Washington DC City Paper
Short Subjects
From the April 15, 2005 issue.
334 words.
Voices in Wartime
By Mark Jenkins
Directed by Rick King
After the fighting is over, the legacy of war is ceded to the
poets. That’s why it’s unsurprising to see West Point’s
superintendent, Lt. Gen. William Lennox Jr., enthusiastically
discussing anti-war verse in Voices in Wartime, an impassioned
documentary by Road Ends director Rick King. The slaughters of
the Civil War, World War I, and other conflicts can now be
acknowledged as horrifically pointless, deserving of smoldering
literary outrage.
Questioning a war that’s in progress, however, is another
matter. King’s film could have been made at any time, but it was
clearly inspired by an event—or rather, a nonevent—once
scheduled for February 2003. Laura Bush invited poets to the
White House to celebrate the work of three now-respected but
once-controversial authors: Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and
Emily Dickinson. Sam Hamill, co-founder of Poets Against the
War, responded with a request for verse that was relevant to the
American invasion of Iraq and received 1,500 poems in 36 hours.
The symposium was quickly canceled. In effect, though, it’s
carried out in this film, which offers a quick history of war
and its bards, from Homer to Tennyson to Auden to contemporary
Michigan 12-year-old Cameron Penny. (The globally thinking
filmmakers also include India’s Sampurna Chattarji, Japan’s
Shoda Shinoe, and Nigerian-born Chris Abani, whose subject is
the Nigerian-Biafran civil war.)
But the focus is primarily on two historical developments:
World War I, which brought a new technological barbarism—and
such writers as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon—and the
“total war” that explicitly targeted civilian populations,
exemplified by Guernica, Auschwitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima. The
film has its awkward aspects: King probably should have avoided
having poets declaim their work while standing on American
streets near such symbols of upscale obliviousness as Starbucks,
and he doesn’t quite acknowledge that his testimonial to the
power of poetry relies significantly on the impact of images.
Still, Voices in Wartime is smart, angry, and unflinching, an
admirable cinematic elaboration on Owen’s maxim that “true poets
must be truthful.”—Mark Jenkins
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