Should the condemned drug-crims be let off by the Indonesian president,
Kinsella can feel part of the campaign…
Coincidentally. I have joined a poetry group near me in Seattle, and the convener has passed round various poems from Shaks to now.
This by James Wright was no doubt celebrated for a time, but I’d missed out on it.
What incited it seems so atrocious - though googling the US army officer turns up
angles not hinted at in the ‘Notes’ below the poem.
Curious about it all - then and now…
Doug will surely have an informed response.
[not that the Kinsella and the Wright are similar poems just occasioned by bad news]
A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter, 1966
BY JAMES WRIGHT
Varus, varus, gib mir meine Legionen wieder
Quick on my feet in those Novembers of my loneliness,
I tossed a short pass,
Almost the instant I got the ball, right over the head
Of Barrel Terry before he knocked me cold.
When I woke, I found myself crying out
Latin conjugations, and the new snow falling
At the edge of a green field.
Lemoyne Crone had caught the pass, while I lay
Unconscious and raging
Alone with the fire ghost of Catullus, the contemptuous graces tossing
Garlands and hendecasyllabics over the head
Of Cornelius Nepos the mastodon,
The huge volume.
At the edges of Southeast Asia this afternoon
The quarterbacks and the lines are beginning to fall,
A spring snow,
And terrified young men
Quick on their feet
Lob one another’s skulls across
Wings of strange birds that are burning
Themselves alive.
NOTES: (Note: Carpenter, a West Pointer, called for his own troops to be napalmed rather than have them surrender. General Westmoreland called him “hero” and made him his aide, and President Johnson awarded him a Silver Star for courage.)
James Wright, “A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter, 1966” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
[I’d add a note on Varus - the general who lost legions to German warriors (and suicided) leaving Augustus to cry out to him - in German!
And Carpenter had been a top footballer at West Point.]
Max
On Feb 7, 2015, at 13:29, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well said, and writ, Mr Kinsella
>
>
> djb
>
> On 7 February 2015 at 16:39, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> and then there’s the comments…
>>
>> but I’m afraid the pen won’t be mightier here…
>>
>> Doug
>> On Feb 6, 2015, at 1:20 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>>
>> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/06/nothing-is-made-new-my-poem-and-plea-that-clemency-be-granted-to-sukumaran-and-chan
>>>
>>> Dear President Joko Widodo,
>>>
>>> I am the Australian poet, writer and academic, John Kinsella.
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