Chant de la Sirène
ISSUE 3, Fall 2022
War, Peace & Poetics
Chris Cheek, “No War” (Multi-media)
Cris Cheek, “No War Anonymous 9” (multimedia)
Table of Contents
LYRIC POEMS
With images from Cris Cheek’s multimedia series “No War”
Cynthia Hogue, “a girl on the bridge,” “Ars Poetica with Blank Page,”“War Torn”
Andrea Carter Brown, “Dowry II,” “O Beautiful”
Michael Ruby, “The Wailing Wall of Köln”; Burt Kimmelman, “Ritual”
Marcella Durand, from “A Winter Triangle”
Abigail Child, from “Resistance,” “Template Dismissals,” “In the Museum of an Extinct Race”
Neda Zahraie, “Mourning,” “You Seem to Have Called,” “25 December 2007,” “In Memory Space”
Norman Fischer, from “Men in Suits”
Anthony Howard, “Soldiers, Who Will…”; Chris Tysh, “Hinge,” “Dictee”
Eileen Tabios, “Bucha,” “Kharkiv,” “The Proscenium Evaporates,” “Advance Condolences on…”, “Sunflowers Became…”,“[Untitled] Ripped Mirror…”
Pina Piccolo, “For Aleppo, “Kyiv; or Playing with Shadows,” “Mahnoud Darwish …”
Marjorie Welish, from “Expectation Studies”; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, “Homage to the Ancient Doll”
Maria Damon & Alan Sondheim collaborations, “Arraign” & “Flaubert”
MULTI-MEDIA & PERFORMANCE POETRY
Carla Harryman, “Dialogues (Against War) in Pandemic Times,” with photo & audio recordings
Susan M. Schultz, from “War Diary,” with photographs
Anne Gorrick, from “East/West,” with print art
James McCorkle, “Oncoming Front,” “Nine Windows…” with images
James Sherry, “Nukeman,” new edition with images curated by Deborah Thomas
Margo Berdeshevsky, “Forest of Ash,” “Because Birds Dread…”, images with text
POET’S PROSE MEMOIRS
Steve Benson, “War with the Indigenous”; Laura Hinton, from “Descend the Rings,” with two paintings by Giacomo Cutonne
Jane Augustine, “War & Peace: America in the ‘40s,” with three paintings by Giacomo Cutonne
POETRY VIDEOS
Sam Truitt, An Absence Formless Because Void
Alan Sondheim, The Failure of Murder Road
Adeena Karasick, “Eicha III” from The Book of Lamentations (with written Introduction by Karasick)
INTERVIEW / FILM REVIEW
Barrett Watten & Vladislav Davidzon, collaboration video-dialogue, “Discussion on the Ukrainian Film Donbass (with written Introduction by Watten)
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Michael Golston, trans. of Georg Trakl (from the German) ; and Pina Piccolo, trans. of Inna Romensko (from an Italian version of the original Ukrainian); with painting by DeJe Watson and multimedia image by Sarah Porter
MUSIC VIDEO
Susan Kane, with Nathan Alamillo, “Peace Be With You”
NO WAR!—Statement of Process
Cris Cheek
“I”—that more public and formal sense of “self”—came “home” from teaching, cobbled together something to eat and in the settling down before going to bed in my little studio apartment downtown ”historic” Cincinnati. It was just before midnight on February 23rd. I had a quick look at the news.
Russia had invaded Ukraine in a time zone 5 hours ahead of mine. So “I” was up most of the night, as stories unfolded among media outlets and platforms and “I”—that more private and informal sense of self—felt utterly useless. “I” felt unable to do anything, to have an immediate response to this new war, except to utter “NO WAR!”
“I” said it by making a plain-speaking graphic as the 24th unfolded toward early light.
In the Russian protests of thousands against Putin’s invasion, “I” was soon to learn they also shouted "нет воине!" or "Het bonhe!”
NO WAR!
**
How would I respond? I had been in this position before. Collaborator Kirsten Lavers and I were filmed making a drawing of the “shock & awe” bombardments on the first night of combat in the War on Terror in 2003. Slant recorded a song using lyrics drawn from my booklet Cloud Eyes (London, Micro Brigade 1993) during the first Gulf War in 1993. And the 750 “shape” poems I culled with differing lenses for my books pickles & jams and contained & contained were created in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima.
As in the latter instance, when I had committed to writing at least one poem each evening in response to disaster, and on this eve of the invasion of Ukraine, I thought I would make one image a day. My goal was to be somehow processing and/or generating a response to—or as—a dark associational commentary on a range of news reportage given rise to by the war in Ukraine. I was aware, as I threw my-“selves” into doing so, of the inadequacy of the gesture. Opacity as a requisite balance to any sense of transparency and sloganeering, I take as an example Miles Davis producing 20-minutes of improvised musical affect so to arrive at what a listener might—with conventional ears—call “the melody.” His contemporary commentators had suggested that he might use an editor and cut right to or close to the bit that seemed to have brought a structure of melodic familiarity. But my thinking, and I think this was Davis’s, is that we only can only appreciate the blue of the sky because it is in conversation with the formations and movements of clouds.
**
The flood of short poems in the wake of Fukushima had quickly became a torrent around a thicket. So, too, this processing of images from this new war in Ukraine was generative. I might start with one of my own drawings (and indeed they often find their way into what occurs), with additional marks on that piece of paper that I had taken a photo of, then and uploaded. Then, in the next few minutes, I might take a screen-grab from a picture on twitter or another new source.
This source might be yesterday's news, or something more recent. Screen-grabs are fairly low resolution. That suits my purpose. I’m not worried about the “original frame” and retaining quality of image and reproduction, as such. My project was about making something else, not “fidelity” to source.
So then I might I mix the first image with another screen-grab, or an image of my own. In the example below, I used two images from “the news” and fuse them into one:
In another step, I might import that image into an AI generator engine. Into that engine, I have been uploading all kinds of images—some of my own photos, “visual” poems I have made available on my computer, or other images from “the news.” I am reading the news on my laptop and making new images partly using what I am reading. But I am also recombining them and recombining recombinations.
By this time, I might have a lot of files in a bulging folder. I am only beginning to have a sense of what might work with what. I select two images to smoosh together. I have no idea what the product will look like, although I am learning. I am deliberately and in the spirit of experimentation feeding the algorithm. I grab that image, and put it into a "simple" photo program as a reference.
Then I might decide a bit later to roll with a version of the image that emphasizes its blues and makes it look a bit darker, arguably more “dramatic.” I might tweak its “curves,” “definition,”or “noise reduction.” I might sharpen or mess with the “layers” of the image. Working like this is sort of like seasoning a recipe in cooking. It is gradual, instinctual, based on taste.
In another step, I might move the image to a different program. Note that I’ve been using Affinity Photo which I bought when it first launched in 2015—sixteen years ago I bought it for $40, and this program a lot of what you can do with Adobe Photoshop. Affinity is a raster graphics editor and at only $55 right now, you can own it outright instead of renting it as most have to do with with Photoshop.
Then I might whack up the volume on the dots per inch (pixel density), and force the image to sharpen again. Often this “sharpening “breaks the image just a little more into lines, opens graphic fissures—pries the resolution open:
Sometimes I don’t like the acidity of this look—sometimes I do. It’s all a process of experimentation:
At this point, there are a heap of things I can do to manipulate this image. I can add my plain text to it. I can import it into the program Lightroom—lots of options and I can play, for example, with lens filters, make the image darker and grittier:
By now, I’ve got some favorite moves I seem to be making over the past 3-4 days. Those will likely change as this series goes on.
**
Before long in my work morning, I will start to have something I like. I might merge the layers I have already made, and then get micro with a cloning tool—something Lavers and I used on “The Books” in a project we called “tnwk” (things not worth keeping) in 2002-2004, and those early days of the American War on Terror. When I say I can “get micro,” I mean it can get as small as working at a level of 3-5 pixels across a canvas of 1-2 thousand pixels. Hunting down digital artifacts is part of this stage. Sometimes being in that close on an intimate detail of an image generates more screen-grabs. Here is how the image might be looking at this point:
A bit later, still in the midst of the morning, I might upload and put this image back into the pot without sharing it. The more I work with it, the more the "tanks" began to look like metal buckets for transporting coal. It’s been just over an hour and some images are taking far more time. The process is very much like writing:
**
Approaching one month into the war, I had a small exchange on social media with the English poet and performance artist Anthony Howell. I record that conversation below.
Anthony:
These [images] seem stronger when not specifically figurative.
Cris:
I feel that tension, too. I am drawn to that tension and am grappling with representations. Cuts both ways, I’m also wondering if the more figurative and those more clearly based in photo-reportage, and others that are using aesthetic histories closer to my own sensibility and or derived from and or incorporating sources that I have rendered, might not need one another in this "moment.” I imagine a cluster, even a cluster-fuck of them, printed on metal on a wall or maybe on the floor to move around or among. Still thinking about how and where to "present" some. Thanks. You raise an issue that I remain caught within and fretting with.
Anthony:
In poetry, and in art, in general I try to create work which hovers between abstraction and narrative, meaning and pattern, creating a sense of unease and uncertainty. I suppose it's where I feel we are at.
Cris:
Yes, exactly—that hover and [create] that unease. I would love to be able to put a fairly generous selection of these piece "out there" and have a discussion about those tensions. I know which ones I "like" and of course they are those which converse intimately with my histories in dirty concrete and are tied into "the world" in a more tantalizing way, or hone in on a detail that teases them beyond more obvious figurative representation. It's an important question raised by much of the art I appreciate in all disciplines and among them. Several times over the past weeks I have thought the series has come to a halt and then it finds a different affect and rolls on.
Cris Cheek, “Parade for the Fallen” (multimedia)
Cris Cheek, “By the Book—A Night Sky” (multimedia)
Laura Hinton
No War! & the Critique of Poetics—
An Introduction
Open your eyes, people
—from Clinton Seigel, “No War Please”
Poetry blockbusters of the West might make us think that war and poetry have always been allies. The Illiad of 8th-century BCE Peloponnese Greece, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf from the 8th-century CE, El Cantar de mio Cid from the Spanish 12th, and countless others—they celebrate war and gore and fighting, and star a masculine warrior-hero ideal in his West-coded “great individualism,” his male physical prowess and mental moxy.
And the glory of war through the West’s Big Poems is not just a feature of European literature. Orally passed on by griots and published today in multiple oral-based versions, Sunjata is an African war poem composed during the 13th-century that likewise champions the masculinist politics of warfare, typically not only inscribing the identity of a brave male warrior but also his warrior culture, in this case, the Mande ethic group of Mali. And even if the warrior-hero tradition was sublimated in an uber-civilized ancient China—according to mid-century Sinologist C. M. Bowra, “the great intellectual forces that set so lasting an impress on Chinese civilization” despised “the unfettered individualism and self-assertion” of warrior-poetry traditions—even the ancient Chinese indulged in a heroic-war poetry genre. According to scholar Maria Chan, ancient Chinese literature offers “a substantial number of poems about the martial enterprise,” ones that are not at all dissimilar to those Western epics featuring a male hero’s “doughty deeds and stalwart warriors.” She gives the example of a second-century BCE poem, entitled, "Hymn to the Fallen" (Jiu Ge, in traditional Chinese 國殤), which is an homage to defeated warriors.[1]
This staunchly positive and wholly patriarchal view of war’s engine in so many cultural contexts and literary histories even continued into modernity in the Anglo-American tradition, during the first World War. Harriet Monroe’s modernist, Leftist-affiliated Poetry Magazine actually offered a “War Poem Prize” during this period. While this wartime project of an enthusiastic assistant editor was questioned by editor-in-chief Monroe herself, the prize submissions nevertheless rolled in. They numbered over 700 poems, “from which the editors culled” several publishable pieces, including Richard Aldington’s “War Yawp” and Amy Lowell’s “The Bombardment,”according to Abigail Deutche. She writes that editor Monroe ultimately was satisfied that the “war poems” in the usually more radical Poetry Magazine demonstrated anti-heroic aspects of war. Nonetheless, Monroe’s journal was criticized by Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence offering such a prize for “best war poem.” Deutche quotes Lawrence writing to Monroe, criticizing the use of romantic imagery when it came to acts of war:
It put me in such a rage—how dare Amy [Lowell] talk about Bohemian glass and stalks of flame! ... I hate, and hate, and hate, the glib irreverence of some of your contributors.[2]
**
Being “glib”—and certainly celebratory—about the realities and impacts of war on global cultures and societies pretty much had gone out of fashion by the modernist era and their early-20th century in America and Britain. The anti-war poem for many decades has been on the rise, instead, along with the industrial and post-industrial rise of technologies of killing and their efficiencies. “The unacknowledged legislators of the world” had long sought to put the breaks on war, and the nationalisms and patriotisms it inspired—or that inspired war itself. Poetry began critiquing war’s heroic symbols and grand narratives as acts of human violence, at the same time that patriarchal social organizations within modern nation states were starting to come under collective attack by feminist social organizations arguing for gender equality. War and masculine cultural prerogatives always had seemed to go together. It’s no coincidence that feminism and anti-war movements grew in power at the same time.
And yet I would argue that the anti-war poem is not just a modernist phenomenon. Reading lines of this modern English translation of the renown Old English war poem from the eight century, “The Battle of Maldon,” which recorded a savage Anglo-Saxon battle against Viking invaders in which “the hero” and all his men die in an inglorious death, we might consider the power of such images of death, demise and defeat upon that Anglo culture:
Bitter was the onslaught, warriors fell
on either side, the young men lying down.
Wulfmær was wounded, choosing a slaughter-rest,
Byrhtnoth’s kinsman—he was mightily cut down
with a sword, his sister-son.
I’ve always thought “The Battle of Maldon” was written by woman survivor. The honesty of its speaker, “Anon,” toward the utterly destructive force waged by war on [her] humans is bitterly reflected in the speaker’s dire images, recalling such a “Bitter … onslaught” that could not be won under any circumstances. Is “The Battle of Maldon” one of our earliest examples of an anti-war poem? And, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, could “Anon” have been a woman? Could “she” have composed this poem having been left behind by the defeated and deceased male warriors, cruelly slaughtered, and leaving wives and daughters and small boys behind, to be raped and their villages pillaged? Would “she” have been the price of war, writing in such “bitterness” of the false impossible masculinist bravado on display?
Was she raped and enslaved as war’s bounty, her home ruined, her crops burned, her children killed or stolen?
The theme of death and defeat in this so-called “heroic” poem is dark and gruesome. Its imagery along with the prosody’s haunting pulsing rhythm in the original Anglo-Saxon is unrelenting, replicating the human heart in the face of danger and terrible loss. “The Battle of Maldon” is an entirely tragic poem. It is not just about Byrhtnoth’s shining heroics.[3]
**
The blood and tragedy of war is an ageless and seemingly multi-cultural poetry theme. But the substantial critique of war through poetry, the anti-war poem, begins to surface in many publications and manuscripts within the US by the era of the American Civil War—considered to be perhaps the first modern technological war, with horrible deaths in vast numbers. Enormous armies slaughtered one another on American fields, not only using knives and bayonets but also new-fangled industrial-era weaponry, including breech-loading firearms, repeating weapons, rifled muskets, and early versions of grenades and landmines. Railroads transported such weaponry, and early submarines and aerial reconnaissance were for the first time in use during this mid-19th century war.
Emily Dickinson’s vast poetry production was particularly acute during the American Civil War. Her “war work” provides an occasion for double readings and ironic interpretations. Conventional “straightforward” readings of a poem like Dickinson’s “It Feels A Shame to Be Alive” view it as praising the heroic men of war. But reading this poem against the grain—which it absolutely begs us to do—reveals that this poem is no mere tribute to masculine heroic sacrifice in battle. It is a devastating critic of the battlefield itself:
Are we that wait—sufficient worth—
That such Enormous Pearl
As life—dissolved be—for Us—
In Battle’s—horrid Bowl
The “horrid Bowl” image also resonates in another war poem by Dickinson, one that is also conventionally read as a testament to those fallen warriors who die before victory can be claimed, therefore never supposedly experiencing war-time victory and its satisfaction. This poem, “Victory Comes Late,” also radically undermines the very concept of “victory” it appears to take on. The poem acts as a scathing critique of “victory” within war, which causes “starving” and “strangling.” War only provides “crumbs” for “little mouths”:
Victory comes late,
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it.
How sweet it would have tasted,
Just a drop!
Was God so economical?
His table's spread too high for us
Unless we dine on tip-toe.
Crumbs fit such little mouths,
Cherries suit robins;
The eagle's golden breakfast
Strangles them.
God keeps his oath to sparrows,
Who of little love
Know how to starve!
Silly Laura Bush—so upset by those antiwar poets who refused her invite to the White House because they were protesting her husband’s nonsensical invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq as reactions to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US homefront. The First Lady decided to cancel her highly-contested White House event by complaining that she “did not believe poetry should be used for political purposes.”
Clearly Laura Bush the librarian had not read Dickinson closely. Nor had she apparently read W.H. Auden’s famous satirical war poem, “Oh What Is that Sound?” Auden’s poem echoes some of Dickinson’s duplicity about war—in this case, less through imagery than through the use of limerick-like rhymed stanzas and the poetic voice of a naive innocent who watches marching soldiers approach his town. In Auden’s poem, a purposely trite narrative and prosody offers that image of a soldiers’ band approaching the speaker’s house. As the warriors come for his own home and his beloved—the presumed silent “feminized” auditor in this poem—the author behind the naive speaker reminds us that war is not just a disaster for those in far away lands. War is a disaster for all of us. It is coming for us:
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming…
**
In this issue of Chant de la Sirène, which took its momentum from the invasion of Ukraine by Russia earlier this year, we, too, are poets and artists critiquing war. Poetry and art is and always has been political. And more than ever in our collective human history, poets and artists are saying: No War. No More.
War is unsustainable.
Multi-media poet and artist Chris Cheek offers us in this issue his visual images that were a response to news of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, as he describes on this page in his “Statement of Process” (left column). His series came to be entitled, No War! His extraordinary multimedia work, layering media images with various digital procedures and effects, is featured here in Issue 3 of Chant de la Sirène, along with many contemporary lyric poetics in the journal’s first part. Cheek’s images throughout the “lyric” anti-war portion of this issue form a kind of gallery exposition, of images he first shared on a daily basis via social media, almost from the very day he learned about Putin’s invasion. His stirring if often non-representational images play with wartime representation through his re-use of media photographs. They form their own resistance to war—not just the current war waged upon Ukrainian citizens, towns, schools, cities and homes, but a resistance reminding all of us about “soldiers coming.”
Cheek’s visual work is joined by that of more than 30 other poets and artists adopting many different media to also say: No War! This is our group mantra in our CDLS Issue No. 3. It not a mantra that is unrealistic or ill-informed. It is one that is intellectually, realistically considered.
For we have come to know in the 21st century that war is not a small tribal matter but a global impossibility. The grave dangers of war today potentially condemn a future for all life on earth.
…soldiers coming…
all our ways, to all of our homes.
**
Contemporary poetics presumes that poetry is not beautiful or innocent. Poetry seems—considered through the theories offered by poetics as a field of study—to be an explosive form, as potentially explosive metaphorically as a wartime battlefield. It shakes the poetry reader through its subversive uses of language. It refuses conclusive analogies. Language is no longer viewed as some seamless conveyer of what Douglas Messeli once wrote ironically might be the “nuggets of meaning,” as if mining for gold. Instead, poetry at its true, brittle heart, is steeped in irony and the failure “to mean.”
As a result of its own duplicity and ironies and refusals of certain clear identities, poetry conveys often enormous and important social critiques in very few lines and words. Poetry is a kind of language that works against any totality implied by conventional readings of expected signs and symbols, the “meanings” thrown about as slogans in wartime. Poetry engages with linguistic slippage, deviation from “meaning,” and takes us under language’s mud, so to speak, revealing not language’s “clarity,” but its opacity. Poetry forces us to investigate the deeper abysses of its own medium, its ironic charges, its trouble with “telling.”
Poetry doesn’t tell. It provokes.
It is in this way that poetry has been, in fact, enduringly political. As in those ancient war epics, poetry may have been used to consecrate and endorse “heroic” and masculinized cultural meaning and value. But poetry also has a fairly long history of also undermining those same values. The Chant de la Sirène poets and artists in these pages use many forms of media—many forms of form—to do just that. To ask questions rather than provide conclusions, to open up the possibilities of a world of different motives. We of this issue on “Poetics, War & Peace” call out war as a false social paradigm of supposedly legitimized human violence. We also suggest that war can have no place in our 21st century era, with the propagation of vastly potent killing machines populating the globe.
Here we suggest that our only option as poets on the planet is to confront and critique the continuation of war. NO WAR! NO MORE!
Modern warfare is not just a threat to war-torn peoples on the opposite sides of various illusory Mason-Dixon lines. Modern wars are an existential threat to all life itself.
**
Of course, there have always been countless reasons to say NO to war, its perpetual slaughter of human bodies. Just in one example, a report that came out a couple of months ago from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha told of hundreds of impossible-to-identify bodies, those of Ukrainian townsfolk, that were continuing to be buried all spring and summer, ever since the Russian assault on that community ended in April. By August, the late summer heat had produced “the stench of the dead” in Bucha, according to the New York Times article on this one disaster. Bucha is but one town in Ukraine in which “more stories of Russian brutality are being told by witnesses,” those who fled places like Bucha that were “under Russian occupation… People taken from their homes at night and never seen again. Lotting torture, murder….” Burials of the dead neighbors and family members may haunt us reading about them. Thus, we can say No War—simply because war is a series of heinous brutal murderous acts. It is butchery, which would seem antithetical to “civilization” at least according to its better angels.
NO WAR!
—and not just because of the countless deaths and the pain and suffering war reproduces. Nine nations in 2022, according to current statistics, now own nuclear weapons of mass destruction, including Russia and the United States. These war toys are not just the prerogative of the two global superpowers playing a Cold War Poker game. Not only do other countries today own a nuclear weapon arsenal— the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—but according to a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), all countries with nuclear arms “continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals.” And the number of countries owning nuclear weapons “will probably increase in the next decade,” says the same report.[4]
And we have not only to worry about the proliferation nuclear weapons around the world. We must also worry today about the 440 nuclear reactors in 33 countries (including Taiwan) that sit on the face of earth’s surface. Fifteen more are currently under construction, and about 90 more nuclear reactors exist on the global planning table.[5]
What happens to such nuclear reactors in a hot war zone? We have only to turn to Ukraine this past year to get a glimpse of war’s future.
**
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Chernobyl’s deadly 1986 disaster’s exclusion zone site was subjugated by Valdimir Putin’s forces, putting the Western hemisphere if not all life on earth at risk for a Chernobyl disaster Number 2. Chernobyl’s on-site staff and engineer team controlling the effects of the 1986 nuclear-reactor meltdown/explosion worked under the threat of armed Russian military guards 24/7 to keep the damaged reactors under their dubious control. While the Chernobyl disaster zone has miraculously thus far held fast in the midst of a major war, there is no guarantee it will continue doing so. Monitors reported grave concerns all summer about Chernobyl’s stability as the war goes on. This particular continuing threat of a major nuclear catastrophe is now joined by highly compromised safety at the Zaporizhzhia plant, the largest nuclear energy site in Ukraine, and even the largest in Europe. Rachel Maddow reported recently on her MSNBC television news program that they’ve already handed out the iodine pills to members of the population living within a generous zone near this seriously endangered nuclear plant facility. Director General of the International Atomic Energy agency, Raphael Grozzi, stated in an August that “Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” at Zaporizhzhia. He said: “what is at stake is extremely serious, and extremely grave and dangerous.”[6]
Just yesterday, the day before the launch of this issue of Chant de la Sirène, Putin has taken the entire region the Zaporizhzhia plant is in, and declared it part of the Russian state. While Ukrainians continue to operate most of the plant, the Ukraine military has suggested that “plant employees were being subjected to ‘moral and psychological pressure’ and had been forced to obtain Russian passports and sign employment contracts with Russia’s state nuclear energy agency.” These unconfirmed but probably true and heartbreaking reports published by CNN October 6, 2022, suggest the kind of horrific pressures nuclear-plant operators and security officials are working under in Ukraine. This is not a safe scenario for nuclear-energy production. This is not a comfortable arrangement for the future of humanity.
NO WAR!
**
Not only has the invasion of the nation of Ukraine threatened the lives of its 43 million citizens, sending approximately eight million of them out of the country as refugees. Not only has this war based within the conventional borders of Ukraine threatened the distribution of food and other goods worldwide, disrupting the world economy.
But through the use of nuclear reactor zones as stages for Russian military control, its artillery and land mines, “humanity—and other life forms— becomes just “one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” according to UN Secretary General António Guterrez. In his speech at the August meeting of the UN Committee for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in New York, Guterrez warned: “The clouds following in end of the Cold War are gathering once more…”[6]
War has forever existed as ironic cause of and foundation for human civilization. War claims property. It violently negotiates religious belief systems that appear foundational to human collectivity. It establishes and re-enforces other community social orders like the dominance of binary gender roles through its “heroic masculinity” warrior stereotypes, propagating the concept of “female” exclusion zones and defining concepts of “cultural manhood” for children and adults alike. It propagates ideological propaganda of all types. “War” continuously recycles and teaches a social politics founded upon outsider/insider binary structures, a system that makes the implicit “stranger” a social “enemy.”
War has been made epic and holy and glorious; the human blood war demands has been made sacred to its societies. War has built empires and it has destroyed them. War is an economic engine by which the profiteers get richer, and countless men suffer and die in the process, typically in large nation states the lower classes—while the women and young children that may be excluded from men’s warrior roles historically have been raped, pillaged, starved. The booty of war offers up goods and land to the already rich. There are many motives and myths perpetuating cycles of war across the planet, honor and glory only being the most superficial “cover stories” of its epochal narratives.
As humanity realizes itself as a globally extended community of multiple societies and bodies, of competing signs and genders and religions, we see ourselves living upon a large but not infinite plane of space, a shrinking ontological universe in which no one can escape the latest catastrophes of war.
War must now become antique. The wars of the warrior-hero saga traditions, sung in ballads and oral epics, have long outspent their narrative-economic use. Poets have been saying this in their anti-war voices for decades: war has outspent its value to modernity. War may have once served as a Biblical-style social mirror, a cultural boundary-delineator, an identity consecrator. But war on any soil upon earth’s crusts today will become our common grave. War threatens to destroy land, air, water, plants, animals—as well as human existence.
Poet “legislators” may not have answers. But we ask the right questions. We challenge stereotypes and de-nature symbols and their forms of social identity. We upset presumptions of “meaning,” and challenge the language used to define false notions of meaning and closure.
Through poetics, we are all made strangers—at our own linguistic doors. We also open those doors—to other beings.
**
“People want peace,” sings Paul McCarthy in his chant-like anthem from the album Egypt Station (2018). But “peace” is not just a song or word. It is not a saying. It is a group desire, as McCarthy suggests. Now we have no choice but to make peace, to live in peace. No War! is not negotiable. No War—is our only collective option on the human horizon.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reinforced what anti-NATO activists have been telling us: that signing treaties based upon the perpetuation of the threat of war does not resolve or end war. It just makes more war, more death and destruction. A post-World War II Cold War logic is defunct in an era of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy producing radioactive waste. The Ukrainian war just outside the current NATO zone is being militarily supplied and perpetuated by NATO-based forces, while the Russian military uses nuclear reactor zones as shields for missile bases and land-mine operations.
Dickinson was prescient in suggesting there can be no win for the victors. There is no winning a war in the 21st century.
The Biden administration and European nations continue to funnel increasing numbers of artillery and war machines to Ukraine, in the hopes of turning back Putin’s invasion. We support the sovereignty of Ukraine. But the Ukrainian war grinds on, with more war, more death, and now more Russian conscriptions, promised. There is no end in sight. That is what war comes to. No good end.
Some poets in America have been observing this period of contemporary war in Russia and Ukraine through ironic “war diary” pieces, including multi-media poets Susan M. Schultz and Anne Gorrick (“East/West”), who couple their reflections on the everyday world in their seemingly safe spaces—located, respectively, in paradisiacal Hawaii (which is loaded with nuclear warheads and is also target of the nuclear state of North Korea), and the bucolic Hudson Valley of New York State. Both poets write with an awareness of the pitfalls of war right out of Dickinsonian irony, suggesting that all is not well—even as one continues writing or painting or cooking up a recipe—that a war in Eastern Europe so far from our own shores is not a veiled threat to their own lives and worlds and homes. It is an overt threat right at home. Similarly, a poem like James Sherry’s “Nukeman,” re-adapted and revised for this issue with Deborah Thomas’s curated media images, suggests that the nuclear era must end all wars, that war itself suffers an identity crisis of its own in its potential, its eventual promise, to destroy all earth’s creatures through radioactive nuclear fallout.
Other poets take on a consideration of past wars in Europe like Cynthia Hogue’s “the girl on a bridge,” based in oral histories Hogue collected from those living during Nazi-occupied France; or in Jane Augustine’s reflection on wartime childhood experiences in California during World War II. Augustine’s poetry memoir is a reminder that in recent history American populations were threatened, too, with an invasion on the homefront via the West Coast. Like the war diaries above, Augustine recounts what it as like to live an “American life” with the on-going fear of a possible war on one’s own soil.
Steve Benson bravely takes on through his poet’s prose and research accumulated during a journey to Palestine as a professional in the mental health field those psychological tolls of continuous war upon a population in the Middle East. His report should give all Americans pause; our citizens, like vast numbers of Israelis themselves (with some notable exceptions), live in general dismissal and denial of Palestinian pain. We in America perpetuate that pain through our foreign policies. Benson’s documentation is forthright and factual. It is based upon his eyewitness experience, and first-hand accounts of wartime suffering.
So many writers and poets, multi-media artists, video-makers, translators—even a vocalist—make up this mega-issue of Chant de la Sirène. The issue is an experience, one to return to several times and explore. It is our largest issue to date. I cannot mention by name here all its talented contributors, in an Introduction calling for the End of War, not the End of Times. But I thank them for their courageous and important work in this issue. I urge you to read each one, or listen to them or watch, whatever combinations of language and form they offer—
to signify we must have global peace.
Let us continue to think through the individual and yet collective mind(s) reflected in these pages, saying NO to war in so many different ways and and media. Our eyes and ears are our investigative guides. Our minds are open—to radical change.
—Laura Hinton, Editor
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NOTES:
[1] See C.M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry, 1952: quoted in Marie Chan, “Chinese Heroic Poems and European Epic,” Comparative Literature Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 1974): 142-168.
[2] Abigail Deutche, “100 Years of Poetry: The Magazine and War,” The Poetry Foundation at:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69902/100-years-of-poetry-the-magazine-and-war
[3] Note: Byrhtnoth was a historic figure as well as a tragic hero in “The Battle of Maldon,” whose authorship is unknown. He was Ealdorman of Essex in the 10th century and an AngloSaxon warrior from the Battle of Maldon that took place on 11 August 991 CE, near Maldon beside the River Blackwater in Essex, England. His name is composed of the Old English beorht (bright) and noð (courage), which rings quite ironically if we consider the anti-heroic, anti-war message potential to this poem.
[4] “Global nuclear arsenals are expected to grow as states continue to modernize, according to the World Nuclear Association at:
[5] These statistics come from the World Nuclear Organization as updated on its website July 2022; see:
[6] Reporter Amy Goodman and the independent news program “Democracy Now” covered this urgent nuclear-reactor issue in the Ukraine recently on August 4; see:
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/8/4/russia_ukraine_zaporizhzhia_nuclear_plant_military
See also the UN Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty Committee conference site for more information on the current dangers of nuclear-power plants in the Ukraine war zone at: