Vietnam War poetry, ‘Anti-War Poetry' ( III). The American anti-war poetry is characterised by reportorial focus on loss of innocence and spiritual wounding. Community-oriented and gutsy, the Asian poets display more formal eloquence and a spirit of sad sacrifice. Cross-fertilisation between peoples of different backgrounds and lands reveals that out of war and its difficult aftermath comes strong healing synergy that transcends barriers of age, gender, nationality, political belief, and race. As one veteran concludes: "Because we are brothers, there are tears in our eyes." According to the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political , Social, and Military History. Ed. Spencer C. Tucker/Oxford, more than any other group, however, American poets, both veterans and non-veterans, in thousands of poems written during and after the war best chronicled the changing, often conflicting attitudes and experiences of men and women fighting in Southeast Asia. Their poetry ranges from often bawdy ballads sung by American fighter pilots, collected in Joseph E. Tuso's Singing the Vietnam Blues (1990), and the short, sometimes humorous verses published in publications such as the satiric Grunt magazine or the Pacific Stars and Stripes, to immensely ambitious and moving works that rank with the best poetry of the age. Poetry about Vietnam falls into three general categories: political protest poems, usually written by established poets who had not been to Vietnam; verse novels, in which chronologically linked poems depict one person's experiences at war; and the hundreds of usually short, personal lyrics, which present individual scenes, character sketches, or events. The first significant protest volume was A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Robert Bly and David Ray. The next year, Walter Lowenfels edited the anthology Where Is Vietnam?, in which the 87 contributing poets include James Dickey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Denise Levertov. Two more collections followed: Out of the Shadow of War (1968) and Poetry against the War (1972). Although a few poems are set in Southeast Asia, most of the works presented in these anthologies reflect the writers' attitudes to US involvement in Vietnam by references to the political scene, the war as seen on TV or reported in the newspapers, and to anti-war themes in general. These anthologies and the numerous individual poems that were published served to define and sustain the general intellectual opposition to the war. Of the verse novels, three stand out: Vietnam Simply (1967) by Dick Shea, How Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam (1972) by McAvoy Layne, and Interrogations (1990) by Leroy Quintana. In discursive, often sardonic selections, Shea presents the observations of a Navy lieutenant about the entrance of US Marines into the war and other scenes and events in 1965 Vietnam. By means of short, staccato verses, Laynes book traces a Marine recruit (who bears the name of the legendary American war hero) through basic training and combat, then becomes allegorically fanciful as "Audie is captured by the Viêt Công and holds telephone conversations from Hà Nôi with the president of the US, yet still hums "The Theme from Marlboro Country”. Quintana, the only Hispanic veteran to publish a major collection of poetry, shows how a young army draftee experiences training, combat, and the aftermath of the war, where even "on city streets, in restaurants, bars" he "still walk[s] the jungle in camouflage," his "M-16 mind still on recon patrol." Each of these verse novels presents young men whose innocent acceptance changes to experienced disillusion about the American presence in Vietnam. This subject the movement from innocence to experience was perhaps the most universal theme explored by American poets, most of whom served in Vietnam, either in the military or as conscientious objectors. Many of them interrupted their college educations to go to war, then returned to earn graduate degrees in various writing programmes and teach in universities. Before the 1975 fall of Sài Gôn, many poet-veterans joined protest organisations such as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, using their poems to substantiate their opposition not only to war in general but to the Vietnam War in particular.
