"We should know these people we bury in the Earth": Brian Turner's radical message.

Bishop, James Gleason

Phantom Noise

by Brian Turner

Alice James Books, 2010

When I start my computer this evening, 117 hyperlinks vie for my attention. Republicans are "talking tough" about pending Wall Street reform. Sandra Bullock is trending. On a secondary news page, seventeen items down, I learn that today, April 23, 2010, was the bloodiest day so far this year in Iraq. The news seems old: In Baghdad, Sunni-led insurgents set off car-and roadside-bombs in multiple Shiite centers--including three mosques--killing at least 69. I wish it hadn't happened. But if I weren't writing this article, I probably wouldn't have opened the story. In "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," Seamus Heaney writes, in one of his most overtly political poems, of turbulent Northern Ireland in 1971: "I'm back in winter / Quarters where bad news is no longer news...." After nine years of war, car-bombs in Iraq aren't trending.

Brian Turner's second collection of poetry, Phantom Noise, is not news. But this book will endure. From the opening gut-thump of "VA Confessional" to the bull's-eye of ".22-Caliber," to so many wrenching lines ("Gilgamesh ... knows that each life is the world / dying anew"), this book shows a mature, versatile poet, as much a witness at Lowe's Home Improvement Center as at a Mutanabbi street bombing. William Carlos Williams' lines from "Asphodel" echo throughout Phantom Noise: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."

Turner's debut, Here, Bullet, won the won the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005 and the 2007 Poet's Prize. It made Turner, in poetry circles, a rock star. He appeared on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio, the BBC, Weekend America, and others. Publishers Weekly called Here, Bullet "likely the most discussed debut of the decade." The New York Times Book Review wrote an eloquently favorable review. To date, Here, Bullet has sold more than 25,000 copies and is in its fifth print run: an astonishing number not only by poetry standards, but for any first book. According to the publisher, "These sales led to one of the highest first print runs in Alice James Books' history for Phantom Noise, half of which sold before the book was even printed." A typical poetry book printing runs about 1,200 copies. Here, Bullet was brutally, wonderfully, relentlessly about the Iraq war. Each poem thudded home, on target. And the target was invariably Iraq. In Here, Bullet, Turner chiseled a few great poems onto the wall of American letters, notably, "2,000 lbs.," "Sadiq," "Eulogy," "What Every Soldier Should Know," and the title poem. After awhile, however, the bullets slapping flesh and sand started to sound--God help us--alike. In his second collection, war follows the poet home. Phantom Noise showcases Turner's ability to squeeze magic and despair from the motions of ordinary life. A dozen poems--though not the title poem--stand out as ones which will show up on blogs, be handed to returning veterans, and which will rightly become part of the next great anthology of war poetry.

With the success of Here, Bullet, Turner joined the ranks of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in World War I, Randall Jarrell in World War II, and Yusef Komunyakaa in Vietnam. With the publication of Phantom Noise, Turner solidifies his title as America's war poet. The sobriquet is, in one sense, unfortunate. These poems show such vision, voice and range, that he could integrate or transcend the war and become America's poet. Midway through Phantom Noise appears the poem titled, "A Lullaby for Bullets," which could serve as an answer to "Here, Bullet." Rather than taunting the bullet to come and get him, here the speaker asks the bullet to miss, to "graze / the man's temple," close enough to learn the man's name. We should know these people.

In a dream sequence from "Illumination Rounds," the poet is shoveling graves for the dead in his backyard, explaining to his lover, "We need to help them, if only with a coffin ..." The mate in this nonsexual fantasy stops the speaker's digging to say We should invite them into our home. We should learn their names, their history. We should know these people we bury in the earth.

But she doesn't say that in waking-life, so it becomes the poet's task to learn the history of those killed by America's longest war. In a 14 May email interview, Turner elaborated on the relevance of the notion that "we should know these people" we're fighting: "It's something I would often say to people once I returned from Iraq. Eventually, the phrase worked its way into this poem. So many have died. So many have lost those they love. So many wounded, with trauma to be lived with for the decades to come. The very, very least we can do is to recognize the wide distribution of pain to which we are connected."

Turner looks at the distribution of pain on both sides of the war. The wealth of epigraphs and brief histories seem not to take sides. We hear from Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahab al-Bayati ("Embrace the frightful and the beautiful"). We also hear from Katie Couric ("One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military") in an angry and wrenching poem, "Insignia," about a sexual assault victim sleeping under a deuce 'n half cargo truck to hide from her attacker. "It's you she's dreaming of, Sergeant--she'll dream of you / for years to come." This is a book concerned with the lingering violence in the years to come. Each poem in this collection serves as its own illumination round.

Here, Bullet gave more or less equal treatment to American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, and Iraqi civilians. The poems in Phantom Noise also stare hard at the frightful and, less often, the beautiful, on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes the war is explicitly nearby, as in the provocative lead poem, "VA Hospital Confessional." Each night is different. Each night the same. Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don't. When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there, gesturing, as if saying, Aren't you ashamed?

Other times, the war hovers, ghost-like, shimmering in and out of the lines. In ".22-Caliber," the speaker's father helps him make a zip gun with a barrel and "finishing nail." The gun made, he takes aim and fires at the target, again and again: "an exercise in muscle memory. / I am learning how to connect / with the small dark silence / carried within the center of all things."

Bull's-eye.

Throughout Phantom Noise, Turner connects with the small dark center. Returning from a year in Iraq, he attends a rave--an all-night party--on his first weekend stateside. A man dressed in an Energizer bunny suit roller-skates around the party. The speaker is taking inventory of what's left after he returns from his deployment: "Rifle oil, check. Smoke grenades, check." Then, "The boredom. The minutes. The hours. Days. Weeks. Months. The moments / unbound by time's dominion. The years after." He looks around the party and declares with terse irony, "These people. My people." The soldier has returned home, and Sandra Bullock is trending.

War informs each poem, though some remain once- or twice-removed from battle--and these become the most powerful in this collection. The simple and simply powerful "The Whale" never mentions war, yet war is the phantom noise whispering throughout the poem.

I expect things to blow up in Ramadi and Fallujah, but not in Florence, Oregon. "It is 1970," the poem begins, "and the summer of love is over." An eight-ton sperm whale has died, and those in charge "carve"--apt verb--an entrance into the whale's side and place 500 pounds of explosives "to rend open the interior / so scavengers can pick the carcass clean." But this is just a whale, a boy watching while "engineers argue / ... equations to undo the intricate puzzle / of muscle and bone."

The year the poem takes place is significant. Although Woodstock, My Lai, Martin Luther King's assassination, and Robert Kennedy's assassination are all past, plenty of things are blowing up in 1970. By mid-year, a third of a million U.S. troops are still in Vietnam. In August, heavy B-52 bombing occurs along the Demilitarized Zone. In 1970, things were also blowing up at home. On April 30, President Nixon announced that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces will enter Cambodia. In his address to the nation, Nixon said the invasion is "not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we desire." Four days later, Kent State: Four dead. Eight wounded. Three days before the shootings, Nixon called anti-war protestors "bums blowing up campuses."

But Turner's poem is just about a whale, a boy watching ... the blast from the sawgrass dunes, the sudden jolt of nerves as the body absorbs the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward in jets of tissue and meat, the local news reporter dropping to his knees to cover his head with a clipboard [...] and I remember everyone smiling afterward, laughing, each of us amazed the day a god was blown to pieces on a beach and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

Turner's jagged lines suggest broken flesh. His trademark internal rhyme (blast, sawgrass) mingles beauty and ugliness. Alone, these lines could describe any beachhead, any war. The whale stank, and little pieces of it fell on the observers. This is no allegory, but there was a large, smelly carcass stateside in 1970. Perhaps, Turner suggests without suggesting, another whale has washed ashore.

"Cut these words and they would bleed," Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed. There's no need to cut Turner's words. They already bleed. The lines surrounding Emerson's quote from his 1850 review of Montaigne's essays, "Montaigne, or The Skeptic," could apply to Phantom Noise.

"The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression."

Turner served seven years in the enlisted corps, eventually earning the rank of buck sergeant (E-5). He joined the Army at age 29, with his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon in hand. Turner knew he could have been commissioned, but opted to be a "grunt." He said he joined in part to continue a family tradition of service in wars. His grandfather served as a Marine in World War II, and his father was a Russian linguist at the height of the Cold War. Turner deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Then, in November, 2003, he went to Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. For nearly one year, he was an infantry team leader--the modern military equivalent of Emerson's teamster and blacksmith. When he got out of the Army in 2005, he split his time between teaching and working as a low-voltage electrician in Fresno. He kept his hands dirty. Turner wrote in our e-mail interview that he was glad not to be promoted above buck sergeant: "I hated the meetings and didn't want anything to do with them." Turner has the voice of a man about his work; consequently, his words become a shower of bullets.

Almost none of the works in Phantom Noise is explicitly a protest poem. An exception is "Sleeping in Dick Cheney's Bed," about speaking to a group of 1,600 cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, then returning that evening to the Distinguished Visitor's Suite in on-base lodging, the "very bed" where Dick Cheney once slept. "It's unnerving how comfortable this is," the poem begins, already nudging toward metaphor, Energizer bunnies dancing during a back-page war. The accusation turns inward, grows larger only by implication--the war crime, in this case, becomes simple act of falling asleep. ... [W]hat does it say about me that I can return to Cheney's room after midnight strip my clothes off to curl in the bed where he too has slept ... the night a perfection of sleep.

This is the new chivalry. Not Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy. Not doomed Roland defending Roncesvalles, not even Emerson's farmers firing "the shot heard round the world," nor the scholars and bridegrooms roused by Walt Whitman's drums and bugles. This is the new chivalry: not protest, but clear-eyed compassion for those who suffer on both sides of a war. We should invite them into our home.

Turner commented in his e-mail interview on the widening circle of responsibility in "Sleeping in Dick Cheney's Bed"--about the fact that bad news about Iraq is not news. "The word 'obscene' comes to mind. It reminds me of a recurring question I have for us--What does it say about a nation that can wage war and yet know very little about [the enemy]? This particular poem avoids the rant, but the rant is woven into it." Turner wrote that he hoped the explicit complicity in the speaker--himself--might uncover an unspoken complicity "within us all. I'm talking about torture. I'm talking about a country that must be responsible for what it has done. I'm talking about the country I love. America."

The easiest thing for a returning soldier to write would be a book of protest poems. Next easiest would be inner-vision poems: look at my raw nerves. Either posture, in academic circles, is trending. As a seven-year veteran of the Army, Turner would also have been justified in writing some artistic version of support-our-troops poems. But this is the harsh reality of Phantom Noise: Turner follows soldiers on both sides of the war back home, and he becomes a clear-eyed witness to the phantom violence that occurs years after the violence of war. Here, Bullet was a poignant book about war; Phantom Noise is a poignant book about war and healing. Significantly, his latest book begins in a VA hospital and ends in silence, deep in Olympic National Park: "it is a type of medicine by landscape." The trajectory is from confession to beauty--or if not beauty, at least the hope of beauty, of finding, as he does in "Eucalyptus," "the small bright lanterns of sunlight / breaking through the leaves above." The penultimate poem in the collection takes place in the Guggenheim Museum. Phantom Noise points toward the power of art to reveal, then heal.

One of my favorite poems, "The Mutanabbi Street Bombing," mingles a bombing in Iraq with a quiet street in California. After the car-bomb explodes and an old man, ears bleeding, "staggers in the cloud of dust and debris," the Renaissance Bookstore catches on fire. Iraqi poets burn next to Homer and Whitman. The California couple lies asleep in a room that smells of "apple-roasted tobacco." Recalling the lines from "Sleeping in Dick Cheney's Bed,"--"the night a perfection of sleep"--the couple wake to find themselves "dusted in ash, the poems of Sulma / and Sayyab in their hair, Sa'di on their eyebrows, / Hafiz and Rumi on their lips." This transcends a surrealist dream of two warring cultures connecting. "This is the world," Dylan Thomas wrote. "Have faith." Like it or not, the poem suggests, America and Iraq are already connected by the war, and by the phantom noise which will echo after the war.

Former NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, in his searing polemic, Can Poetry Matter?, laments the insular, private, and specialist-speaking-to-specialist nature of contemporary poetry. Written in 1992, his points ring true today. Gioia alleges that "poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture" and that the genre as a whole has "difficulty in discussing most public concerns." A decade later, responding to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gioia wrote in Disappearing Ink, "Poetry is a vast and flexible art that should be able to express all human experience--public and private. The horrors of September 11 remind us that the art should be able to articulate our common sorrows as well as our private ones...It is a false sophistication to believe that contemporary poetry is above such mundane concerns."

Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise may constitute the best attempts so far to answer Gioia's charges. Here are collections that go to war, return home, and stare hard at what matters. These books will endure until, and after, the next war breaks out, even though Brian Turner, thank the thankless Muse, is not trending.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES BISHOP's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Connecticut Review, North American Review, Smithsonian, Yankee, The Boston Globe, and Christianity and Literature. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.