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Article Excerpt
David Bottoms and Andrew Hudgins grew up with fathers who had military backgrounds. Bottoms's father was a genuine World War II hero; Hudgins's a career military officer. Yet neither poet chose military service during the Vietnam era, when he came of age. Instead, each has worked out--within his poetry--a relationship with war and with his patriarchal heritage that helps both to define his personal aesthetic and to redefine southern war poetry.
Characterizing World War I poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Arthur Lane says of the complex intersection of aesthetic and moral impulses in their work, "[I]f a man is skilled in the art of poetry and dedicated to it as a means of expressing his humanity, and if he then uses it to inform the moral awareness of his fellow-men, the talent has been well used" (12). Lane's study, An Adequate Response, makes the argument that the cultural moment at which these poets responded to war required that they shift from the epic form that had been considered appropriate expression on war to the lyric, a form they found better suited to the new realism, a more human rendering of war they sought to convey in their poems. While the conventions of the epic found in more traditional war poetry perhaps encourage a stronger narrative thrust, the shift toward the lyric that Lane identifies clearly takes war poetry in the direction of greater immediacy and more direct representation of the poet's lived experience. While Lane's study is about British poets of the early twentieth century and my concern is southern American poets of the present, I believe that his important observation about the shift from epic to lyric in the poetic representation of war is crucial to understanding the contributions of Hudgins and Bottoms to the evolution of southern war poetry.
These poets take the shift Lane identifies a step farther, creating a narrative emphasis that is clearly not epic in its intention while also retaining palpable elements of the lyric mode. Even when reading Hudgins masquerading as Sidney Lanier, one cannot escape the sense that one is experiencing, at least in part, an outpouring of emotional expression based on the poet's own lived experience. Thus, we might say that, in making poems from their non-war experience, filtered through the lenses of their fathers' military lives, both Hudgins and Bottoms come to a form that is a special kind of intense lyric narrative, an imagined war reality that is vicariously theirs only in a particularly personal way but that they also make their readers' through aesthetic techniques that blur the boundaries of art and reality in ironic ways.
David Bottoms was born in 1949; Andrew Hudgins, in 1951. As sons of military and athletic heroes, both grew up to face two central identity questions that can be read as resonating almost mythically for males of their generation. First, they had to decide whether to serve in the military and, thus, in all likelihood, in Vietnam; second, they had to decide, because of the historical coincidence of their coming to adulthood and the rise of the modern women's movement, what kind of men they wanted to be. Would they be men's men--the models offered by their fathers' generation: strong silent types who did war's duty without question, who embodied the qualities of traditional war poetry, in fact? Or would they become a different sort of men and eventually write a new war poetry?
Cultural historian Mark Gerzon poses the dilemma this way: "[W]e want to be seen as real men, whatever that may mean to us. This need is so strong, so primitive, that some of us will risk anything to satisfy it." But, he goes on to say, many contemporary men, driven by this strong impulse to be seen as men, find themselves misled by the models that they adopt, consuming "certain images of manhood even though the world from which they are derived may have disappeared--if it ever existed" (5). In an epigraph to After the Lost War: A Narrative, a book-length sequence of poems in the voice of nineteenth-century Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, Hudgins quotes Clarence Darrow, who makes Gerzon's point in a more intuitive way: "History repeats itself That's one of the things that's wrong with history."
By casting himself backward in time and vicariously using Lanier's experience in the Civil War to substitute for the experience he does not have in Vietnam by virtue of his decision to be a different kind of man than his father--and not coincidentally to write a kind of poetry very different from Lanier's own, Hudgins seeks in part to rewrite histories: his own history, of course, in relation to war and military service, as well as his history in relation to his fathers, both biographical and poetic, but also to some extent the history of southern poetry, about war and otherwise. Through his marriage of the narrative and lyric modes and his complete rejection of the epic intention and by virtue of his sustaining the story of Lanier throughout the length of his book, he ironically achieves a postmodern post-war anti-war anti-epic, if you will, in which he is...
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