Review by Lynda La Rocca
Poetry – March 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Lady Liberty Lied – A Voice for the Victims of the Invasion of Iraq – This includes YOU!
Poetry and Art by Laura Knelange
Copyright 2006 by Laura Knelange
No ISBN
POETRY CAN SOMETIMES be so topical that it loses a crucial component of what helps to make it poetry: universality.
As Laura Knelange writes in the foreword to her chapbook, “The intention of my poetry and artwork is to bring awareness and education to the illegal invasion of Iraq and its horrifying aftermath.”
That’s a noble goal. But Knelange might have achieved it more readily through a series of editorial pieces. That’s because poetry’s purpose is not to provide information but to deepen and broaden the reader’s awareness, understanding, and perception of life. Poetry should generate profound emotion, whether joy or wonder, sadness or despair. It should enable us to vicariously participate in the poet’s experience — regardless of whether we’ve shared that experience in “real” life.
This last comment is one reason why I think war poetry is so difficult to write. The majority of readers may never have experienced the horrors of combat. It therefore becomes the poet’s responsibility to immerse the audience in those horrors– which the poet must, paradoxically, be able to conjure regardless of his or her actual background. And I don’t believe this can be accomplished by proselytizing or by focusing on specific political agendas or administrations which (thankfully) come and go like the wind.
For instance, I don’t need to know about specific governmental policies or circumstances to feel, in my gut and in my soul, what it was like to be a soldier in Wilfred Owen’s classic poem Dulce et Decorum Est:
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags . . .
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue . . .”
Nor do I need a medical textbook describing the effects of mustard gas to shudder at this vision of a comrade who fails to don protective gear in time:
“Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling . . .
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. . . .
the white eyes writhing in his face . . .”
I don’t need particulars about which war is being fought to feel that I, too, am in agony on the battlefield. (Owen was, however, writing about World War I; he died fighting for England a week before the armistice.)
Indeed, I don’t need to know anything other than what it means to be human to be repulsed and sickened by war’s carnage and misery. By the end of this poem, it is abundantly clear that “the old lie” — Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country” )– is just that, hideous propaganda designed to persuade “children ardent for some desperate glory” to give their lives for causes they often neither support nor understand.
Knelange starts to capture this kind of horror in “White Phosphorous” (although the noun should be spelled “phosphorus”), one of seven original titles in this paper-covered and string-bound booklet. But then she reverts to telling, not showing.
KNELANGE’S PIECES are pure protest, enraged and strident. They’d make excellent posters at a Washington peace march, could be converted into pithy bumper stickers, and would provide material for numerous scathing and scintillating editorials. They’re emotional and sure to be appreciated by those who share her viewpoint.
But Lady Liberty Lied reads like a political tract and as such, it lacks some of the elements usually expected by lovers of poetry, including depth and especially, timelessness. References throughout to “Shake-N-Bake,” “Condi,” “Neo-Con,” “SOA,” and “FOX” may not enhance the contemporary reader’s experience and understanding, and will give future readers even more trouble deciphering and relating to this collection.
Lady Liberty Lied is a fundraiser for the Central Colorado Coalition on the Iraq War; it is available locally at The Book Haven for $10 a copy. Buy it if you want to support the coalition in expressing opposition to the conflict in Iraq. But look to poets like Owen for a universal understanding of what war does to those who engage in it– and those who promote it.
