Yusef Komunyakaa

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‘Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau

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In the following essay, Gotera asserts that, unlike much of the poetry that emerged from the Vietnam War, Komunyakaa's poems collected in Dien Cai Dau offer some hope of solace and self-renewal for the Vietnam veteran. Gotera further comments on Komunyakaa's use of surrealist technique to express the experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War.
SOURCE: Gotera, Vincente F. “‘Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, pp. 282-300. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990.

One of the dominant impulses informing war literature is the documentary urge: the drive to make the horrors, the senselessness of war concrete to the uninitiated. Not surprisingly, in the course of this documentation, the writer often discovers the self, grappling with the realities of war; Jeffrey Walsh has pointed to “uniquely American visions of self-renewal and discovery through the exigencies of warfare, and [how] most of them draw upon the literary reworking of the writer's own experience” (5). Typical examples are Whitman, Dos Passos, cummings, Mailer, Jarrell—writers who were close to the fighting, if not literally combat veterans themselves.

American involvement in Vietnam, however, has fostered a consciousness of war which is radically different from our visions of earlier wars, especially because the Vietnam War has dramatized the moral ambivalence of American military power and the shortcomings of military technology. The use by the military of what writers on Vietnam have called the “jargon stream”—such terms as “pacification,” “kill ratio,” and “defoliation”—has become a specific challenge to the writer, since this use of semantics is a deliberate obfuscation. In addition, the cultural and geographical remoteness of Vietnam (as brought home by television), the public backlash and national controversy, the rejection of the returning soldier—all these have contributed to what Philip Caputo has labelled the “ethical wilderness” of the Vietnam War. A wilderness in which the soldier-poet is lost.

Traditionally, poetry has been a source of solace to the beleaguered poet. The locus classicus, of course, is the elegy; we do not doubt that Shelley, for example, in writing “Adonais,” sought and found surcease for his sorrow at Keats' death. The important question here is whether the “self-renewal” to which Walsh points in war literature implies that the Vietnam-veteran poet finds solace in lyric poetry. Since the anthologies of the early 1970s, veteran poets—Receveur, Paquet, Casey, Berry, Ehrhart, Weigl, among others—have been assiduously documenting the war: depicting the strangeness of Vietnam, recording the language of that war, and reporting the alienation of the returning soldier. The optimist would suggest that these poems result not only in personal growth but also in the opportunity for national renewal. In a 1987 essay, however, W. D. Ehrhart (one of the most outspoken veteran poets) writes:

[O]ne might venture to say that the act of writing these poems—even the worst of them—is an act of cleansing. One would like to think that the soul of the nation might somehow be cleansed thereby, but that is hardly likely. More realistically, one hopes that in writing these poems, the poets might at least have begun to cleanse their own souls of the torment that was and is Vietnam.

(“Soldier-Poets” 265)

Clearly, Ehrhart's language reveals his reluctance to believe that the Vietnam-veteran poet has been consoled by his own lyric impulse and the writing of poetry. I propose that Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau, through its devotion to a lyric rapaciousness, through its insistence on human connections, offers hope for such consolation.

Literary critics have cited the difficulty of depicting Vietnam and the war in poetry; Jeffrey Walsh, for example, has echoed John Felstiner in arguing that “poetry of a traditional kind has proved inappropriate to communicate the character of the Vietnam war, its remoteness, its jargonised recapitulations, its seeming imperviousness to aesthetics” (Walsh 204). As the Vietnam War wound down, the first poems to be published by veterans relied on violent imagery coupled with the absurdity of Vietnam in the eyes of youthful Americans. Don Receveur's “night fear” is typical:

i heard my meatless bones
clunk together
saw the ants drink
from my eyes
like red ponies
at brown pools of water
and the worms in my belly
moved sluggishly
delighted.

(Winning Hearts & Minds 15)

This poem teeters on the verge of triteness and overstatement, but what rescues it is the projection in the reader's mind of the actual experience which certainly lies behind this poem, prompted by Receveur's insistent concreteness. One critic has noted that in Receveur's work “the war seem[s] actualized, made urgent through its particularity” (Walsh 204).

Even when an early Vietnam-veteran poem is more cerebral, there is still a strong flavor of the unbelievability of Vietnam. A good example is Basil T. Paquet's “They Do Not Go Gentle”:

The half-dead comatose
Paw the air like cats do when they dream,
They perform isometrics tirelessly.
They flail the air with a vengeance
You know they cannot have.
After all, their multiplication tables,
Memories of momma, and half their id
Lies in some shell hole
Or plop! splatter! on your jungle boots.
It must be some atavistic angst
Of their muscle and bones,
Some ancient ritual of their sea water self,
Some blood stream monsoon,
Some sinew storm that makes
Their bodies rage on tastelessly
Without their shattered brains.

(Winning Hearts & Minds 3)

Of course, the title is a reference to Dylan Thomas' famous exhortation affirming life and the pursuit of it. In Paquet's Vietnam, however, this primal urge is reduced to the body's momentary life after a shell hits, mere corporeal inertia. Diction here implies an intellectualized rationality: “comatose,” “isometrics,” “id,” “atavistic angst.” But the lasting impression is of “multiplication tables, / Memories of Momma” smeared “pop! splatter!”—American intangibles concretized by onomatopoeia. The point is that Paquet, whom Ehrhart has called “[l]iterate without being literary” (“Soldier-Poets” 248), sets up a tension between the quotidian realities of “the world” (everywhere outside Vietnam) with the incredible commonplaces of “the Nam.”

Another preoccupation of Vietnam-veteran poetry has been language—both the jargonized as well as the colloquial. Michael Casey, whose collection Obscenities won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1972, “works exclusively with the truncated matter-of-fact speech rhythms [of the] Vietnamese grunt[s]” or infantrymen, as Ehrhart has noted (“Soldier-Poets” 248). Casey's “The LZ Gator Body Collector” is a revelatory example:

See
Her back is arched
Like something's under it
That's why I thought
It was booby trapped
But it's not
It just must have been
Over this rock here
And somebody moved it
After corpus morta stiffened it
I didn't know it was
A woman at first
I couldn't tell
But then I grabbed
Down there
It's a woman or was
It's all right
I didn't mind
I had gloves on then

(56)

According to Casey's book, the “language is so simple and open, so plausible, that one scarcely notices the artfulness of the compression, the understatement” (xii). Gracefully ensconced within the clipped language of this poem is a parody of romance and pornography: “Her back is arched,” “stiffened,” “I grabbed / Down there”; the neologism “corpus morta” not only replaces “rigor mortis” but also emphasizes the connotations of body here. John Felstiner asserts that Casey, in “merely reassuring us that his death encounter was sanitary, … lets the war's full insanity come in on us with everything he does not say” (11). Such artful omission is what allows Casey's delimited language, finally, to carry a charged eloquence.

D. C. Berry, whose saigon cemetery was also published in 1972, creatively uses the unique military language of the Vietnam War. Casey uses Army slang for plausibility, to make his characters' speech sound genuine. Berry, in contrast, orchestrates language to oppose the “jargon stream” which Walsh suggests “can hide the reality of moral outrage” (206). Felstiner proposes that “Washington's need was to sanitize reality and quarantine the fact from the word—precisely what much poetry avoids” (10); Berry's poetry is an deliberate act against such linguistic conditioning. Note Berry's meticulous attention to language in this untitled poem:

The way popcorn   pops   is
the way punji sticks snap
into your skin and stab
pricking urine
into  cardiovascular
systems and apparatus
apparently
unorganizing then demonstrating
it.
                    then you die
either from the spike,
the   p,
or the
sun gone to grain
expanding
in your eye.

(41)

Berry uses sound adroitly in this poem: the onomatopoeic “pop” and the labial explosion of the plosive consonant “p.” And the “p” sounds are not only initial or terminal (as in “snap”), but also medial (“apparatus,” “spike,” and “expanding”). In fact, Berry is even more clever when he uses the letter “p” separated from the rest of the line by white space rather than the slang “pee” which a poet more concerned with reportage might have used. The “jargon-stream”-like lines—“cardiovascular / systems and apparatus / apparently / unorganizing then demonstrating”—are deflated by the next line, a hard monosyllable, “it.” As does Paquet, Berry contrasts “the Nam” and “the world” in this poem through the conflict between militaristic jargon and basic Anglo-Saxon language.

A third focus of this body of poetry has been the veteran's return to America, dramatizing political activism and personal commitment within the poems themselves. W. D. Ehrhart's 1984 volume To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired, as Lorrie Smith has pointed out, “traces one representative veteran's growth from naiveté to disillusionment, anger, and political activism” (24). The title poem dramatizes the interlacing of Vietnam with myriad political and humanitarian issues:

After the streets fall silent
After the bruises and the tear-gassed eyes are healed
After the consensus has returned
After the memories of Kent and My Lai and Hiroshima
lose their power
and their connections with each other
and the sweaters labeled Made in Taiwan
After the last American dies in Canada
and the last Korean in prison
and the last Indian at Pine Ridge
After the last whale is emptied from the sea
and the last leopard emptied from its skin
and the last drop of blood refined by Exxon
After the last iron door clangs shut
behind the last conscience
and the last loaf of bread is hammered into bullets
and the bullets
scattered among the hungry
What answers will you find
What armor will protect you
when your children ask you
Why?

(Carrying the Darkness 97-98)

Again the ubiquitous contrast of America and Vietnam, but here it has come home to roost in the home, in the child's question “Why?” Ultimately, Vietnam becomes only one of many fronts for the political activist: American aggression, the environment, animal rights, the depatriation of Native Americans, and more. And the discovery of this range of political issues is both mirrored and complemented by the poet's own recovery of self; “Ehrhart,” asserts Smith, “connects two converging continuums: his personal coming of age and the destructive flow of history” (24).

For Bruce Weigl, the commitment is not so much to historical or political concerns as to personal responsibility; the poems in his 1985 collection The Monkey Wars chart a private rather than a public landscape. It is this personal testimony, however, that gives these poems their immediacy and, in our inevitable identification and participation, their social and collective force. The book opens with “Amnesia,” an unrhymed sonnet whose octave and sestet contrast Vietnam and America:

If there was a world more disturbing than this
Where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole
And overgrown tropical plants
Rotted, effervescent in the muggy twilight and monkeys
Screamed something
That came to sound like words to each other
Across the triple-canopy jungle you shared,
You don't remember it.
You tell yourself no and cry a thousand days.
You imagine the crows calling autumn into place
Are your brothers and you could
If only the strength and will were there
Fly up to them to be black
And useful to the wind.

(Carrying the Darkness 274-75)

In this poem, Vietnam is depicted concretely but not with explicit violence; instead, a paralyzing ambivalence dramatizes the speaker's wish to forget. But at the same time, there is a drive to remember, to become “useful to the wind,” and The Monkey Wars is Weigl's heroic attempt to gather “strength and will,” in order to resurrect and finally confront Vietnam, that “world more disturbing.”

In these six poets, the documentary urge comes to encompass more than mere telling; the last three poems are set in second person, reflecting the polemical bent of much Vietnam-veteran poetry. Using “you” as the voice of a poem, however, also enforces the immediate and personal participation of the audience. Clearly, the implication, especially in a poem such as Weigl's “Amnesia,” is that Vietnam can only be understood and appreciated by the civilian through a direct, if only imagined, taking part. But this device does not enjoin the “self-renewal” of the poet. In Weigl's “Amnesia,” the speaker is enervated—he wants to transcend Vietnam, but “strength and will” are only imagined, not actual at the moment. Smith has argued that, in the work of Ehrhart and Weigl, “the lyric imagination utterly fails to ameliorate or transform the memory of Vietnam” (17). I propose that Yusef Komunyakaa's welding of an idiosyncratic ferocity to what we usually envision as “lyric imagination” in Dien Cai Dau affords the opportunity for such transformation and eventual amelioration.

Dien Cai Dau is Komunyakaa's fourth book of poems. In his earlier three books, he has not included a single poem on Vietnam, because he has been waiting for emotional distance—objective and journalistic-from his 1969-70 Army tour there. George Garrett, in his introduction to Berry's saigon cemetery, proposes that “ordinary judgment [of Berry's poems] must be suspended. We are too close, and the wounds and scars, literal and metaphorical, are too fresh” (viii). It is just such a suspension of judgment that Komunyakaa does not want; he wishes his work to be tested with the full rigor applied to all serious poetry.

The fact that Komunyakaa has waited almost two decades to publish poems on Vietnam differentiates his work significantly from that of other veteran poets, especially those who published in the early 70s. The difference is not so much that he has achieved a distance from his Vietnam experience but rather that the development of his craft has not been inextricably bound up with Vietnam, as Ehrhart's, for example, has been. Komunyakaa comes to the material with an academic grounding in modernist and contemporary poetics as well as classic surrealism, and his work registers an esthetic advance not only of poetry about the Vietnam War but also of war literature in general.

From his first chapbook, Dedications and Other Darkhorses (1977), through his most recent book, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), Komunyakaa's forte has been the counterbalancing of seeming oppositions and incongruities. Critics of Surrealism have pointed to “The poet Isidore Ducasse, the ‘comte de Lautréamont,’ who … had provided the classic example in writing of ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table’” (Rubin 19), a serendipitous yoking in whose interstices an immanent, wholly startling signification can well. Komunyakaa has inherited this mode of juxtaposition from the Surrealists, specifically through the poet Aimé Cesaire. A typical example is “2527th Birthday of the Buddha”:

When the motorcade rolled to a halt, Quang Duc
climbed out & sat down in the street.
He crossed his legs,
& the other monks & nuns grew around him like petals.
He challenged the morning sun,
debating with the air
he leafed through-visions brought down to earth.
Could his eyes burn the devil out of men?
A breath of peppermint oil
soothed someone's cry. Beyond terror made flesh-
he burned like a bundle of black joss sticks.
A high wind that started in California
fanned flames, turned each blue page,
leaving only his heart intact.
Waves of saffron robes bowed to the gasoline can.

(18)

This poem takes as its base a kind of journalistic language, and of course the seed of the piece is the rumor that the heart of a self-immolated monk literally had not burned, a rumor perhaps gleaned from an actual news story. But the poem quickly moves into the contrapuntal surrealistic plane with “the other monks & nuns … like petals,” setting up a group of images: petals, leaves, and finally pages, reminding us of Holy Writ. (And the phrase “terror made flesh” of course vibrates for Christian readers.) But the Komunyakaa wrinkle here is how the political situation is mystically manifested—American collusion made evident by the “high wind that started in California.” The astonishing final image juxtaposes “saffron robes” with “the gasoline can,” succinctly summing up the Vietnam War which arises from this volatile situation: “the gasoline can,” a harbinger of technology which emblemizes violence and death, becomes a new deity, and all the saffron robes will be ultimately consumed.

Komunyakaa's surrealism varies from that of the other veteran poets because he does not depict Vietnam itself or the Vietnam experience as literally surreal, as do many of the other poets. Surrealism has been defined as “the attempt to actualize le merveilleux, the wonderland of revelation and dream, and by so doing to permit chance to run rampant in a wasteland of bleak reality” (Gershman 1); in other words, the exploration of the strange, through fortuitous juxtaposition, allows revelation to occur in the midst of the real. Through surrealism, Komunyakaa discovers—or perhaps more appropriately, reveals—Vietnam and does not only document its apparent surreality for an incredulous audience. “Camouflaging the Chimera” enacts this process of revelation:

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.
We hugged grass & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slowdragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover,
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren't there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies: we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man's eyelid.

(3-4)

Surrealism in this poem does not function to present Vietnam to the reader as exotica, but rather to underline the existential reality of ambush: the internal psychic state of each combatant. The wish-fulfillment of camouflage involves becoming the landscape, abdicating one's memories and anything else which might disrupt the illusion. The angst of the situation, the impending firefight, is focused by “a world revolved / under each man's eyelid,” a revamping of the cliché “my life passed before my eyes.” Of course, the phrase also refers to “the world” or everything not Vietnam, delineating each soldier's acute realization that he does not belong in this place, that his death here would be literally senseless. The dramatic situation of this poem also acts certainly as a signifier for the entire war, and thus the word “Chimera” in the title serves as a political statement.

The poem “‘You and I Are Disappearing’” (a quote from Björn Håkansson) is a bravura performance highlighting Komunyakaa's technique of juxtaposed images:

The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
          she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
                    We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
                    like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
          silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
          at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
          to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.

(17)

In this poem, Komunyakaa is performing “the kind of intellectual wrestling that moves and weaves us through human language,” as he told me in an interview. According to Komunyakaa, “language is what can liberate or imprison the human psyche,” and this poem dramatizes a speaker who is simultaneously liberated and imprisoned. The speaker here is at a loss to describe this scene fittingly. The charged language grapples with a view that is both unimaginably beautiful and incredibly horrible, all at the same time. The speaker, again and again, tries to find a metaphor that will convey both the beauty and the horror—the dilemma of speaking the Sublime, in Edmund Burke's terms. And the speaker comes enticingly, asymptotically close without finding the ideal phrase. Finally, he simply has to stop. And the final image points a biblical finger: the girl will always burn in the speaker's mind in the same way that the burning bush could have burned forever unconsumed. What really nails this image is the phrase “godawful wind” which puns on “awful God,” straight out of the Old Testament, while it resurrects the root meaning full of awe, or more properly here, filling with awe.

“‘You and I Are Disappearing’” also demonstrates Komunyakaa's poetic ancestry in English, specifically William Carlos Williams and his use of the image. Just as Komunyakaa has been influenced by the Surrealists, Williams has been influenced by Cubist art; Marjorie Perloff notes that Williams' “Spring and All lyrics … provide verbal analogues of … Cubist fragmentation and superposition of ambiguously located planes” (182). In many of these poems, Williams' “images do not carry symbolic weight; they point to no external sphere of reality outside themselves,” writes Perloff. “Rather, items are related along the axis of contiguity. … In a larger sense, the whole book constitutes just such a field of contiguities. Williams' recurrent images—wind, flower, star, white, dark—are perfectly ordinary, but it is their relationships that matter” (186-87). If we ignore for a moment that the signified is “she”—a human being—Komunyakaa's images here are similarly ordinary: “a piece of paper,” “oil on water,” a “cigar,” “a shot glass of vodka,” “a field of poppies”; others are lexically more interesting but still reasonably innocent: “foxfire,” “a sack of dry ice,” “a rainbow,” “dragonsmoke.” What drives this poem is the anaphoric repetition of “she burns”—the accretion of which underlines the intrinsic horror of the poem and, by extension, the war itself. The ultimate focus is on humanity and on humaneness.

Many of the poems in Dien Cai Dau deal with human response and connection in combat. “Nude Pictures” begins at the end, only implying the story which comes before:

I slapped him a third time.
The song caught in his throat
for a second, & the morning
came back together like after
a stone has been dropped
through a man's reflection
hiding in a river. I slapped him
again, but he wouldn't stop
laughing. As we searched
for the squad, he drew us
to him like a marsh loon
tied to its half-gone song
echoing over rice fields
& through wet elephant grass
smelling of gunpowder & fear.
I slapped him once more.
Booby-trapped pages floated
through dust. His laughter
broke off into a silence
early insects touched
with a tinge of lost music.
He grabbed my hand & wouldn't
let go. Lifted by a breeze,
a face danced in the treetops.

(25)

In “2527th Birthday of the Buddha,” the typical Komunyakaa opposition is the documentary vs. the figurative; here the conflict is between nature and human intrusion. The morning shattered by a firefight “came back together like after / a stone has been dropped through a man's reflection / hiding in a river.” The “stone,” a semaphore for gunfire, intrudes upon the harmony between humans and nature—here, the squad and the morning. Now the hysterical soldier intrudes upon the reassembled morning, “like a marsh loon / tied to its half- gone song” (i.e., nature gone mad).

The final human intrusion occurs in the arresting close: “Lifted by a breeze, / a face danced in the treetops.” Literally, of course, this is a wafting scrap of girlie magazine, with the face coincidentally framed. On a figurative level, however, the image finally rescues humanity: the lexical territory of “Lifted” and “danced” argues for an upbeat ending here. Just as the speaker and the sole surviving soldier hold hands (“only connect,” as Forster tells us) so too are humans and nature harmoniously reunited, if only metaphorically.

Komunyakaa's devotion to a highly textured language is clearly evident in the poems already discussed. There are arresting turns of phrase throughout Dien Cai Dau: a tunnel rat moves “Through silver / lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence” (5); the Viet Cong are “lords over loneliness / winding like coralvine through / sandalwood & lotus” (8); conspirators plan a fragging, “their bowed heads / filled with splintered starlight” (16); an armored personnel carrier is “droning like a constellation / of locusts eating through bamboo” (19). For the most part, however, the language of Dien Cai Dau is a spoken language, in the Wordsworthian sense—it is the extraordinary way in which these everyday words are combined which makes the poems significant.

As Casey does in Obscenities, Komunyakaa uses the “grunt's” language and speech for credibility. In “Hanoi Hannah,” however, he places the argot in the mouth of the enemy, to demonstrate the ambivalent ambience of Vietnam:

Ray Charles! His voice
calls from waist-high grass,
& we duck behind gray sandbags.
“Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,
Georgia's also on my mind.”
Flares bloom over the trees.
“Here's Hannah again.
Let's see if we can't
light her goddamn fuse
this time.” Artillery
shells carve a white arc
against dusk. Her voice rises
from a hedgerow on our left.
“It's Saturday night in the States.
Guess what your woman's doing tonight.
I think I'll let Tina Turner
tell you, you homesick GIs.”
Howitzers buck like a herd
of horses behind concertina.
“You know you're dead men
don't you? You're dead
as King today in Memphis.
Boys, you're surrounded by
General Tran Do's division.”
Her knife-edge song cuts
deep as a sniper's bullet.
“Soul Brothers, what you dying for?”
We lay down a white-klieg
trail of tracers. Phantom jets
fan out over the trees.
Artillery fire zeros in.
Her voice grows flesh
& we can see her falling
into words, a bleeding flower
no one knows the true name for.
“You're lousy shots, GIs.”
Her laughter floats up
as though the airways are
buried under our feet.

(13-14)

It is interesting to note here that Hannah speaks not just colloquial English, but fluent black English; her speech is so well tuned as to be virtually indistinguishable from the American voice who says “Let's see if we can't / light her goddamn fuse / this time.” That Komunyakaa is black generally makes no difference in many of the poems in Dien Cai Dau, but here it is significant because blacks (and hence the poet) are being directly addressed here by the Viet Cong; Hannah plays Ray Charles and Tina Turner, speaks to “Soul Brothers,” and taunts them with Martin Luther King's assassination—it may well be the speaker's first realization of that event. As this poem shuttles between reported speech and narrative passages, it displays a seamlessness of diction, unlike that of earlier Vietnam—veteran poets like Paquet, who deliberately embattles one set of connotations against another for tension. Here, the everyday diction—“duck behind,” “light her … fuse,” “buck like a herd / of horses”—is allowed to rest easy with slightly more elevated phrases—“carve a white arc,” “knife-edge song,” “white-klieg / trail of tracers.” But the salient point here is Hannah's intimate command of English and the social nuances conveyed by language.

The plight of the “grunt” home from the war is handled by Komunyakaa differently from other veteran poets, and this variance arises partly from questions of race. The black soldier remembers a different Vietnam: Viet Cong leaflets saying, “VC didn't kill / Dr. Martin Luther King”(47); the white bars and the black bars on “Tu Do Street” in Saigon (29); the black POW remembering “those rednecks” in Georgia, ‘“Bama,” and Mississippi to help him through VC torture (42). But other poems focus more universally on the generic returnee. The poem “Combat Pay for Jody” focuses on a soldier and his inevitable encounter with Jody, the folkloric figure back home who steals every combat soldier's wife or girlfriend:

I counted tripflares
the first night at Cam Ranh Bay,
& the molten whistle of a rocket
made me sing her name into my hands.
I needed to forget the sea
between us, the other men.
Her perfume still crawled
my brain like a fire moth,
& it took closing a dead man's eyes
to bring the war's real smell
into my head. The quick fire
danced with her nude reflection,
& I licked an envelope each month
to send blood money,
kissing her lipstick mouthprints
clustering the perfumed paper,
as men's voices collected
in the gray weather I inhaled.
Her lies saved me that year.
I rushed to the word
Love at the bottom of a page.
One day, knowing a letter waited,
I took the last chopper back to Chu Lai,
an hour before the firebase was overrun
by NVA. Satchel charges
blew away the commander's bunker,
& his men tried to swim the air.
A week later when I returned
to Phoenix, the city hid her
shadow & I couldn't face myself
in the mirror. I asked her used-to-be
if it was just my imagination,
since I'd heard a man
could be boiled down to his deeds.
He smiled over his wine glass
& said, “It's more, man.
Your money bought my new Chevy.”

(49-50)

This poem literally brings clichés to life. The testimony of a “grunt” for whom the thought of his lover functioned as a chivalric favor preserving him from harm is so common that it becomes apocryphal. Ditto for the stories of Jody's legendary exploits. In “Combat Pay for Jody,” Komunyakaa has composed a vividly lyrical narrative which encompasses the thousand days of the speaker's Vietnam tour and his eventual return to “the world.” More importantly, he has created a realistic voice which re-enlivens the overworked clichés of military life and which points up the returning soldier's inability to navigate in what used to be his personal landscape.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become an emblem of the difficulties of the Vietnam veteran, and Komunyakaa's poem “Facing It” (the closing poem in the book) does exactly what its title says—face the monument and what it signifies:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn this way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

(63)

This poem is literally a reflection about reflections; it is a “facing” of the dualities that govern this everyday life: there and here, America and Vietnam, living and dead, night and day, old and young, white and black (i.e., Caucasian and Negro). Komunyakaa does not declaim, does not decry; instead he presents, practically unmediated, a series of images. Like the speaker of “‘You and I Are Disappearing’”—the poem about the burning girl—the poet here is faced with an ineffable scene, but instead of searching for apt metaphors to voice his feeling, he reverts to a reportorial mode. Everything ultimately is point of view, and we are always “depending on the light / to make a difference.” This is what Vietnam poetry (and all poetry in essence) must do—enlighten, give light, illuminate, the better for all to see and see well.

Dien Cai Dau is a breathtakingly original work of art because of the believable, down-to-earth language which speaks the thoughts and feelings of authentic characters, filtered through Komunyakaa's atypical vision. In the last line of Dien Cai Dau—a book whose title, after all, means “crazy”—a woman is “brushing a boy's hair,” an action which affirms sanity and life in the face of the insanity of the war: the love between a mother and child, between two human beings. Writing about Weigl's The Monkey Wars, Smith proposes the potential of a “salvific poetic vision which might unify past and present, anguish and affirmation” (17); Komunyakaa fulfills this promise in Dien Cai Dau.

Komunyakaa's achievement points to the possibility and actuality of self-renewal and solace in poetry by Vietnam veterans. As the body of poetry by veterans moves from mere documentary to self-discovery and personal commitment, from a gratuitous surrealism to a conscientious use of French surrealistic technique, future work by Vietnam-veteran poets becomes increasingly able to transcend the paralyzing horror of the Vietnam War. Bruce Weigl's new book, Song of Napalm, which collects his previous Vietnam poetry and showcases new work, already demonstrates this potential; the new poems begin to ameliorate Weigl's despair in The Monkey Wars. The transcendental possibilities in poetry by Vietnam veterans, therefore, can make possible a more accurate national vision of the Vietnam War—both in documentary and spiritual terms-allowing us, as a nation, to confront fully the moral consequences of our presence in Vietnam. Perhaps, in some near future, it may not be too optimistic to wish, with Ehrhart, that “the soul of the nation might somehow be cleansed” by poetry.

Works Cited

Berry, D. C. saigon cemetery. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972.

Casey, Michael. Obscenities. Yale Series of Younger Poets, v. 67. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.

Ehrhart, W. D., ed. To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1984.

———. “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War.” Virginia Quarterly Review 63.2 (Spring 1987): 246-265.

Felstiner, John. “American Poetry and the War in Vietnam.” Stand, 19.2 (1978): 4-11.

Gershman, Herbert S. The Surrealist Revolution in France. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988.

———. Personal interview. 21 Feb. 1986.

Perloff, Marjorie. “William Carlos Williams.” In Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. Ed. Helen Vendler. New York: Random, 1987.

Rottmann, Larry, Jan Barry, and Basil T. Paquet, eds. Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Brooklyn: First Casualty Press, 1972.

Rubin, William S. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. New York: Museum of Modern Art, [1968].

Smith, Lorrie. “A Sense-Making Perspective in Recent Poetry by Vietnam Veterans.” American Poetry Review 15.6 (Nov./Dec. 1986): 13-18.

Walsh, Jeffrey. American War Literature: 1914 to Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's, 1982.

Weigh, Bruce. The Monkey Wars. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

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