peter robinson
The poet deftly brings together the two sides of this theatre where both are players,
butplayers with little or no agency in their fates. Many aspects of the civilians’
war didn’t get into the poetry at all—for reasons connected with cunning, petty
criminality, and survival, as revealed some fifty years later, by Fisher’s poem ‘Item’.^75
There have been a great many wars since 1945, which have included the sustained
bombing campaigns against the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese, as well
as briefer air attacks on such cities as Tripoli, Belgrade, and Baghdad, on refugee
camps, insurgent strongholds, on towns and villages, with incalculable and certainly
uncalculated civilian casualties. What with the invention of the Internet, the writing
of protest poems against such horrors as are reported on the news media has become
a part of our contemporary scene.^76 When such writing aspires to be memorably
significantwarpoetry,itfacesdifficultiesonlytoosimilartothoseoutlinedinlooking
at work from the mid-twentieth century’s wars—ones that have been aggravated
by the familiarity of the spectacle in newsreel and television footage. This can be
emblematically illustrated by John Tranter’s ‘Guernica’, written during the 1970s:
Take the Stuka staking out the air
with banshee breath; the bombing pilot
has a dark complexion, and his thumb on the button
is very easily dealing death.^77The assonance and alliteration in these lines (‘Take the Stuka staking’) suggest
a theme practically pre-packaged for poetry. Tranter’s poem is not so much a
protest poem as a poem protesting the pointlessness of protest: ‘There’s no use
questioning’, it begins. ‘Guernica’ ends, though, by reversing its perspective—not
the dive-bomber pilot with his finger on the button, but the anti-aircraft gunner with
his on the trigger: ‘The blasting Oerlikon executes a rhyme|and strips the pilot from
his sight.’ A similarly ready-made fluency infects the pun on ‘sight’: both eyesight
and gun-sight. The poem concludes by returning to its protest against complaint:
‘There’s no use cornering the gunner in his grief.|Hisfingerrestsalongtheringof
night.’ And the poem, too, has executed a rhyme. Tranter’s is a poetry of belatedness;
here he effectively addresses difficulties with such belatedness in the poetry of war.
Adorno foresaw something of this, writing about the counter-productive result
of inventing the term ‘genocide’: ‘the unspeakable has been cut down to size at
theverymomentthatitisprotestedagainst’.^78 Sensing something of the like in
the social demand for emotive response in art, Donald Davie’s ‘Rejoinder to a
Critic’ retorts:
(^75) Fisher, ‘Item’, inThe Long and the Short of It, 256–8. There are some poems of the ‘Home Front’
in Gardner (ed.),Terrible Rain, 125–34.
(^76) See the ‘Poets Against War’ website at<www.poetsagainstwar.net>and the instant anthology:
Todd Swift (ed.),100 Poets Against the War(Cambridge: Salt Publications, 2003).
(^77) John Tranter, ‘Guernica’, inSelected Poems(Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), 45.
(^78) Adorno, ‘The Paragraph’, inCan One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney
Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 60.