Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941 (Contemp North American Poetry) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is not an easy read; it is a book that uses phrases like "intertextual passage." In other words, it is book that will help the writer get tenure. That is not to say it is not well written. Philip Metres has some sentences that sing, especially considering the academic style that he is required to use. The problem is that Behind the Lines is simply not written for the average reader. And since I finished my master's degree last year, I have quickly reverted back to being an average reader.
I was attracted to this book by the title, as a person who enjoys reading poetry. I wanted to learn more about poetry in America, particularly war poetry since we are in the middle (or is the end?) of a war in Iraq, yet this book was more than I was counting on. There wasn't a lot of poetry inside it. Metres traces the history of war poetry and cites the works of poets from Robert Lowell and William Stafford to June Jordan and online group Poets Against the War, but you don't get to experience the poems as poems because they are excerpted and then scrutinized.
If you want to learn about the limits of current lyric and autobiographical in the contemporary peace movement, this may be a book you want to read, but, personally, I have trouble even getting that sentence out. It brings back memories of being a graduate student, reading on Saturday nights in my pajamas and eating frozen dinners, and that's a place I'd rather not go back to.

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Whether Thersites in Homer's Iliad, Wilfred Owen in "Dulce et Decorum Est," or Allen Ginsberg in "Wichita Vortex Sutra," poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium "Poetry and the American Voice" in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet's relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.

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