The Center for Poetry and Poetics

“The pages [in this volume] are far-reaching in what they cover, though insufficient to match the global reach of war in our lifetime. Nonetheless, the symposium’s twenty-eight contributors touch on conflicts in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the translocal violence of the war on terror. . . . In writing about war, one necessarily takes on a problem of perspective in which ethics, religion, politics, history, psychology, anthropology, and more are implicated. The contributions to this symposium demonstrate a range of solutions to that problem, some hard won, others provisional. Poems, stories, memoirs, and essays, their individual successes are magnified by the context, for the scale of war is such that no single standpoint can encompass its meaning. Nor can a single symposium. But perhaps the work gathered here at least yields a glimpse.”

—from the Preface

Contents

Symposium: Literature and War

Mona Kareem, “America, America!”

Steve Benson, “Revolving War”

Kristin Prevallet and Yamuna Sangarasivam, “War Prompts: I Remember”

Howard McCord, “Wars I Have Known”

Pierre Joris, “From: Exile, The Only Dwelling”

Merle L Bachman, “Writing Fire: Reflections on Yiddish Poetry and War”

Anthony Rudolf, “Obstinate Hope: Case Studies of Poetry Written/Read”

Richard Berengarten, “War, Shadows, Mirrors: Castings from The Culture of Lies by Dubravka Ugrešić” Ifi Amadume, “Other Ways of Fighting War to Fight and Live for Another Day” and “Kamaka (A Dialogic Epic Poem)”

Stephen Collis, “Common Animal Being: A Natural History of Destruction”

Adam Gilbert, “The Impossibility of Writing About War”

Tracie Morris, “There’s Alwats Time” and “Arwald The King”

Shira Wolosky, “War Against Poetry”

Mark Wallace, “The Last War”

Jonathan Vincent, “The Theme of War in American Literary Studies: A Testimony for Our Time”

Baron Wormser, “From Tom o’ Vietnam”

Robert Whelan, “Literature and Movies from the Viet Nam War”

Pina Piccolo, “Poetry and War, the Motion of Social Change and the Movement: Reflections on Creativity and Poets’ Opposition to US Wars of Empire During Desert Storm”

Ammiel Alcalay, “Imperial Abhorrences (& Other Abominations)”

Murat Nemat-Nejat, “Eleven Septembers Later: Readings of Benjamin Hollander’s Vigilance”

Rachel Zolf, “On War and Flesh”

Ryan Stovall, “Two, or More”

Ann Keniston, “A blip on their]//radar’: Looking, Surveillance and the Aftermath of (Post-)Trauma in Contemporary American War Poetry”

Nahid  Rachlin, “Ayesha”

Brooke Sheridan, “Service”

Philip Metres, “Never / Enough: Afterward on Paideuma’s Symposium on War and Literature”