My Pen

I wrote the first draft of this entry in pen--specifically, a Cross Townsend Medalist Chrome with a .7mm gel rolling ball tip. I've been using this pen as my every-day writing tool for more than ten years. I write with it in my journal all day long. I also write my drafts of poems and other writing with this pen.

It fits my hand. That is to say, I enjoy using it. I like the heft, and I like the way the ink flows--particularly with fine-tipped gel ink, which glides smoothly across the page and doesn't blot the letters together. My only complaint is that one ink cartridge doesn't last very long, so I always make sure I have multiple spares.

 

Even though every poem eventually ends up there, I don't often begin writing with a computer. Poetry isn't a race. I need time to think.  I need space to write in the margins of my initial thinking and to line through things, all of which lets me see through the current version into what I've been thinking along the way.

Early on, I decided I didn't like writing on bright white paper. And I discovered an engineering notebook that had legal-pad-yellow pages with grids instead of lines, as if for designing a widget, to scale. When those were harder to find, I turned to a gridded Moleskine (the 5 x 8 1/2  hard-cover version). I think the grid encourages me to think of my writing as construction, something built rather than strung together.

And if I'm going to go to all that trouble, I want to have tools that will allow me to more fully enjoy the process. This pen does that.

Over the years, I've dented the cap, and I've bent the clip so that it's useless. But I have no intention of replacing it. I've owned two Mont Blancs, but I've lost them both (I suspect they were an attractive nuisance, and others are enjoying them now). And even though it's a presidential souvenir pen (the kind he hands out after signing bills), the Cross is not nearly as expensive as a Mont Blanc. Yet it is still distinctive and expensive enough that I'm motivated to keep track of it.

But if I should lose it or damage it beyond use, I know where to find another one just like it.

Moments Like This Make it All Worthwhile

Moments Like This Make it All Worthwhile

West Point Mess Hall -- 
Not Your Ordinary School Lunch Room

It's fine to say that I write for myself. But if it were true, I wouldn't bother to show the poems to anyone. Even Emily Dickinson, at her most reclusive, had an audience of one with whom she shared her poems before rolling them and tying them with a ribbon and stuffing them in a desk drawer. I want to share my poetry, and I want it to mean something to others.

I was at my 40th reunion last week at West Point, and I gave a copy of General Discharge to the son of one of my classmates while we were having brunch in the cadet mess hall. The book got passed around, as books sometimes are, and one of the others sitting at the table flipped through it, came upon a poem ("Inquisition," for those of you keeping score at home), and barked out a loud laugh.

That in itself was marvelous, but then she said, "I have to take a picture of this and send it to my friend." So she did.

I couldn't have asked for a better response--or a better place for it to have happened. Back at West Point, among those who have similar stories to tell. It meant enough to her to share it with someone else.

Some Poems Worth Your Time: Keith Douglas -- "How to Kill"

Some Poems Worth Your Time: Keith Douglas -- "How to Kill"

Keith Douglas

This is another war poem, by another British soldier, from another war. And for me, its power comes from the way the poem's speaker demystifies the act of killing as a way of repelling the reader from it. It isn't heroic. It's simple. And therein lies the horror.

Here is a link to the poem.

A bit about the form of the poem, because it is important to its meaning. This poem rhymes, often with loose rhyme, but it does. The stanzas are six lines each, and the rhyme scheme is a-b-c-c-b-a.

Think of the rhyme scheme as a progression; it goes up, reaches the top, then goes back the way it came. An arc, perhaps. Or--a parabola.

Bullets and shells travel in an arc. Because mass loses velocity over time and distance, all projectiles are launched upwards (even slightly, in the case of a rifle), because they will fall as they travel out towards their target.

So do balls. Children's balls. And so the poem begins: "Under the parabola of a ball..."

It's a simple transition for the poem's speaker to go from children's games to the game of killing a man during war. It makes the reader pause to think how difficult it should be.

For me, the most memorable line in the poem is this:

"How easy it is to make a ghost."

In the final stanza, with its comparison of a human life to the image of the shadow of a mosquito, I find echoes of Shakespeare's Macbeth ("life is but a walking shadow...").

This is a beautifully crafted poem about a sobering subject.

To add a layer of pathos to all this, Keith Douglas was himself killed in battle--at Normandy, following D-Day.

Some Poems Worth Your Time: “Dulce et Decorum est”--Wilfred Owen

Some Poems Worth Your Time: “Dulce et Decorum est”--Wilfred Owen

If you know Wilfred Owen’s poetry at all, it is probably for this poem, which confronts the idea

From Arlington Cemetery, Washington DC -- "Dulce..."

that war is in any way romantic with the specter of a grisly death as a result of a chlorine gas attack. Part of the power of the poem no doubt comes from our knowledge that Owen himself died as a soldier, just before the end of World War I. It’s not just that he can critique those who never fought because he was there—he actually died there, and the poem speaks to us from beyond the grave (as this poem was only published after his death).




Read the poem here.

The title comes from the Roman poet Horace, and it is the first part of the sentence, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country!

My experience says Owen's kind of cynicism is pretty common among soldiers. There is the thought that politicians and other would-be patriots send soldiers off to war, waving flags and shouting “hurrah,” but they leave the fighting to the likes of Owen. Of us.

In the movie Patton, when he is making his speech in front of the enormous American flag, Patton shows his knowledge of Horace’s words—and, like Owen, he refutes them. He tells his soldiers, “No bastard ever won a war dying for one’s country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for HIS country!” We soldiers know that we are the poor, dumb bastards who will do the dying.

When I was in Korea, it was common practice to stencil a motto of some sort on the windshield of one’s vehicle (my ride was a HMMWV—a “Humvee,” or in the commercial version, a Hummer). I asked my driver to stencil the title of this poem on the windshield, and so he did. DULCE ET DECORUM EST. In stenciled block letters.

It might not surprise you to learn that it bothered him. It bothered him because it was Latin. He didn’t know any Latin, and neither did any of his driver friends. And so it would have been confusing. Second, he didn’t know the poem. More confusion. And my explaining the context didn’t help, since he wasn’t comfortable with the cynicism.

“What do I tell people when they ask me what it means?” he asked me. It was a good question. It was an existential question, really. If this is what you think, then what are we doing here? To borrow from one of my favorite anti-war songs (“And the Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’”), “I ask myself the same question.”

“Tell them it says, ‘How sweet it is!’ in Latin,” I offered. He thought about it, and he decided it might work as an explanation.

And so we drove around, training and inspecting, with our motto on the windshield. He grew used to it. And I relished the inside joke.

Later, on one of our many training exercises, I pulled up to a big meeting at the headquarters tent, and I met another West Pointer, who had read Owen’s poem in his cadet days. He grinned when he saw it and completed the quotation (as Owen does in the final line of the poem, where he calls it “the old lie”—the motto on the chapel at Sandhurst, Britain’s officer training school.)

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” he cried.  Yes, yes! I nodded. We no longer needed our West Point rings to know we were in the club. We shared this poem.

I saw him later, on another exercise. And this time, his vehicle had completed the motto: “PRO PATRIA MORI” it said. To die for one’s country.