Voices in Wartime

I was originally skeptical when I first heard about this documentary about how poetry has been the most expressive medium to voice the experience of war by combatants and civilians. But, after seeing it, I have to say that it delivered.

The movie itself is a meta-poem, with a lyrical structure oscillating between poems, interviews with poets, and news/newsreel footage. After achieving a pleasant rhythm, it drifts to variations with meta-verses on the largest conflicts the US Armed Forces have participated in: Civil War, World War 1, World War 2 and Vietnam. What it builds is an incredible link that we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, was previously called combat fatigue, which was previously called shell-shock. That these occur is inseparable from war itself.

The superintendent of West Point is one of the experts this movie interviewed, and his insights into the ways poetry can help soldiers and veterans with no other way to express their experience were particularly valuable. For my own taste, I would have wished the movie took a stronger stand either in support of the glory of war, or support of the uselessness of war, but it left that open. It's not perfect, but easily the best documentary on poetry I've ever seen.

It is my opinion that the best poetry sets up a rhythm, delves into its subject, and ends with a line that stops you cold. This meta-poem movie does that: ending with a poem that stops you cold.

VOICES IN WARTIME is a documentary that has many aspects: it is an important investigation into how poets have responded to war from the Civil War through the two World Wars, Korean and Vietnam Wars and it is an homage to the fallen and to those who have been permanently damaged by war's dissection of the psyche, whether that be called combat fatigue, shell shock, battle rattle or the now accepted term Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. One has only to read the works of Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Langston Hughes to find the core of this deeply moving project and film.

Filmmaker Rick King has created a platform for which poets and commentators, scholars and photographers and explores the close relationship between anti-war protest and the poetry that has grown out of such feelings. This film is not a compendium of works praising Old Glory or making the world safe for democracy: this is a conversation among poets and their works with newsreel footage and stills of the wars of our past and present, thoughts that descry the atrocities of war and the rage it invokes. It is difficult to watch, but it is important to absorb. This is the portal through which author Sam Hamill is seen organizing the activist group, Poets Against the War. And the impact is strong.

Not all of the poetry read is great and much of it comes from the pens of the untrained. But all of the works and voices and images in King's film cannot help but touch the heart and the conscience. It needs to be seen. Grady Harp