Description
These poems were written during that violent period between May, 1968, and May, 1969. A simplistic evaluation of them might be that they were written as a highly personal reaction to a forced participation in violence. The poems are largely confessional in origin, the title deriving from one long, central poem in which the violence of daily life is related to the violence of war; these are "apologies" for violence. Part One attempts to place the work in the perspective of the United States during the 1960's. In Part Two, the violence which pervades our lives begins to emerge, as well as the hope for the restoration of some order. Part Three carries the confessional mode further by focusing on specific relationships between people in an age when ''love" assumes the same relative significance as "troop deployment." Part Four is largely propagandistic in nature, a reaction against the forces which shape the poems. The poems themselves are largely experimental in form. There are, perhaps, only three "traditional" poems included. Language in these poems--though not always syntax--is basically simple, in the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. These are not poems to be read with a dictionary in one hand and a guide to mythology in the other. Whatever significance these poems have is achieved chiefly through word relationships: connotation and their configuration on the page. Among the influences on these poems, the following may be of interest: the plays of Bertolt Brecht; the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, and Dalton Trumbo; the poetry of W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Mezey, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Robert Bly, and James Dickey; the music of Bob Dylan and such groups as The Doors; and television newscasts that bring the multiplying war crimes in Vietnam into our kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms.
