Images of war appear forcefully and extensively in the history of literature because the experience of war extends painfully and consistently through history itself. That some of what we consider the greatest poems and novels are produced in or in the wake of such events hardly feels like consolation, despite the grandeur and insight of Homer’s epics or the elegies of Owen and Sassoon. Robert Frost’s “War Thoughts at Home” made me think not just of the great writing of war that takes place in the thick of battle, in the shuddering aftermath, or in the retrospective construction of national pride and civic pageantry in the wake of wartime violence. Rather, I’m thinking of a different domestic scene and in particular of a poem by Laura Jensen, whose writing has been important to me of late.
Jensen published three odd and compelling books (and several chapbooks) between the late 70s and the late 80s. Jensen still lives in the Northwest but hasn’t published in some time (as far as I know).
Jensen’s second book, Memory, was recently reissued by Carnegie Mellon University Press in their “Classic Contemporaries,” which, like the newer Graywolf reprint series edited by Mark Doty, seeks to keep a live books that have fallen out of availability. Graywolf will soon republish National Book Award Nominee Harryette Mullen’s first three books in a volume called Recyclopedia.
Jensen’s poem, “World War Two Movie: Home Front” thinks about the public consumption of war imagery (a veritable spectator sport on CNN since the Gulf War) but the public consumption of particular forms of domestic waiting, when all one can do is live in the hopes of certain kinds of news. Under such scrutiny (often as sentimental as it is isolating) , Jensen wonders “Must it be so public, so private?” Waiting causes the home itself to become perversely animate: the “furniture stalks up and down the stair…Smoke wails out / of the chimney.” Comfort rarely comes, nor does peace. What does come is more sinister: “there’s a sound / outside the door, and it’s Death rapping. But if Death can rap, there is a place outside / that door, where we can enter, we can say / Do not let us see you weeping anymore.”
Private grief is as inconsolable as the varieties of public grief that seize upon suffering as an excuse for parades and movies. The quiet and desperate inner life of such grief is, for what reasons we can’t be sure, Jensen’s subject. Let’s not be seen weeping anymore: let’s instead be seen marching home from war.