war poet
Feb 4, 2010 · 1 comment
last week with 2VP the CO asked me how I prepared for being a war poet. I thought about it for a day and replied, “I’m not a war poet, I’m a poet who believes there are only two great subjects. war and peace. and right now I’m writing about war.”
and I didn’t mean this in a smartass way.
sometimes we look for the vein. sometimes it finds us. this found me. who knows why. all I know is that it astonishes me where my words have taken me over the past few years and the people I’ve met.
I am often thanked by soldiers for listening to them. the truth is, until I began all of this I had never met a soldier in my life. I had a cookie-cutter image of what they were, what they did. thousands of hours in their company has dispelled that pre-conceived idea.
one thing I hope that I’ve been able to do as well is to dispel soldiers’ preconceived ideas of what it means to be an artist. who knows? 99.9% of the time I can laugh at the stereotype some soldiers make of artists, but one night in KAF I sat next to a bitter soldier, a clerk, and when she began putting me down as an artist and from the west coast, I laid into her. told her to back down and stop assuming things about me. I should have considered the source and let it go, but being in a war zone edges one up somehow.
and sometimes I feel a stony silence from my fellow artists (with the exception of my fellow war artists and a few loyal readers). this mystifies me. is it because to write about soldiers/war in anything but a negative light is to be considered a propagandist? some day I hope to figure this out.
and thank you again for reading this. I’m getting close to the 45,000 hit mark.
best,
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The page you're reading contains a single diary entry entitled war poet. It was posted here on February 04, 2010.
Oso
I love the fact that you’ve run the entire gambit of a soldier’s life. You arrived with pre-conceived ideas, of what is was going to be like, you’ve been dunked in the cold hard reality of the life, seen the humor, the joy and the grief of hoisting a friend, bundled up in a box, up on your shoulder. I’ve been a soldier off and on for almost 24 years and I can remember when I went from my Inf leadership course in Wainwright to my first year studies at Emily Carr. I appreciate the dichotomy and I’ve enjoyed watching you travel that road. I can remember my CO asking me why I was in the infantry and studying to be a painter. It confused a lot of my contemporaries on both sides. I never saw anything odd or confusing about it. Being an artist is about being able to translate experience via your medium. Being a soldier is about trying to control the uncontrollable in a chaotic environment. The both rely on skill, passion, control and a desire to manipulate your environment: shape a very small part of it to your will. Its equal parts love and hate mixed in with frustration and joy (when you see it done right).
I’ve applied to be a War Artist but I understand its no easy task. Few soldiers have been able to make that transition let alone professional, well known artists. Thanks for all you’ve done.
Feb 04 2010 · 15:07