Whether it's Brian Turner's Here, Bullet, a soldier-poet's meditation on the Iraq War or Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," a cry from the heart of World War I, literature has never lacked for war poetry or soldier poets.
Poets like Owen, Turner, Siegfried Sassoon or Randall Jarrell or Howard Nemerov derive their authority from firsthand witness. Nothing can rival that, and that is the predicament of antiwar poets who, unless they too have soldiered, must find their authority elsewhere. When we compare poets who have been to war with poets who address war—and they are often one and the same—we do so for the most part with a rickety and lacking definition of the nature of violence. War is not the ultimate violence. There is violence going on under our noses every day, and it is often the cause of war-rape, molestation, verbal abuse, social injustice. All of us soldier through these iterations of violence and are in this sense authentic veterans of the experience. Seen in this light, poets who have gone to war do not seem to have greater license to speak of it than those who did not, and the degree to which a culture gives them greater license is the measure of that culture's denial of the squalid devastation war inflicts on all of us.
Mere indignation readily degenerates into polemic, and much antiwar poetry suffers from an inauthentic voice that grates on warlike and poetic sensibilities alike; it has the sound of politicization. Doves, after all, can be as dogmatic as hawks.
Gregg Mosson's Questions of Fire excitingly avoids this pitfall with its powers of penetration, observation, and introspection. Mosson, unlike many antiwar poets, does not address matters he can't possibly know intimately. Rather he examines his own and others' responses. Each poem, then, becomes an alchemical process in which the poet pours raw experience into the alembic of the poem, introduces the elixir of his own introspection, and ennobles the outcome with an illuminative cognition.
But before I venture further into the morass of category I would like to make the case that most poems, if not all, written since 9/11 carry within them a response to the attacks' nihilism, even poems that make no mention of the attacks or our often self-destructive response to them. This is simply because poetry is the best expression of the sensibility of a period. This raises the larger issue of the distortions that occur when category and genre are used facilely. There is a tendency, bred by the critical and gate-keeping establishments, to use categorization and the assignment of genre like shots plinked at sitting ducks. Once a label is attached to a work of art an aura of been-there-done-that engulfs it and no further inquiry is encouraged. The critic has bagged the work, whether he has praised it or not, and the work becomes secondary to the critic's talent for describing it. This is part of what has resulted in the ascension of marketers over editors.
Alfred Lord Tennyson probably wrote "The Charges of the Light Brigade" six weeks after the Crimean War tragedy that it addresses. What he knew of the fatal charge-which resulted from a series of bureaucratic blunders and rivalries-he had read in newspapers, just as most contemporary antiwar poets derive their information. Tennyson famously celebrated the bravery of soldiers in the teeth not only of Russian defenders but their own foolhardily generals. It's worth recalling this because the Crimean War was the first war actually covered by the press, and it changed the way war is perceived.
Tennyson's famously heroic poem is not an overtly antiwar poem, but it may be read as one. He was a thoughtful if somewhat unquestioning celebrant of ordinary soldiers confronted by enemy bravery and back-stabbed by decorated asses. There isn't an ounce of introspection in the poem. It has none of Mosson's humility and contemplation. Reflection is absent, and the entire work is based on received ideas, whereas Mosson is witness to what he writes about, not to war itself but to the horrific psychic damage it inflicts upon society.
There are many ways to decry and deplore, witness Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a prescient protest against the same kind of greed and egoism that diseases our society today. But for some of us, myself for example, Howl, influential as it almost instantly was, is a bit pretentious and lacking in authority.
Questions of Fire isn't going to make the splash Howl made, just as meditative sensibilities usually don't fare well against more operatic ones, and that is more a comment on us than it is on the book. After 9/11 there were those of us who honked horns and waved flags and questioned the other guy's Americanism, and there were those of us who, like Mosson, turned inward and outward at once, examining our place in society, questioning how events had changed our everyday experience of familiar things and each other.
Our situation after 911 was redolent of the probably apocryphal story of the Sufi poet Hafez telling Hulagu Khan that he wouldn't trade the great khan's empire for the mole on his girlfriend's face. We can kiss the khan's ass, which many of us choose to do, or we can attend to the mole, which is what Mosson does.
I think the chief clue to Mosson's work here appears on page 40 in a poem called "To A Co-Worker (While Drinking a Beer)." Before the poem , six unrhymed tercets, Mahatma Ghandi is quoted: Be the change you want to see in the world. To which the poet responds:
toward rational disappointment with the world....
There is no mention of war, but even if nothing in the collection informed us that Gregg Mosson is profoundly concerned with war, with irrational response, the poem would have made clear that the war is a cyclotron in which every particle of poet and poem is hurled about and transformed into creative energy.
Mosson is no amateur prosodist. He understands the uses of haiku, tanka, the Italian terzo, and the French villanelle. The very first poem in the collection, "Words," is an exquisite haiku:
haul us through internal lights,
snap utopias.
It summons Moby Dick without being referential. It's so memorable, in fact, that if you were to encounter Melville after Mosson you would likely remember this poem.
While the first person is the dominant voice in this collection, it by no means defines Mosson's poetics. The poems hint at more ambitious narrative works to come. For example, "Self-Portrait at Thirty-One" begins this way:
Beyond the mind's cage, zone
without words: mudflats of yellow bubble and burst
with brown and orange dust. This is why I gaze at art
in Washington, D.C. at The National Gallery, to flash another's light
into the darkness of myself.
Mosson, in the tradition of Baudelaire and Apollinaire, is moved by paintings, and even when there is no specific mention of them in his poems the poems themselves paint images and color ideas.
A poet who wishes to make a point, whether it's about the Faustian marriage of war and greed or the Holocaust or the Arab-Israeli conflict, is immediately at a staggering disadvantage, because the reader is on guard against the poet's intent. Something is being sold and the reader is not entirely sure he wants to buy.
For this reason one could argue that the longer contemplative poems in Questions of Fire, particularly those that overtly address the warlike behavior of society, should not have been allowed to impinge on the shorter lyrical poems. Conversely, one could argue that the shorter poems temper the longer ones and the reader as well. I found myself immediately drawn to poems like "Portrait of Home":
eddies from the stereo. The apartment becalmed as we both work,
city blurred in repetitive rain—I have more than I can name and
as rhythmic breathing vessels we flow
through what must be arranged
into what we own.
Whereas, I had to work through the three-page poem, "Riding to The Anti-War March, New York City, March 20, 2004." I resented the overt historicity of the title, I resented my own resistance to the poem. But in the end I came to see the poem as the work of a journalist-poet capable of carrying his work beyond reportage into the subjective. The poem ultimately reminded me that in spite of all our new technology we still endure 19th Century journalism, as if Freud, Jung, Adler and the others had been kooks. And that is surely no way to voyage the 21st Century.
So Questions of Fire is, finally, not only a collection of poems but reportage fired in the kiln of poetics. Indeed the reader is an aspect of the kiln. Mosson is extraordinarily engaged in one of the most urgent issues of our time, and he has decided that he does not have to be either a reporter or a poet; he can be and is both. As a lifelong journalist and poet, I admire this inordinately, and my qualms about how well it is carried off in this collection are nothing compared to the ambition of the project and the compelling insights and recognitions of the poems. Mosson's work emboldens me to say that if there had been a 20th Century press during the Trojan War it would nonetheless have been better reported by Homer.
I regard "Portrait of Home" as quintessentially French. For me it recalls Pierre Bonnard's interiors, Apollinaire's long lines and casual felicities, such as the near rhyme of rain and name and flow and own. I admire, too, how the poem conveys the rarely summoned definition of "apartment" as the state of being apart from something. Most poems fall short of such subtlety.
This is Mosson's second book of poems. His first was Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River Press). He has since 2003 published the journal Poems Against War. He has worked as a writer, teacher, and independent journalist since the 1990s. We have every reason to look forward to his next book.—Djelloul Marbrook