly disagree with the president’s choices in regards to war. This happened in 2010, when General Stanley McChrystal was asked to resign from duty after making ‘unflattering remarks’ about vice president Joe Biden (Elliot, 2010). Soldiers, however high their rank, are encouraged and even forced to some extent not to use their minds. In addition, it is confusing for soldiers to fight for the government’s cause. A passage from All Quiet on the Western Front reads, “Kat shrugs his shoulders. ‘There must be some people to whom the war is useful.’ ‘Well, I’m not one of them,’ grins Tjaden. ‘Who are they then?’ Persists Tjaden.” (Remarque, 205) In this passage Kat and Tjaden, both friends of Paul, discuss the purpose of the war. This shows the extent of how soldiers generally don’t believe in the causes they fight for, and sometimes don’t even understand what they are. This is intellectually damaging because the soldier is faced with conflicting thoughts; if they believed in their own cause, they would certainly be less opposed to committing necessary measures for their goal, while, contrarily, if they don’t agree with the reason, they are led to questioning everything they do.
The most evident toll that war takes on soldiers is the physical kind. This is the kind most often portrayed in the media and the most commonly known. The first is death, arguably the most important consequence of war. Wounds are also included, involving pain and costs of rehab. Another not-so-obvious category is the pain and suffering of the soldier’s comrades. Remarque says in the prologue of All Quiet on the Western Front, “…death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.” (N.P.) This means that soldiers do not perceive their deaths as heroic the way many others do, but as a frightening reality. Physical consequences also affect beyond one soldier. In wars with large injury or death counts, the country’s economy and population as a whole is impacted, along with friends and family of the soldiers. Physical consequences not only impair soldiers and cause them great pain, if not end their lives entirely, but contribute to their mental issues as well.
Emotional damage to soldiers, although not always visible, is one of the absolutely most important penalties of war. A study taken by the World Psychiatric Association says, “Death as a result of wars is simply the "tip of the iceberg". Other consequences, besides death, are not well documented. They include endemic poverty, malnutrition, disability, economic/ social decline and psychosocial illness, to mention only a few… the direct correlation between the degree of trauma and the amount of the psychological problems is consistent across a number of studies. The greater the exposure to trauma - both physical and psychological - the more pronounced are the symptoms.” (Murthy and Lakshminarayana, 2006) This study was for an article about psychological consequences of war, mostly post-traumatic stress disorder, a disorder very common among veterans. These conditions usually have long-term effects, which make it even harder for someone involved in war to return to a ‘typical’ lifestyle. The soldiers have experienced such truthful and harsh things that their previous lives become completely meaningless and alien. Soldiers find these emotions hard to share with people who haven’t experienced the same things, and have trouble going back to their ‘normal’ lives after the war. A mind is a precious thing to lose. The question is, are these emotional casualties worth it?
The last toll taken on soldiers is the moral consequences they face. Paul writes in All Quiet on the Western Front, “The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:--against whom, against whom?” (Remarque, 140) This quote demonstrates loss of morals quite well. In war, many soldiers blame themselves for their actions (or inactions) under stress. When Paul says ‘we shall have a purpose,’ he is saying that once the war is over, everything will return to normal, he will never again question his morals, he will be free of guilt (‘our heads shall be clear’), and again feel self- worth he has lost through breaking his own morals. Also, acts of war go against many religions, and it would also cause soldiers great confliction to break such religious ‘rules’. Soldiers have been taught their morals (don’t kill/hurt others, etc.) since birth, and it is hard to simply forget such things as a soldier.
Much more action is taken to stop causes far less tragic than war, and it is past time such a destructive, awful waste as war is stopped. The government is powerful, and it is hard work to run a country, but essentially they are just people, and people make mistakes and misjudge things. The problem with larger scale faults is that the consequences are much direr this way. The effects of the government’s orders on soldiers are impossible to overlook, and it is not justifiable for the governments to sentence their own soldiers to such things. War is scarring, and it is terrible, and I cannot begin to understand what the soldiers go through, but one thing is certain in this confusing and abysmal game; there is no justification for betting another’s life or sanity.
Works Cited:
Remarque, Erich M. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Random House, 1928.
Murthy, Srinivasa R. and Lakshminarayana Rashmi. “Mental Health Consequences of War: A
Brief Review of Research Findings.” World Psychiatry. Feb. 2006. 27 Oct. 2011.<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1472271>
Elliot, Justin. “How a Rolling Stone Profile Wrecked Stanley McCrystal’s Reputation.” TPM
News. 22 June, 2010. 27 Oct. 2011. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/how-a-rolling-stone-profile-wrecked-generals-reputation.ph
