What Turner’s War Poetry Reveals

In the midst of the brutality of the Iraqi war, Brian Turner transformed his experience into prose. Through his poems, Brian Turner – now, one of the most celebrated poets of our era – describes the intensity of his experience. Before becoming involved in war, Brian Turner received an MFA from University of Oregon. Following family tradition, he volunteered and served seven years in the U.S. Army. Between 1999 and 2000, he was deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and later served as an infantry team leader in Iraq. Rather than glorifying or protesting the act of war, Turner’s poems expose the rawness and brutality of war-experience. He brings the battlefield to the reader, inviting them to read, to understand, and to draw their own conclusions from his text. The act of bringing the battlefield to light, though poetry, is its own political statement – more poignant than explicit glorification or protest. To make this point, I’ll analyze five of Turner’s poems in-depth.

In the title poem of Turner’s first book, Here, Bullet, Turner exposes a stubborn, almost taunting attitude in the face of death. Speaking to the bullet, Turner writes, “If a body is what you want / then here is bone and gristle and flesh” (13). He characterizes the bullet’s entry as “that insane puncture into heat and blood,” revealing a fearful fascination with the destructive capacity of modern weaponry. As if he seeks to provoke the bullet to do further damage, he dares the bullet to “finish what [it’s] started.” Concluding the piece, he writes, “because here, Bullet / here is where the world ends, every time.” The poem exposes both fear and a desire to stand up to that fear, to challenge it, to render it innocuous by exposing it to the world (Baker). The bullets of which he speaks could be those he fires or those he dodges. He doesn’t say. By leaving this ambiguous, he creates a space for readers to form their own interpretation. This poem also seems to equalize Americans and Iraqis in the war, recognizing that both live in fear of the destructive power of gunfire. Whether a bullet hits an American or an enemy combatant, the result is the same – the world ends, every time.

In “White Phosphorus,” another poem appearing in Phantom Noise, Turner writes about the city in Arkansas where white phosphorus is made. White phosphorus is an incendiary, illuminating powder used by U.S. forces in Iraq. When it contacts human flesh, it burns, sometimes through to the bone. In “White Phosphorus,” Turner writes of a “low vowel of pain / stretching out over the Arkansas River / and into the sway of pines, a sound that travels / along Dollarway Road and on into town” (Turner 51). He refers to the pain of Iraqis who come in to contact with white phosphorus, manufactured here in this town. The low vowel of pain travels over “Ray and Suzanne” who have “forgotten / how to talk with one another, steam curling over their coffee at the diner.” In this section, Turner reveals how the atrocities occurring in Iraq have causal origins in this mundane little town. The low vowel of pain travels through the city, permeating even the “soybean fields and poultry farms outside of town.” He attributes to the town “a pause, a quiet recognition / Here. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where it’s made.” Turner almost seems to attribute implicit responsibility to regular folks like Ray and Suzanne who allow this to go on. He doesn’t do so explicitly – he doesn’t protest the use of white phosphorus but exposes a scene in which he hints at type of causal responsibility for “low vowel of pain” that emanates from halfway around the world.

Another poem in Phantom Noise, “Sleeping in Dick Cheney’s Bed” reveals implicit political themes that are absent elsewhere in the book. Turner doesn’t protest the falsehoods that led us to Iraq but recognizes them as such. At the same time, he speaks of “how unnerving how comfortable this is: NORAD watching over the bedroom” (Turner 15). Lying in Cheney’s bed, he dreams of fly fishing until he falls back, plunging “into the cold rushing / white water, my eyes blurred hard / under the sun’s interrogations – Cheney’s hands, like a preacher’s delivering me deeper into the truth.” He seems to recognize, and be startled by, the false pretenses that led to war. He wishes to return to California, with his “lover beside [him] and not this stale man’s breath,” revealing that he feels smothered by the situation he finds himself in. He writes that, “Cheney slept in this very bed,” maybe experienced the same suffocating doubts that he finds himself experiencing now. He writes of Cheney’s “dead skin sloughed off / to coat my own skin at an invisible level,” and wonders what it says about him, “that [he] can return to Cheney’s room after midnight / strip [his] clothes off to curl in the bed / where he too has slept.” Through these passages, Turner reveals that he sees himself as complicit in a war waged on false pretenses (Hicks 4). He doesn’t say so explicitly but reveals a state of mind and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. He doesn’t protest the war, but his experience seems to hint at a form of internal, experiential protest.

“Illumination Rounds,” also appearing in Phantom Noise, reveals a sense of regret mingled with the pressing duties of daily patrol. He opens the poem with a surreal vision of “Parachute flares” as they “drift in the burn time / of dream, their canopies deployed / in the sky above our bed” (Turner 23). The poem becomes increasingly surreal as he speaks of his lover who “sleeps as Iraqi translators shuffle in through the doorway... each of them holding / their sawn-off heads in hand.” He co-mingles the experience of sleeping next to his lover with memories of his experience in Iraq, contrasting the tranquil peace of U.S. citizens with the horrors experienced by Iraqis (Broek 35). As the poem progresses, his lover finds him at 3 A.M digging graves in their backyard. He says to her, “We need to help them if only with a coffin,” and asks her to try to understand what he’s experienced. If she were to shovel beside him, she would begin to see “them – the war dead – how they stand under lime trees and ash.” As she shovels, she “stares at these blurry figures / in silhouette, the very young and very old,” and Turner says to her,

We should invite them into our home.

We should learn their names, their history.

We should know these people

We bury in the earth.

Following this exchange, Turner is whisked away to another time in his mind. He’s “out on patrol again,” driving in his mind from California to the neighborhoods of Mosul. He says that he wishes he could say he’s here to save someone, “but it’s all bullshit.” He’s here, driving, “until [he] finally understand[s] who it is [he’s] supposed to kill.” Through this narrative, Turner expresses regret for the deaths of Iraqis and regret that U.S. soldiers have so little understanding of these people whose lives they destroy (Bishop). He recognizes that he wasn’t in Iraq to save anyone, but to kill. He struggles with the reality of this situation but doesn’t take a side. His confusion is evident, and his poetry exposes the conflict that he feels.

In the opening poem to Phantom Noise, Turner exposes the depth of the trauma he experienced at war. In the “VA Hospital Confessional,” he writes that, “Every night is different. Each night the same. / Sometimes I pull the trigger. / Sometimes I don’t” (1). He clarifies this ambiguous statement, stating that, “When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there, gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?” He feels guilty when he returns home from war, even ashamed, like the figure in his head accuses. He writes that, “Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep. / My lover has learned to face away.” This seems both literal and metaphorical – his lover turning away from him, sensing what he’s done. He writes of men, bound on their knees with helicopters hovering overhead. He whispers in their eras, saying, “Howlwin? Howlwin? Meaning, Mortars? Mortars? / Howl wind, mutherfucker? Howl wind?” As he whispers, a milk cow stares, wanting to know he “can do this to another human being” (2). Through this poem, he exposes the brutality of war and his guilt as the perpetrator of such atrocities. He struggles to cope with his experience, to find meaning in the death and destruction he’s experienced at war (Bumiller). Though he doesn’t protest or glorify the situation, he delivers a powerful message – an experience, exposed.

Turner doesn’t need to politicize his poems – the rawness, the detail, and the emotion contained within his poems are enough. They deliver a message hidden between the lines – that war is traumatic, that real human beings die and collateral damage is inevitable – that war kills individuals with their own personal histories and lived experiences. His poems expose a man who feels fear but will taunt bullets in the face of death. They expose a city complicit in the act of killing, producing white phosphorus for use far away from home. They expose a man who feels as responsible as any politician for the continuation of the war. They expose his regret and remorse, his doubts and confusion. His poems engage primarily in the act of exposing, rather than the more explicitly politicized acts of protesting or glorifying. Through his poems, Turner exposes the brutal experiences of war and allows them to speak for themselves.

Works Cited

Baker, Aaron. “Poetry’s Embedded Soldier.” Critical Poetry Review Magazine (2006). Web. Retrieved from http://www.cprw.com/Baker/turner.htm

Bishop, James Gleason. “We Should Know These People We Bury in the Earth: Brian Turner’s Radical Message.” War, Literature & the Arts 22.1 (2010). Web.

Broek, Michael. “The MFA at War: Proximity, Reality, and Poetry in Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise.” The American Poetry Review (2011): 35-36.

Bumiller, Elisabeth. “A Well-Written War, Told in the First Person.” New York Times 7 Feb 2010. Web.

Hicks, Patrick. “Brian Turner Interviewed by Patrick Hicks.” War, Literature & the Arts 24.1 (2012): 1-26. Web.

Turner, Brian. Here, Bullet. Farmington, M.E.: Alice James Books, 2005. Print.

Turner, Brian. Phantom Noise. Farmington, M.E.: Alice James Books, 2010. Print.