Voices In Wartime: Poetry And The Wages Of The War Of Have Waged

This moving film just opened in Seattle, Washington D.C., San Francisco, NYC, and Los Angeles. Go see it now, while it's still in theatres. Bring some friends! Let's get the theatrical run extended. Don't wait for the DVD! See the trailer! Go to their website! The movie documents the wages of wars in interviews and in poems. Jonathan King, a beloved brother-in-law, produced this documentary, so I hold it to a higher standard than other works of art. Poets have been reacting to war since before Homer penned the ultimate war poem. And they have been doing it well. This movie shows a wide variety of poets and their take on the wages of war. The movie uses excellent stock footage and documents from World War I to the present. It even has an interesting score. You should see this movie.

One of the poets I enjoyed most on screen was David Connolly, a poet who lives in Southie in Boston. He served in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Vietnam war. The war palpably affected his life, and his work. A collection of his poems Lost in America is not in print, but is available from used bookstores on Amazon.com.

This is one of the Connolly poems, and may be the spookiest war poem I have ever read:

Food for Thought, 3:00AM

They moved in unison
like dancers in a ballet,
the spider, twenty inches from my rifle,
the VC, twenty feet farther out, in line,
each slowly sliding a leg forward.
I let the man take one more step
so as not to kill the bug.

- David Connolly
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