A War Poet

This is a paper I wrote for an in depth study in poetry dealing with conflict.  Our class specifically looked at the book by Carolyn Forche, Against Forgetting.  The poet I researched is Bruce Weigl who served in the Vietnam for three years, starting when he was a teenager.  The experiences he had in the war changed his life forever and give him a context for his poetry.

Bruce Weigl: The Impressions Vietnam Left Behind

            The Vietnam War was one of the most destructive wars in history and is resented in the American culture more than thirty years later.  It created a high level of distrust in the government and for the first time depicted the atrocities of war on television.  The violence that the Vietnamese and the American soldiers endured has left a permanent scar on the United States and those soldiers who fought in the war.  Bruce Weigl, the distinguished war poet, fought in the war for three years, starting when he was only nineteen.  His experiences in Vietnam and back in the States post-service led him to write his characteristic emotional and graphic poetry, some of which dealing directly with the images of Vietnam.  In an interview with David Keplinger, a poet himself and a student of Bruce, Weigl admits that “…it did not occur to me to write poems about the war for a long time.  It wasn’t exactly that it hadn’t occurred to me, but I wondered why anyone would want to read about the war because it was already terrible enough” (Keplinger 140).  After the war, Weigl attended Oberlin College and the University of New Hampshire, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Utah.  Bruce Weigl’s experiences in the war are vivid memories that seem to linger in the present.  The terror of Vietnam permeates all of Weigl’s work.

            In Weigl’s memoir Circle of Hanh, he explains, “The fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror” (Weigl 6).  Horror is what drives his poetry, and the source is his dark memories of the war.  Early in Weigl’s career he sent a piece called “Mines” to James Wright who responded, “Out of the horror there rises a musical ache that is beautiful” (Keplinger 141-2).  This was an affirmation of Weigl’s gift to transcend dreadfulness in his poetry, which is exactly his intent.  The main strategy that Weigl uses relies on the sound of words, “words said straight,” to say something so bluntly that the poem portrays a tangible emotion that is not offensive to the reader.  Underneath all of his wrongness is a rightness Keplinger observes.  Weigl views the world objectively and so does his poetry.

             Still, not all of Bruce Weigl’s poetry specifically focuses on the violence and disturbing qualities of the Vietnam War.  There is the same sense of an upset balance of the natural world however.  This describes his poem “The Impossible” which tells a story of an afflicted adult mind shaped by the sexual molestation as a child.  The poem from his collection Archaeology of the Circle has graphic imagery and offensive language, but it still sticks to Weigl’s goal as a writer, proven by the last line, “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what” (Weigl 135).  There is a similarity here that connects the war to the molestation.  The war left an irremovable stain from the soldier’s minds just as the pedophile left one on the seven year old child.  There is something to be said about carrying on after something like this happens in one’s life, and Weigl notes that in his last line as well.  The question asks “what can I do after something like that happens?”  Weigl answers, “It’s hard, but you must struggle with it upfront.” Another similarity reflects the feeling one has when coming back into society after the atrocity has taken place.  To the child molested, “a black wave/washed over my brain, changing me/so I could not move among my people in the old way” (Weigl 134).  To the surviving soldier, he was met with a disapproving US population and the terror of PTSD once back from the war. 

            Most of Bruce Weigl’s poetry relies on a story telling technique, furthering his straight forward style.  In his poem “Song of Napalm” from the self-titled collection, Weigl tells a story where he witnesses a rainstorm and is reminded of his time in Vietnam.  He finds similarities between branches and barbed wire, thunder and mortar, horse pasture and rice paddy.  He explains that he tries to put these images of war out of his mind, and he thinks he finally does.  All in the poem is not gruesome so far, but as he closes his eyes he still sees “the girl/running from her village, napalm/stuck to her dress like jelly,/her hands reaching for the no one/ who waits in waves of heat before her” (Weigl 34).  Just as the details of the Vietnam War affect every aspect of Weigl’s life, they affect his poetry.

            Some of Weigl’s poetry expresses the loss of context between generations. The United States views Vietnam as something that happened to it, but for the Vietnamese it was a life changer.  Another poem from Archaeology of the Circle, shows this when Weigl tells a story of a Vietnamese woman he met during the war.  “Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag” shows how unnatural and inhumane war is.  The poem describes a quaint woman offering Weigl water who told him that she saw the planes bomb her childhood home.  The terror of that day is a worm that digs inside her, she explains to him.  She doesn’t blame him however, but Weigl also has a worm inside of him. He writes “…no words can bring the burning city back” (Weigl 98).  The United States is safe at home while the Vietnamese suffer the real consequences of war.  He continues, “…she told me I should leave./All night I ached for her and for myself/and nothing I could think or pray/would make it stop” (Weigl 98).  Weigl is uneasy because he knows how recognizes things are in the States and how wrong it is to make people suffer this way.  The effect of war is as tangible as a gentle woman who lost everything. 

            Bruce Weigl once said, “To be a writer is to accept who you are, your background…the whole landscape of your past” (Riley 46).  He writes about what he knows and what shaped him living before and after the war.  The war created a context in which Weigl lives his life.  “Snowy Egret” in Song of Napalm shows the psychological aspect of war by telling a story of an adolescent boy who has shot an egret and is attempting to bury it in the backyard because he is frightened of what he has done.  Weigl writes, “His man’s muscled shoulders/Shake with the weight of what he can’t set right no/matter what,/But one last time he tries to stay a child, sobbing/Please don’t tell” (Weigl 48).  Weigl’s perspective changed when after his time in the war.  Something was stolen from him.  He was not ready to see what he saw.

            In Against Forgetting, Weigl’s war poetry is cited as a truth-teller for what really happened in the war.  It is a reality to him and to the other Vietnam War poets in the book that real people die in war.  To the American people, the dead are just names and bodies, nothing more.  Bruce Weigl’s life and poetry is affected by the war in almost every way.  His poetry shows that no one can forget the images he witnessed.  It also describes everything in life being a reminder of the horror he saw in Vietnam.  The horror is his focal point, and making it beautiful is his life goal. 

Works Cited

Forché, Carolyn. Against forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

Keplinger, David. "On Bruce Weigl: Finding a Shape for the Litany of Terror." War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 12.2 (2000): 141. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO.

Rielly, Edward J. "Out of the landscape of his past." Journal of American Culture (01911813) 16.3 (1993): 47. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO.

Weigl, Bruce. The circle of Hanh: a memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Weigl, Bruce. Archaeology of the Circle. New York: Grove Press, 1999.

Weigl, Bruce. Song of Napalm. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Print.