Wildfire
My friend Andrea Brady is an accomplished poet, which is great. The only problem is that her poetry can be tough to decipher. I once read an online review, which spent a fair amount of time dwelling on this difficulty.
“It is a coded, nearly subliminal story, to be sure, one that begs detection rather than understanding; it may only be whiffs or threads of a story, an oneiric tease. But there is something.”
It then went on to parse out various things known about the poetry in question, starting with “1, there is a horse…”
And yet, the review was extremely favorable, which struck me as humorous when I first read it, although I can definitely relate. “But there is something” pretty much sums it up for me. Or at least it did until Andrea discovered hyperlinks.
Many things are the new something.
Andrea’s latest poem deals with, among other things, white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon used recently by the US in the battle of Fallujah. There are plenty of links within the poetry, which pop up javascript windows full of background information. You can’t really just read the poem straight through, and the amount of information can be slightly overwhelming, or at least that’s what I felt at first, something along the lines of “as if she wasn’t confusing enough…”
But after I settled down and got into it, I got the hang of her work in a way I never have before. If anything, the links are a gentle hermeneutic push, the perfect addition for a better understanding, which reveal but do not stifle the poem. There is a lot to sort through, but it’s all right there, from fas.org’s description of WP, to ancient Greek texts. That the poetry is concerned with fire is also fitting for Andrea as well.
“Is the obscurity of the ‘innovative’ poetry I favour a way of hiding poetry’s militant interventions in popular culture, or a dangerous smoke screen for hostile manoeuvres? By throwing open the compositional process through the ‘work in progress’ section of Dispatx Art Collective, I want to make clear how the mapping of this particular object entails a set of choices, both from the historical and literary record, and within language itself.”
As a ferquent lurker on the fas.org website, I find the language of weaponry oftentimes as cryptic as some poems.
“Presently the Shahab-6 is a design study concept with a better mass fraction and aspect ratio than that of the Shahab-5. That is its upper stages will be shorter and larger in diameter similar to the Chinese CSS-3, and CSS-3A LRICBM. The second stage will probably be the same diameter as the first stage but only time will clarify this design issue.”
Still, there is that need to push through it all, try to conjure like John with Revelation, how it’s all going to end, what the missile will look like before it detonates over your head (your last living thought possibly being “it really does look like the CSS-3A LRICBM”), how awful it will be, and what if anything we can do to atone for our sins, or your sins that is, because I know I was cleaned and gutted pretty good from my last confession.
I know a second grader who is obsessed with nuclear weapons. He has a pretty good handle of some of the technical mumbo-jumbo pertaining to various systems, which is why I was somewhat surprised to learn a few months ago, as the two of us surveyed the fas website, that he was unfamiliar with the phrase “anti-personnel.” I tried to explain what it meant, but he seemed like he was beginning to cry, so I backed off. It was as if he was unaware of, despite the time spent on the precise science of weaponry, what weapons actually do. The techno-speak can sometimes do that to you though. When you start to consider “mass fraction” and “aspect ratio,” it is possible to lose sight of pain and suffering.
Brady, on the other hand, uses that same language of precision (”geocoordinates,” etc), to induce awareness. At one point, she takes pieces of a declassified memo and puts them back together, but doesn’t allow for the language to contain itself to removed techno-speak. From the section of the poem called Chronic:
“…Now in syndicated repeat
the ‘brutal crackdown’ in Erbil exacted by its geocoordinates
(3412N/04401E), Dohuk (3625N/04301E)
these sites visible from space aflame their ground
cover: nothing lives underneath, pyrotechne
converts all that is solid into feed, and at Oak Ridge
they make the bacteria which eats even that.”
If you check it out at the site, you get to read it with the links in tact, and you’ll find out about the bacteria from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other fascinating things. It’s like a giant museum over there, but you don’t have to pay for the headphones. Definitely check it out.