The focus of this set of exercises is an excellent poem by Jim Northrup about the experience of war. Because poetry in America now connotes flowers and feelings and touchy-feely-ness1, you wouldn't necessarily think of war and poetry going together well. This belief, that there is something feminine about poetry, is a recent prejudice, though. Oddly2, novels were considered to be girly when the were invented, but somehow that flipped over. Some of the most acclaimed poetry in American (and world) history is about the horrors and the glories of war.
If you're interested, here's some:
- I heard an amazing story on the radio about a Vietnam hero who was locked alone in a POW camp for years. To keep from going crazy, he composed poetry and tapped it out in code to his soldiers through the wall. Here's a link to the article and the audio track that I heard.
- Walt Whitman, the most important American poet who ever lived (and maybe the best), lived through the Civil War. When it broke out Whitman moved to Washington, D.C. and volunteered at hospitals to help the wounded soldiers. He then turned these experiences into a number of poems in the one book he spent his whole life writing, "Leaves of Grass."
- One of the most famous poems to come out of World War II, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrett, is, one, kind of horrifying, and, two, plays a cool game with point of view (don't read it if you're squeamish).
1. "Touchy-feely-ness" is a word I just made up now. I took the hyphenated word "touchy-feely," which I wanted because it has a connotation of making fun of feelings. I needed it to be a noun though, and "touchy-feely" is an adjective, so I tacked the suffix "-ness" onto it, which makes is a noun that means "possessing the quality of being touchy-feely." I chose to write it "touchy-feely-ness" and not "touchy-feeliness" because I wanted to keep the matching y's. I can do that since I made the word.
2. Here, I am using "oddly" as an adverb to open a sentence, which is a technique I like. Teachers like it because it creates a variety of sentence openings, which I don't especially care about, but I like it because it slaps a feeling over the whole sentence right away. I want the reader to understand right away that I want an odd feeling, so I put the "oddly" out in front. The rule is usually to keep words as near as you can to the words that they modify, but the "ly" lets the reader know that I mean the word to modify the verb, "considered." I want the oddness to permeate the whole sentence, so I put it out front. That's also why, if you are ever writing a story, please write the sentence like this: Mary whispered, "Could we go somewhere and talk for a minute?" instead of "Could we go somewhere and talk for a minute?" Mary whispered. If you write it the second way, the reader doesn't know that Mary's whispering until they have already said the words in their head in a non-whisper. That drives me nuts. I know that I got off topic, here, but these are footnotes, you know? If you're bored, you can just stop reading.
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