Jarell and Forche: The Importance of War Poetry on Society by Rachel Ostberg

Poetry is one of man’s ultimate forms of creation. We use it not only to express our own feelings, opinions, or critiques, but also as a way to evoke emotion in others. Since poetry is such a strong form of art it often takes on the most difficult of subject matter; those subjects being love and hate, death, war, and religion. Poetry, however great it may be to read alone, most of the time is better when listened to, especially when it is read by its author. The author, being the creator of that piece of art, knowing the ins and outs of that poem and in what way it was intended to sound, can provide insight into that particular poem. Poetry readings “…whether by poets themselves or by other performers, are conventionally appreciated as a distinctive area of expressive culture, one necessarily set apart from direct political action…“ (Strine). Some authors, such as Carolyn Forche, author of “The Colonel”, do not find it useful to read her poetry aloud. Her reasoning includes the fact that an audience can walk away and forget the entire thing ever happened, but without poetry readings the life of the poem is lost, is it not? It can be argued that a reader can give life to a poem by themselves, but having the poet him/herself gives it a feeling not only of understanding, but it gives the narrator of the poem a voice that they were meant for. The added understanding is especially important in poems that deal with strong emotions or difficult subjects (which most poetry can be argued as). Two such poems that should be heard and analyzed are Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” and Randall Jarel’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Both poems expressing the horrors of war should be introduced to the public, performed by their authors and read by many because of the important images presented that cannot be ignored. Why then would such a writer as Carolyn Forche not want her poetry to be heard if her subject matter was important to her? Her reason is that the type of audience that …goes to an auditorium on a Thursday evening and hears someone speak about conditions in one country or another, and then has wine and cheese afterward with the person who is speaking and goes home to the life and the life does not change at all, that there is a kind of illusion that one has done their part (Forche).

This can be true, and I believe that cannot be denied, that there are those that will go to a poetry meeting and feel accomplished. Think of the type of people that donate to the Salvation Army once a year, maybe around Christmas time, and say “I’ve done my good dead for the year, I don’t have to do anything more.” If this type of writing was left unheard to the general public however, we can only imagine what will be left unsaid and what lives could be changed because of it.

Carolyn Forche’s poem “The Colonel” contains many important messages, not only about war, but also about poetry. The poem, a real-life incident from Forche’s life, begins with Forche and a friend of hers in the house of a colonel who is a part of the political riots occurring in El Salvador at the time. As the colonel, his wife, and his guests are eating dinner, the colonel suddenly exit’s the room and returns with a sack filled with human ears. After dumping them on the table he picks one up and sets it in a glass of water where Forche describes it as “[coming] alive there.” The colonel then proceeds to say “I am tired of fooling around… [a]s for the rights of anyone, tell your people to go fuck themselves.” The colonel ends the night sweeping the ears to the floor and holding his glass of wine in the air saying, “[s]omething for your poetry, no?” The poems ends with the image of some of the ears facing the ceiling and some not.

So then what is it about this type of poetry that Forche is so against reading in public? A person can understand that there are indeed people that will not gain anything from “The Colonel” in a poetry reading besides the mental image of an older man holding a human ear up to Carolyn Forche’s face. However, a person does not have to look too far to find substance in “The Colonel” if they want to gain something from the poem. The poem opens painting a scene of the colonel’s house. His children performing daily activities, the TV on in the background, his wife carrying a try of coffee. Outside are “[b]roken bottles…embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those is liquor stores.” This is a fairly violent and brutal image. Here is where the audience knows not all is well at this time and place. After the parrot says “hello” the colonel tells it to shut up and pushes himself away from the table. Returning with a bag of human ears and pouring them out on the table, the first strong statement is made. Though we do not know where the colonel obtained all of these ears, we can assume he collected them from the innocent victims of the riots in El Salvador. Or could we even say that these victims are innocent? If they choose to be ignorant to the riots and the political oppression occurring they are as much part of the problem as the men involved with the riots. And so, here the ears symbolize the part of society that ignores the political issues on El Salvador. The “dried peach halves” ears have no home, no body part to be a part of any longer, and thus cannot actually hear any longer. They are the people that never cared about the riots, whether they knew about them or not, and never did anything to stop them. And yet they are innocent lives, and as the colonel states, “I am tired of fooling around” the audience realizes that these political problems have been going on for too long and there are too many silent, ignorant, and innocent lives being wasted.

The colonel drops an ear into a glass of water and “[i]t came alive there.” “As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves” he says, and sweeps the ears to the floor. The audience needs to wonder, who is “your people” referring to? Poets? Could it possibly be a statement of the equality that poetry attempts to give everyone? Is the colonel even addressing Forche at this point? Backtracking a few lines and reading more into Forche’s description of the ear in the water she had said “[i]t came alive there” and so the colonel could be addressing the newly alive ear, especially if the ear represents the ignorant society. The colonel then addresses Forche. “Something for your poetry, no?” he said after flinging all the ears onto the floor. “Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.” This is an especially important two sentences. The ears pressed against the floor cannot hear what the colonel, or even what Forche and the rest of the world are saying about this entire political subject and are thus ignorant to any problems. The fact that there are human rights at risk in the political problem that is El Salvador, to have ignorant ears is a dangerous thing.

Going through Forche’s poem “The Colonel” an audience that cares to do so can find many interesting arguments and references to ignorance and the brutality of war. While it is understandable that Forche does not feel as if reading her poetry out loud does any good to a general audience, there are those that can be changed by such poetry readings, as cliché as that may sound. Besides possibly gaining new knowledge or insight on the subject, poetry readings, especially of poems such as Forche’s and even Randall Jarrell’s, can spark an interest in a particular subject. Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” uses shocking fetus imagery to describe the horrors and random, unbiased side of war.

From line one of the poem, Jarrell uses the imagery of birth. The narrator “[f]rom [his] mother’s sleep… fell into the State”, here the State being, the reader may assume, the military. In the second line the narrator “[h]unched in its belly till [his] wet fur froze.” It is essentially as if the soldier is transferred from the womb of his mother into another larger and metal womb; essentially, the State become his new mother, his new care-giver. The soldier “[s]ix miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, [he] woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.” Suddenly the narrator is expelled from his metal mother and he is suddenly rushed into the world of war. The “nightmare fighters” surround him and he is suddenly gone. “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” The ending imagery is akin to that of abortion “…since metaphorically the gunner is a fetus in a womb, the washing out of his remains by introducing a fluid under pressure clearly suggests one of the common procedures for ejecting a fetus after abortion” (Horner). Jarrell could be commenting on the suddenness of death in war. The unbiased death that comes in fighting, whether you are an innocent or part or the military, everyone is fair game and it can happen in the amount of time it takes a person to read one line of Jarrell’s poem. The poem mirrors this suddenness effectively as it is first, only five lines, and out of nowhere, in the fifth line the audience is suddenly hit with the words “[w]hen I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” There is an underlying tone of cruelty also. The way in which the ball turret gunner is simply washed away makes it sound as if his life meant nothing to the State; that as he was separated from his mother his life essentially lose meaning and individuality. The callousness of the act of washing away the dead soldier is similar to the way in which fetuses are aborted. Quick, before they have a personality, a name, a soul, abort them! The quick and dirty act is soon done and the ball turret gunner is forgotten.

Both poems are powerful on paper and a close reading of each poem brings forth interesting ideas that are worth taking a closer look at. For an audience to hear the authors read their creations would give their work an extra step, that extra heart and emotion that sometimes “make or break” a work. Even though Carolyn Forche makes a good argument as to why certain poetry, or at least her own, should not be presented at poetry readings, she should remember that there will be some that will be moved in some way or another. Merely taking a closer look at these two poems about war and brutality only strengthens the argument that they should be read to a general public because they give the public something to think about.


Works Cited


Forche, Carolyn. "A TPQ Interview: Jill Taft-Kaufman Talks With Carolyn Forche." Interview. Text and Performance Quarterly 1990: 61-70.

Strine, Mary S. "Protocols of Power: Performance, Pleasure, and the Textual Economy." Text and Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 61-67.

Horner, Patrick J.; Jarrell’s ’The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’ Explicator, 1978; 36 (4): 9-10.