>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Robert Casper: Hello. Welcome to the Library of Congress, everyone. Nice to see you at noon on a Thursday. My name is Rob Casper. I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library, and I'm honored to present the first of our programs associated with the Library's Exhibit, Echoes of the Great War, American Experience of World War I. I'm going to see, before I go any further, I want to just check something else out. I'm just checking. How does it sound like there? Can you hear me okay? All right. This exhibition in the Southwest Gallery of of the second floor of the library's Historic Thomas Jefferson Building across the street examines the upheaval of World War as Americans confronted it both at home and abroad. It considers the debates and struggles that surrounded US engagement, explores US military and Homefront mobilization and the immensity of industrialized warfare and touches on the war's effects as an international peace settlement was negotiated, national borders were redrawn, and soldiers returned to reintegrate into American society, a theme that Yusef will talk about a little bit later in his presentation. Today's event is presented in conjunction with the library's Veteran's Day programming. This programming is part of the Library of Congress Veterans History Projects programming efforts that began on November 7th and will continue on until November 11th. Congress created the Veterans History Project in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the first-hand remembrances of America's War veterans from World War I through the most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. To find out more about the Library's Veterans Day program and its World War I exhibit, you can visit our website, www.loc.gov. If you want to see our literary programming, you can go to www.loc.gov/poetry. We also have a signup sheet in the foyer if you want to join our Events Listserve and get more information about the future of literary programming. Before I tell you more about this event, let me ask you to turn off your cell phones and any other electronic devices you have that might interfere with the program. Also, I'd like to let you know that this program is being recorded for webcast, and your participation gives us permission to broadcast this event. So, just so you know. The focus of the Poetry and Literature Centers World War I programming is to link the literature of the Great War to the poems and stories of today's American poets and writers. For our kickoff event, we've asked one of our greatest poets to set the stage for the series. You can read more about Yusef Komunyakaa in your program, which should be on your chairs, and you can see his many honors, including a Bronze Star, which he received as Managing Editor of the Southern Cross newspaper during the Vietnam War. I first encountered Yusef's work over a quarter century ago when a professor assigned Dien Cai Dau in our Creative Writing workshop, and I'm excited to say that Dien Cai Dau is for sale in the back. I will never forget the experience of reading this book. I've seen war through the beautiful and violent lyricism of We Never Know, and of encountering the Vietnam War first through facing it, one of the most powerful poems of our time. I will always be grateful to Yusef for what he taught me in that book, and I'm thankful he is here for us today to remind us what poems can do to contend with man's most tragic engagements. Please join me in welcoming Yusef Komunyakaa. [ Audience Applause ] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: It's a great honor to be here. I would like to say upfront that I'm not a historian, but I'm a poet who loves history. I'm going to start by reading some poems from the Great War. The first poem is entitled, I'm Being Asked to Write a War Poem, by W.B. Yates. I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent; for in truth, we have no gift to set a statesman right. He has had enough embattling. Who can please a young girl and the indolence of her youth, or an old man upon a winter's night? I suppose in a certain sense, Yates' poem is a warning, but I'm going to just proceed to a poem entitled the Death of a Soldier by Wallace Stevens. Normally, we don't associate Stevens with World War I. Life, contracts, and death is expected as a season of autumn. A soldier falls. He does not become a three-day's personage imposing his separation, calling for [inaudible] death is absolute and without memorial, as in a season of autumn, when the wind stops. When the wind stops and over the heavens, the clouds go; nevertheless, in their direction. When I think about World War I and the poetry to rise out of that conflict, that war, that bloody war, trench warfare, I think of Chassoon [phonetic]. And that's a poem of his that's read in Texan, and it's called They. I like the fact that it's called They and not Me. The bishop tells us when the boys come back, they will not be the same, for they're that fought in a just cause. They lead the last attack on antichrist. Their comrades' blood has brought new right to greed and honorable race. They have challenged death and dared him face-to-face. We're, none of us, the same. The boys' reply, for George lost both legs and Bill's stone blind. Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die, and Bert's gone. [Inaudible] Atlantic, you're not fine; a chap who serve but hasn't found some change, and they're Bishop said, "The ways of God are strange." Yes. E. Cummings, I have to admit that E Cummings was one of the first poets I engaged with, and I never really associated him with World War I, but here he is, and a strange poem of his called Etcetera. My Sweet Old Etcetera, Aunt Lucy during the recent war could and what is more did tell you just what everybody was fighting for. My sister, Isabel, created hundreds and hundreds of socks, not to mention shirts, fleaproof, ear warmers, etcetera, wristers, etcetera. My mother hoped that I would die, etcetera, bravely, of course. My father used to become hoarse talking about how it was a privilege, and if only he could. Meanwhile, myself, etcetera, lay quietly in the deep mud, etcetera, dreaming, etcetera, of your smile, eyes, knees, and your etcetera. Come by insinuation, right. [ Audience Laughter ] And what gets said and what doesn't get said, I suppose. I think he's having fun, really. The Send-Off by Wilfred Owen. That's another name that really moves to the forefront always when we think about the poetry of World War I. The Send-Off. Down the close, darkening lanes, they sang their way to the siding shed and lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were struck all white with wreath and spray, as men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp stood staring hard, sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed up, they went. They were not ours. We never heard to which front they were sent. Nor where if they yet mock what women sent who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells in wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, may creek back, silent, to village wells up half-known roads. And I'm just going to read two more poems; well, one more poem associated with World War I, and this is slightly different for the simple reason because we get to hear the woman's voice. And that's very important because there were 947,000 women who work in the ammunition plants, and 300 died from TNT poison, or explosions. That's important to know. Women at Munition Making. This is my Mary Collins. Their hands should minister unto the flame of life; their fingers guide the rosy teat, swelling with milk, to the eager mouth of the suckling babe or smooth with tenderness, softly and soothingly. The heated brow of the alien child or stray among the curls of the boy or girl, thrilling to mother love. But now their hands, their fingers are coarsened in munition factories. Their thoughts, which should fly like bees among the sweetest mind; flowers gaining nourishment for the thoughts to be are bruised against the law, kill, kill. They must take part in defacing and destroying the natural body which, certainly during the dispensation in the shrine of the spirit, O God! Throughout the ages, we have seen, again and again, men by Thee created canceling each other, and we have modeled at the seeming annihilation of Thy work. But this goes further, taints the fountain head, mounts like a poison through the Creators every heart. O God, must it anew be sacrificed on Earth? The question at the end of the poem is really, I think, a moment of protest, and I'm thinking about other moments of protest. I'm particularly thinking of an individual by the name of Charles Young. He had done a simple, he had wanted to be, he was a full colonel, and he wanted to be part of the war effort, but he was returned as a full colonel for the simple reason because he was black. Now, he goes to prove that he is agile, that he's physical fit because he rides 500 miles from Wilberforce, Ohio, to DC by horse. And Charles Young comes up again when we think of San Juan Hill because at Wilberforce, he had been instrumental in training troops that ended up at San Juan Hill rescuing the Rough Riders. That was in 1898. What is the situation of the black man and World War I? For me, it's also personal, but I'm going to play this little clip here from a lyric that I wrote a few years ago. And this is about the 369th. >> I go back in time, the times like this, thinking about my brothers fighting overseas. Aha, I go back in time, time like this, thinking about brothers fighting overseas. [ Music ] Hellfighters of Harlem, shaking and studying for [inaudible], study for a number. Doing up the site, [inaudible] they'll set freedom. Singing [inaudible], study for a number, studying for a number. Oh, oh, oh, Jim Crowe over here, start a war over there. >> In basic training, they went to hell. Down Spartanburg, off to World War I with their regimental flags and their French helmets, down in the trenches. But they crossed the tree line, not even giving a few inches of the machine gun fire along the Rhine River, River, River. But when all was said and done, they had legions of honor, brass shining in the air. He was a kid; men who dare. But and Jim Crowe over here to fight a war over there. >> Spare the one [inaudible]; spare the one [inaudible]. >> It's like we're back in time to times like these. Thinking about the brothers fighting overseas. >> Singers now; one, two, [inaudible]; three, four, want to leave [inaudible] One, two, [inaudible] >> Okay. The reason I wrote the lyric had to do with having some history in my psyche that I was wrestling with. First of all, the Hillfighters of Harlem, the 369th, fought under the French flag. Like Americans fought under the French flag. I just wrote an introduction for an anthology inherent in the war, and I talk about my Uncle Jesse. I'm just going to read a couple of paragraphs of that. As I reflect, it seems as if I'm transposed, standing in the atmosphere of a memory, a feeling, a place. I can see the room. I can hear a voice. Usually, I'm listening acutely. In this memory, time is sequential. I'm standing in the living room with my great uncle, where my great uncle is asleep, and I hear him sob and cry. This is not the first time I hear him this way. But in this memory, I am six or seven, and only the way a child can, I ask, "What are you crying about, Uncle Jesse?" He rises, sits on the edge of the couch, takes my hand and says, "I was on a death detail overseas. Soldiers were dropping like flies. We cut trenches in the ice. I learned what dog tags are good for. I put one into the mouth of each dead soldier, and the other dog tag in a canvas bag, and we pushed the dead into ditches until we come back to dig them up." Then, he rose a cigarette from his red canned, a Prince Abbott. My great uncle Jesse was a veteran of World War I. He fought under the French flag because at the time the US military was segregated. This image of him digging up corpses from the trenches recurred in my psyche. It had already begun to direct my childhood play where one fights imaginary wars. But perhaps this knowing also created a real sense of reflection. At only six or seven I wasn't eager to pretend to be dead. I suppose, I'm going to take a slight turn. I'm going to read a poem about one year after the war; it's written in 1919, and you may know this poem, If We Must Die by Claude McKay. If we must die, let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accused lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain; then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, and for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! It's an interesting poem because if we think about what happens after many of the solders return. The war ends in 1918. This is also a moment of great conflict in America, especially if we look at the history of lynching, and that is what essentially Claud McKay is responding to. A lot of the individuals who were lynched are actually vets. The other thing about the poem, If We Must Die, Churchill, World War II, reads the poem to the English people, to Britain. He doesn't say anything about Claude McKay writing it. But it's an interesting moment because the poem has a life out of its context, you know, and that is important. I suppose -- I'm going to read a few of my poems. I'm going to read a few poems from War Horses. I'm going to read from a section called, it's a strange title, Love in a Time of War, but I think you can believe in that, right. Here the old masters of Shock and Awe huddle into War Room, talking iron, fire and sand, alloy, and nomenclature. Their hearts lag against the bowstring as they daydream of Odysseus's bed. But to shoot an arrow through the bull's eye, the 12 axes lined up in a row is to sleep with one's eyes open. Yes, of course, there stands lovely Penelope like a trophy, still holding the brass key against her breast. How did the evening star fall into that room? Lost between plot and loot, the plucked string turns into a lyre, humming praises and curses to the unborned. I want to say, okay, here we are. When our hands caress bullets and grenades or linger on the turrets and luminous wings of Reconnaissance planes, we leave glimpses of ourselves on the polished hardness. We surrender skin, hair, sweat, and fingerprints. The assembly lines hum to our touch, and the grinding wheels record our laments and laughter into the bright metal. I touch your face, your breast, the flower holding a world in focus. We give ourselves to each other, letting the workday slide away. Afterwards, lying there facing the sky, I touch the crescent-shaped war wound. Yes, the oldest prayer is still in my fingertips. Someone's beating a prisoner. Someone's counting red leaves falling outside a clouded window in a secret country. Someone holds back a river, but the next rabbit jab makes him piss on the stone floor. The interrogator orders the man to dig his grave with a teaspoon. The one he loves, her name died last night on his tongue. To revive it, to take his mind off the electric wire, he almost said, There's a parrot in a blue house that knows the password, a woman's name. I said I wouldn't write about Vietnam anymore, and I found myself thinking about the 14, 15 young black men who threw themselves on grenades in Vietnam, and I'm still trying to make some sense out of that. Where does it come from? It's not rehearsed; it's not practiced. Maybe you can help me, but I'm going to read this poem called Grenade. There's no rehearsal to turn flesh into dust so quickly. A hair trigger, a cocked hammer in the brain, a split second between man and infamy. It lands on the ground. A few soldiers duck, and the others are caught in a half-run, and one throws himself down on the grenade. All the watches stop; the flash, smoke, silence; the sound fills the whole day. Flesh and earth fall into the eyes and mouths of men; a dream trapped in midair. They touch their legs and arms, their groins, ears and nose and saying, what happened? Some were crying; others were laughing. Some are almost dancing. Someone tries to put the dead man back together. "He just dove on the damn thing, sir!" The flash, smoke, silence. The day blown apart. For those who can walk away, what is their burden? Shreds, a flash, and bloody rags gathered up and stuffed into a bag. Each breath belongs to him; each song, each curse; every prayer is his. Your body doesn't belong to your mind and soul. Who are you? They remember the man left in the jungle; the others who owe their lives to this phantom. Do they feel like you? Would his loved ones remember him if that little park, a statue erected in his name didn't exist, and does it enlarge their lives? You wish he'd lied down in that closed coffin and not wandered the streets or enter your bedroom at midnight. The woman you love, she'll never understand. Who would? Do you remember what he used to say, "If you give a kite too much string, it'll break free." That unselfish certainty. But you can't remember when you began to live his unspoken dreams. How are we doing for time? Maybe questions. Maybe a dialogue. >> I think that our reading is up. I'm going to take that reading just to ask the first question, which is, it gets at our heart though while we read this [inaudible] series. You began by reading some things from [Inaudible]. To engage here, can you talk a little bit about [inaudible] and War Horses and how those poets and poems matter to you connected to that work, how you might have felt, continuing the kind of theme [phonetic] versions of those poems were engagement. Yusef Komunyakaa: Well, it's interesting, with, especially with Yates, because as a teenager, I would read Yates to my cousin, and don't even ask me where that came from, but that was the situation. But I never really thought of Yates as a war poet in any way; and yet, when I go back and look at his work, I do see flourishes; I do see moments there. Even with the automatic writing as such, you know. But when I started writing, okay, I thought I would write, not about Vietnam but poems generated through my imagination, especially when we think its realism. Those were the poets I was really reading, the surrealist poets, and also some of the Negritude poets, such as images there, [inaudible]. How did I get to the war poems? I'll tell you exactly how. I was in Louisiana, and it was a summer; it was August, and I was renovating a house, and what I liked to do if I'm doing physical labor, I like physical labor, especially carpentry. I keep a pad of paper close by, and I would descend the ladder and write a line down, and I found myself writing a poem titled, Somewhere near Phu Bai, and I just couldn't stop writing the Vietnam related poems. I said I would stop writing those poems as such. Yes? [ Inaudible Speaker ] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Somewhere near Phu Bai. The moon cuts through night trees like a circular saw, white hot, and the guard's shot. I leaned on the sandbags, taking aim at whatever. Hundreds of blue still stars cut a path, fanning out, shiver for a second. If anyone's there, don't blame me. I count the shapes ten meters out front over and over, making sure they're always there. I don't dare blink an eye. The white painted back of the Claymore mines like quarter moons. They say Victor Charlie will paint the other sides and turn the blast towards you. If I hear a noise, will I push the button and blow myself away? The moon grazes treetops. I count the Claymores again. Thinking about buckshot kneaded into the plastic C4 of the brain, counting sheep before I know it. So, yeah, that's the point that got me to the Vietnam-related poems. Yes? >> So, my question is [inaudible]. So, my question is I've been to European [inaudible] Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. >> Many of them said I never thought about talking of it. Some of them said I never want to talk about this. And some of them talk about it and say I never want to talk about it again. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. Yes. >> When you wrote those poems, was it cathartic, or was it like driving or drove into a bed of oil where everything came [inaudible]? >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Well, yes, everything came forth for the simple reason because I think it had something to do with the way my mind works; not to talk about things as much as to visit them again and again through a severe silence, a kind of meditation. But I think it has a lot to do with where I grew up in Louisiana, a small town, that I would venture out into the trees, into nature, and I took in all of those elements; and perhaps, in a certain sense, I was rehearsing being a poet. I'm particularly thinking about the small things, how we take in the small things, not the monumental, but those small things that are accumulative, and before you know it, we have a surprising world at our hands, you know, the psyche. That's what I feel. I don't know if I, if I'd grown up in the city, I don't know if I would write poems in the same way. It would be entirely different because we internalize a terrain, and that internalized terrain becomes an overlay for how we experience and see the world. So, that's what I believe. Yes? >> Yes. Just to continue on that note, could you describe your writing process a little bit more because as you mentioned when you were doing carpentry work and you have a pencil and paper near you. How do you write a poem? Are you involved in a workshop? Do you write a poem and share it with somebody else and get the feedback? Do you write a poem five, six, or seven times before it's considered a poem? Just describe the process by which you write a poem. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: I often say that I love the principles of jazz and proposition. So, I write everything down. Upon initially maybe 100 lines, and I very systematically cut it back to 40 lines or 30 lines. Sometimes, I have the allusion that a poem is complete that I return to and cut it in half. Also, revising, sometimes I start at the bottom of the poem and read the poem back up through and see how many exit points are there, places where the poem possibly could end because I think we want the reader to know everything, when in fact maybe that's the wrong direction to go because the reader is also an instrument of inquiry, of genius, and a cold creator of meaning. The reader is cold creator of meaning. Yes. I believe that. Yes? >> Could you about with your fellow Americans how you combine surrealism and use it? I'm thinking about folks like you are experienced. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: It starts with define, and I read everything aloud as I'm writing. So, I think maybe that's part of it. Also, if we think about it, I remember Richard Hugo saying something very important. He said, "You know, I write poems in long and short lines," And I didn't know what he was talking about when I first heard that until I really thought about it over and over. What he was talking about essentially was a kind of modulation, the movement of those lines across the page, not just, you know, straight down, a vertical plunge with a certain number of syllables per line because we don't really think or speak that way. To just hear it; you don't have to dance it, but you can hear it, right. Language is our first music. Language is our first music, and the body is a resonator. Yeah. >> So, if you wouldn't mind talking about why someone has read, and someone's not a great [inaudible] because having had theories about both Americanism and the ways [inaudible] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yeah. I, yes. You know, I've gone to Chicago and there's a little park dedicated to Milton Olive, and there's a photograph of him. He's 18 years old. He went to job school, and I still have real difficulty trying to go there. What was he thinking? Because I'm quite convinced that if a grenade landed here, who would be the volunteer? Most people would run. That would be not to cover the grenade with one's body, you know. And so, but you have a theory. >> It's in the margin that [inaudible] a life well lived is worth a life that has meaning. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. Yes, yes. And also, it depends on how that individual has been initiated into the family or community. I think that's part of it, maybe, because it's impulsive. Yeah. >> And I guess that's as good a reason as any. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. >> [Inaudible] reason to that that he had carried the word, covering the bodies of their children and some answers it like that. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yeah. >> Actually, what you said, what you just said, I was thinking about that very much that if I don't have family members who were in the military, but you know, reading things that one reads and watching children get in wars, you can't get into a field that and just start thinking of how much it's, you know, these other people and their families. They have their back; we have their back, and are still are going to be some individual source get a real trade [phonetic]. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes, of course, yes. >> But I think it's much more likely because, like you say, they're in the community as well, you know. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: [Inaudible] Yes? >> I'm very touched by the idea of the generosity of the person who just like support others. Do you think it has anything to do with age? You at times [inaudible] that [inaudible] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: That's right. >> But as you say, the commanders are older but the soldiers themselves are young. I wonder if they're, that conflict [inaudible]. And actually, it is a kind of idealism [inaudible] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. >> How [inaudible] >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yes. They are very young, usually, and it doesn't have -- well, in the case of the 14 or 15, throwing themselves on grenades, from First Lieutenant all the way down to Private. But yeah, they're all young. [Inaudible] Yes? >> [Inaudible] all of those? >> But even in that calm, it was, a sturdy mind was for those who -- [inaudible] for those who could walk away, what is our blessing? Because I think that's all of us. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yeah. >> And also possible provocations whatever war our country engages in. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: Yeah. What is that burden? That is what I felt, and I'm quite sure other veterans felt some -- >> It's not that [inaudible]. >> Yusef Komunyakaa: As well, yes, but it's a burden. >> Well, I hate to [inaudible] but these. Okay, thank you so much Yusef. [ Audience Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at www.loc.gov.