Tag: Amalie Flynn

Forty-Two American Iraq-and-Afghanistan War Poets

Soldiers Patrolling Wheatfield, Khost Province, Afghanistan (USAF-ISAF photo)

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2021: The links to the poems by the following poets are unfortunately broken: Nicole Goodwin, Colin Halloran, Lynn Houston, Victor Inzunza, Dunya Mikhail, and Brian Turner.

I am leaving the entries in place for now, in hopes the links will be restored and to alert readers that the poets and their poems are well worth seeking out by other means.

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To honor National Poetry Month, below are poems by forty American writers that reflect and engage America’s 21st-century wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, directly, indirectly, or possibly only in my mind.* They run the gamut from the nation’s poet-laureate to MFA-honed to raw, and are written by veterans, spouses, and interested civilian observers, but they’re all great individually and collectively they articulate the nation’s crazy play of emotions as it sought redress for the sting of the 9/11 attacks. Many thanks to the authors for writing them and much love also for online media sites that feature poets and poetry–please read them, support them, share them, and spread the word.

The links should take you directly to each of the poems, except for Jeremy Stainthorp Berggren’s and Maurice Decaul’s, which are featured on the Warrior Writers page. An additional click on “Writing” will get you in the ballpark, and you can figure it out from there. If you discover a dead link or that access to a poem is blocked by a pay-wall, please let me know.

*Seth Brady Tucker’s “The Road to Baghdad” probably draws on Tucker’s experience in the 1990 Gulf War, but was first published in 2011 and can certainly be read as a contemporary war poem.

1.  Graham Barnhart, “What Being in the Army Did.” Beloit Poetry Journal.

2. Chantelle Bateman, “PTSD.” Apiary Magazine.

3. Jeremy Stainthorp Berggren, “Real Vet, Fake Vet.” Warrior Writers.

4. Marvin Bell, “Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002.” The New Yorker.

5. Benjamin Busch,“Madness in the Wild.” Slippery Elm.

6. Eric Chandler, “The Stars and Stripes is Free.”  Line of Advance.

7. Liam Corley, “A Veteran Observes the Republic and Remembers Ginsberg.” The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

8. Maurice Decaul, “Shush.” Warrior Writers.

9. Jehanne Dubrow, “Much Tattooed Sailor Aboard the USS New Jersey.” poets.org.

10. Elyse Fenton, “Word from the Front.” Reed Magazine.

11. Amalie Flynn, “Where” and “Know.” New York Times.

12. Frederick Foote, “Birth Rights.” The Piker Press.

13. Kate Gaskin, “The Foxes.” poets.org.

14. Nicole Goodwin, “In Medusa’s Arms.” The Moxie Bee.

15. D.A. Gray, “Makeshift: The Mortar’s Whistle/Transubstantiation.” Sewanee Review

16. Colin D. Halloran, “I Remember.” Drunken Boat.

17. Pamela Hart, “Penelope at the Shooting Range.” Heron Tree.

18. Lynn Houston, “At the Harbor Lights Motel After You Return.”  As It Ought To Be.

19. Victor Inzunza, “The Part of Ourselves We’re Afraid Of.” Pacific Review.

20. Brock Jones, “Explaining the Unexplainable.” Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.

21. Shara Lessley, “The Test.” Missouri Review.

22. Hugh Martin, “Ways of Looking at an IED.” Blackbird.

23. Phil Metres, “Hung Lyres (for Mohamedou Ould Slahi).” Poets Reading the News.

24. Dunya Mikhail, “The Iraqi Nights.” Poetry Foundation.

25. Abby E. Murray, “Asking for a Friend.” RHINO/Frontier Poetry.

26. Jenny Pacanowski, “Strength in Vulnerability.” Women Veterans’ Rhetoric.

27. Drew Pham, “How to Remember Your Ancestors’ Names.” The WWrite Blog.

28. Robert Pinsky, “The Forgetting.” Poetry in Multimedia.

29. Kevin Powers, “Improvised Explosive Device.” Bookanista.

30. Frances Richey, “Letters.” poets.org

31. Roy Scranton, “And nevermore shall we turn back to the 7-11.” Painted Bride Quarterly.

32. Solmaz Sharif, “Look.” PEN America.

33. Charlie Sherpa, “Toward an understanding of war and poetry told (mostly) in aphorisms.”  Wrath-Bearing Tree.

34. Juliana Spahr, “December 2, 2002.” poets.org.

35. Lisa Stice, “While Daddy’s at Training, Our Daughter Asks Questions.” the honest ulsterman.

36. Nomi Stone, “The Door.” Poets.org.

37. Seth Brady Tucker, “The Road to Baghdad.” Colorado Poets Center.

38. Brian Turner, “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center.” Poetry Daily.

39. Paul Wasserman, “Fifteen Months, Twenty-Two Days.” Time Now.

40. Ben Weakley, “No Take Backs.” Line of Advance.

41. Johnson Wiley, “Shooting Stars of Kuwait” and “A Mother’s Son Returned.” Time Now.

42. Donna Zephrine, “War Sees No Color.”  Military Experience & the Arts.

War Memoir/Poetry: Amalie Flynn’s Wife and War

I’m curious why there haven’t been more post-9/11 war novels written from the perspective of a wife and that portray marriage and family life in the period after redeployment. Have we seen any? Siobhan Fallon’s collection of short stories You Know When the Men are Gone, when it appeared in 2011, seemed to announce that marital tension wrought by war would be THE subject most attractive to talented war writers and alert readers. And yet, since then, not so much of anything, really. A story here and there. Some poetry. But no long fiction, from Fallon or anyone else.

Maybe the options for portraying martial domestic life are limited. A chirpy story of foibles on the family homefront while Daddy’s off killing Taliban and Al Qaeda bad guys followed by a happy family trip to Disneyland seems neither serious nor dramatic enough, you know what I mean? A failure of imagination might also be involved. Perhaps, though, it just takes guts to depict the guts of marital strain. The blogosphere is full of writing by savvy wives of deployed service members. Writers such as Andria Williams and Angie Ricketts I’m sure don’t miss much, and their posts give the impression that they could say a lot more even than they do about military married life. But as wives of officers, they, perhaps, are bound by the same chin-up, perpetually optimistic codes of propriety that bind their husbands, and that might be what keeps them from telling all the stories, even in fictional form, that they might. I know it’s true for me, still an active-duty officer, as I think about writing short stories and novels. A little too much interest in keeping up appearances, which sometimes earns officers the accusation that they “are not real people,” is even more toxic for a would-be writer of fiction. You’ve got to put it out there, and you can’t be afraid when it gets a little messy.

Wife and WarAn interesting twist on this line-of-inquiry is afforded by Amalie Flynn’s Wife and War. Subtitled “the memoir,” it more accurately is a memoir-in-verse, as Flynn has spaced out her sentences and paragraphs a few to a page in a way that resembles long-line poetry and mixed these passages with more conventional snippets of lyric verse. Most of the lyric passages refer to the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, which Flynn witnessed. An example reads:

But what I didn’t know then is what marriage is like, how it is a net,
like the tulle of my wedding dress. How it is.

The wire mesh, found inside a wall,

Found out on a street, after a building falls down.

How it entangles you, and how hard it is to walk away.

Flynn has lived through a lot more than just the horrifying experience of being present at Ground Zero. An equally traumatizing event from childhood, a miscarriage (or two?), and a rocky patch in her relationship with her Navy officer husband following his deployment all make their way into Wife and War’s 400+ pages. My interest here though is not Flynn’s life but her choice of poetry to tell her story. Long narrative poems haven’t been in literary fashion since the first half of the nineteenth century, but I can understand their appeal to contemporary writers looking for a means of expression more starkly stated than diffusely explained while still being more suggestive than explicit. The modus of Wife and War is to render a striking scene, event, or image minimalistically and then hint at rather than explore and analyze the cluster of emotions, perspectives, and implications that might accrue to it. For example, on one page:

I am still awake, in this new house, our bed, and my husband’s arm,
crossing over my chest, like a deadbolt.

[Next page]

And I think about the mechanism of a lock. The safety on the M4 my
husband carried for one year in Afghanistan,locked but ready.Or the way
we sleep, too often, now, now that he is home, how we sleep, together, in
our bed, but locked on opposite sides. Or our hearts, that organ we assign
too much to, or maybe, not enough, locked inside of our rib cages.

[Next page]

That’s good, plenty good enough as is for most. But there’s also a lot of white space left on the page that might be used to fill in details, provide context, sketch in character (and more characters), explain a little more, if not better, in either fact or fiction. Kudos to Flynn for thinking how the resources of literature might be brought to bear on one’s personal narrative, kudos to her for letting us see the shape that marriage to a service member might take. Wife and War’s amalgam of memoir and verse probably won’t inaugurate a new public affection for narrative poetry, but it does bravely beckon other war writers to give the spaces inside a military marriage–its guts–the attention they deserve.

Amalie Flynn’s Wife and War: The Memoir. 2013.