Tikkun

A Poet’s Meditation on Force

January 31, 2013

by David Wojahn

In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series of troubled meditations on the nature of “force” within contemporary culture. Let me explain what I mean by force. 

To do so requires a look back at the groundbreaking work of philosopher and activist Simone Weil.

Writing in the first year of World War II, in an effort to show that Hitler’s rise to power was not the anomaly that other intellectuals claimed it to be, Weil composed one of the most famous meditations on violence ever written, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.”

Early in the essay, Weil defines what she means by “force”: To define force—it is that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all. This is the spectacle The Iliad never wearies of showing us.

Warfare for Weil is not a continuation of politics by other means but a grimly relentless process of dehumanization, unchanged since the time of Homer. Anyone who sees it otherwise is dismissed by the author as a “dreamer.” Weil does not care to offer a nuanced mediation on the role of violence in human nature, and she surely would not view technological progress as having done anything to change the state of things. (What better exemplifies Weil’s notion of force than an American drone—piloted many thousands of miles away by a twenty-two-year-old in California—unleashing its missiles on an al-Qaida safe house outside Karachi?)

Weil scholars often cite "The Iliad or the Poem of Force" as prefiguring the turn toward mysticism and spirituality that characterized her late work, but the basic stance of the essay is one of simple astonishment and disgust at the relentless magnitude of the human capacity for violence. In other words, Weil writes in the tradition of the Jeremiad rather than that of the epic. So too does Tom Sleigh in this new collection of poems. Weil and Sleigh both also remind us that astonishment and disgust can be powerful rhetorical tools when artfully employed.

The initiating subject matter of Army Cats, Sleigh's seventh book, is the most recent of a seemingly endless series of internecine conflicts that have plagued Lebanon for much of the last halfcentury. Working as a journalist based in Beirut during the summer of 2007, Sleigh was able to witness the escalation of the turmoil firsthand, yet the poems of Army Cats do not focus on the war's political implications. We do not hear of Hezbollah's attempts to unseat the elected government of the country, or of the bloody siege of Nahr al-Bahred Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli; we are instead offered a series of portraits and snapshots, pictures of the war's human cost rendered in sometimes excruciatingly intense close-ups. Here is the closing of a poem entitled "Refuge":

... her face twisted up

by scars is a face of scars that's only hers

her face that I look at as she smiles first

indulgently, then back at herself as child

beseechingly asking mom for approval.

The woman she will be tells her that she's pretty

such a pretty girl, and the child she is

as the mother knows it too, she nods her head

and for that moment the three of them agree.

 
This is harrowing description; the use of repetition, enjambment, nearrhyme, and (especially) the bravura syntax of the opening sentence combine to an effect of sorrowful claustrophobia. We can no more stop looking at the girl's disfigured face than the speaker can. And the tension of the poem is only released via the grim irony of the speaker speculating upon the girl's future- "the woman that she will be tells her that she's pretty." In another poem, a military mechanic attempts an emergency repair of a decrepit French tank, "nothing /like the ones the Americans deploy." Here is the concluding passage:

         ...He runs two fingers

up and down it, then feels where rust,

mixed into an oily paste, shines like bloody flux

he gently dips his fingers in, sniffs and tastes.

Clanging back his tapping on the armor plate,

as he listens to her talking on his back in the dirt, screwing in

the spare parts, the tank says what tanks always say,

Fix me, oil me, grease me, make itfit,

confirming what he knows about the French.

 
As with "Refugee," there's a visceral and kinetic immediacy to this passage that is typical of Sleigh's work. Even more notable, however, is the unsettling unsettling personification of the closing lines; the tank and the mechanic are frozen in a kind of erotic embrace; the scene is part Ovid's Metamorphosis, part Robocop, and altogether strange, a startlingly imaginative example of the process of Force turning individuals into "things."

The poems set in Lebanon, which are found mainly in the first section of Army Cats, focus on the psychological effects of warfare on ordinary individuals and recall the work of America's great poetic chronicler of such trauma, Randall Jarrell. But Sleigh eschews Jarrell's sentimentality for an almost pitiless objectivity. And Sleigh well knows that the desire for objectivity also holds its dangers-not least because it can easily devolve into a stance of mere gratuitousness. As the speaker of a monologue entitled "Reporter" confesses: "I shrink myself /to nothing just to feel history and my nothing/come together in the most beautiful fucking / you can't quite feel." There is a sadly long tradition ofAmerican writers visiting war zones in search of content: one thinks of Stephen Crane in the Spanish-American War, of Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War, and more recently-in the 1980s-of author Joan Didion's and poet Carolyn Forche's dispatches from the civil war in El Salvador. Sleigh surely follows in this tradition, but differs from his predecessors insofar as he is much more concerned with matters of personal and aesthetic accountability.

Violence is of course seen as one of force's handmaidens, but so too is technology: the volume's longest and most risky piece is a four-page prose poem describing a YouTube video-the "sound quality and the resolution are poor" -purporting to record the execution of Saddam Hussein. Sleigh goes on to imagine that the cell phone recording this event is held by none other than William Shakespeare, and develops this outlandish conceit with considerable brio. The tone is more earnest than comic. When the video fails to capture the spectacle of Saddam's body dangling from gallows, Shakespeare-the consummate professional-sees an aesthetic opportunity:

Later, after viewing the video back in

his room, Shakespeare concludes that

the overall effect is crude, but the scene

builds well, the rhetoric carries the day,

and that the blackout is an excellent device-

more effective, in the end, than

the actual showing of the body. After

all, everybody has seen hundreds upon

hundreds of corpses, if not in real life,

then on TV, at the movies, in books, .

in plays, No, a corpse doesn't have the

dramatic force it used to have ... and

he remembers back to when he was a

boy working as a butcher, exercising

his father's trade, that when he killed

a calf he would do it in high style, and

make a speech. And everyone would

laugh, the calf would be skinned out,

the meat salted - and the next one

would stumble up, be tied down, and

made ready for the knife.

 
As the collection goes on, and the subject of Lebanon is replaced by more various concerns, the sort of grotesque anachronism and outlandish juxtapositions found in the Saddam/ Shakespeare poem become a prevailing motif. Sleigh's range of reference and allusion has always been formidable, and the poems of Army Cats are no exception: there are references to gladiatorial contests, to writers such as Primo Levi and Robert Graves, to a Russian space suit set adrift from the International Space Station (stuffed with old clothes and containing a radio transmitter), to the Greek magical papyri, to rock eccentric Frank Zappa, and to jazz great Charles Mingus.

There are of course many other contemporary poets who Cuisinart allusion in this fashion, but such writing for the most part derives from skill at Googling rather than from serious research or necessity. This is not the case with Sleigh, partly because he interweaves his work in this mode with poems that can be disarmingly personal. "Triumph," a poem for the speaker's mother, manages to be offbeat and clinically precise at once, much in the manner that Robert Lowell portrayed his own parents in Life Studies. Here's a characteristic passage from "Triumph":

 
-- The old drama queen. But she's also got that mad nobility

in her voice that makes me imagine her

riding like a Greek general on a horse through

everything she's been through, my father's death,

her children's cutting silences, her hardscrabble childhood

on the farm where they lived on 50 cents a day ...

Another reason for Sleigh's success with his project is that his command of technique is impeccable. Again we're reminded of Lowell, for it is work of vernacular immediacy that manages to be unobtrusively formal in its ultimate design. The collection is packed with sonnets and nearsonnets, sly use of off-rhyme, and a muscular free verse strongly informed by pentameter. Witness a compressed little tour-de-force baldly entitled "To Death":

 You won't wipe away my joy

 in my seaweed skin, my hunched neck,

my folds and creases you hide in

even as I throw my arm around you and lie

my leg sweaty and cooling next to yours.

I know you make my face more

interesting on me on this beautifully

lit stage made to look like an open

field where I wander in your theater

of fantasies touching god knows what

in this delirium of bodies

in this noisy club where everybody's

drinking and that's you leaning over

secretly spitting in everybody's drink.

Sleigh has been publishing formidable poetry for almost thirty years, and among American poets of his generation there is no one better. He has arrived at this status in no small measure because few of his generational peers have been as willing to sosuccessfully address large and abiding subjects as well as intensely personal ones. And that he accomplishes all this with a seething clarity of vision that never lapses into grandiosity makes his accomplishment all the more noteworthy.

At the end of her Iliad essay, Weil compares the pitiless spirit of Homer's depictions of warfare to the message of the Gospels. But Weil's conception of piety is one of exceptional rigor, involving the most difficult of reckonings, and the most hard-won consolations. Art, too-at least the art that is apt to endure-cannot offer easy reckonings or tidy consolations, either.

"Nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed," Weil notes. Tom Sleigh understands this concept as well, and thus Army Cats is nothing less than a triumph.