My scarcity here is due in some part to reading and writing a review for Evie Shockley's poignant "a half-red sea." I finished it up last night and it should be Internet-live tomorrow.
I can admit to you, dear reader, that I ended up writing the beginning of the review four times because I kept rediscovering a theme that had more potential at wrapping all of the other themes together. Has that ever happened to you? (Serves Shockley right. That's what happens when you release a compilation that's so thematically rich.)
Today, I want to share just one of the introductions, one that was written right after the midterm elections. The poem is "a thousand words," and it is truly the heart of this collective whole.
I began reading Evie Shockley’s poignant "a half-red sea" during the climactic days and nights of the midterm elections. I was captivated by the concerned voices rising out of every nook and cranny of America – in the heart of the cities, in the suburbs, in the rural farmlands and small towns that support them, and even amongst all party affiliations, cultures, age groups, classes, and religious tenets. A convincing majority exhibited discontent regarding a number of issues: the scandal-ridden congress; the unbearable cost of health-care; the embarrassing and sickening failure’s of Katrina; out-of-control gas prices; and the worsening economy in which it is getting harder for anyone not belonging to the higher echelon of society to make a living to survive on.
However, the greatest issue vocalized even in the last 72 hours prior to the elections was reserved for the unpopular Iraq war and the loss of confidence in the President and his administration for mismanaging it.
Bubbling under the tumultuous surface of this discontent, however, are the lingering effects of the torture that U.S. military personnel serving at the infamous Abu Graib prison inflicted on men, women, and boys; and of the passing of the torture law this past September that authorized torture and rescinded habeas corpus.
Social, moral, and ethical standards have changed since the revelations of our hideous and illegal interrogation methods. This has altered not only how other world-citizens view us but how we view ourselves. The altered sense of identity, due to forces beyond our control, is just one theme echoing throughout Shockley’s "a half-red sea," most prominently in "a thousand words."
Shockley employs nouns, adjectives, names of popular songs, films, slang, and cultural catch-phrases that have the swift and powerful flow of a river cutting its way through a rocky gorge.
This isn’t simple brainstorming thrown together and called poetry. There is a structured, intelligent design.
The content of "a thousand words" is literally framed by the word "torture." Thus, when you begin and end each line, you see and say "torture." This affects the reader in a number of ways: it drives home the fact that we cannot escape saying or even thinking "torture," just as those tortured cannot escape it. It symbolizes that their existence is framed by torture.
The magnitude of torture on a world-scale, national scale, and the individual are undeniable. To explain this, let me pass on a story I read by columnist Greg Mitchel of Editor & Publisher while reading "a thousand words."
On Sept. 15, 2003, Alyssa Peterson died from a "non-hostile weapons discharge." She was the first female U.S. Soldier to die serving in Iraq. Thanks to a reporter's FOIA request for details about her death, Mitchel revealed that Peterson actually took her own life after spending two nights taking part in "interrogation techniques" used on prisoners and then refusing to take part in them any longer. And it is not the fact that there was pressure to perform, because they relieved her of this responsibility, moving her to the guard station to monitor incoming Iraqi prisoners. It was while serving in this capacity for only a few days when she took her life, indicating that she was unable to shake the mental images of the interrogation techniques. And though Mitchel explains that the military destroyed the records of the types of techniques that were employed there, we can assume, after viewing the Abu Graib pictures, that she saw similar inhumane, atrocious acts.
Peterson was educated, (received a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University), devoutly religious (served as a Mormon missionary in the Netherlands for 18-months in the 1990's), and a military stalwart (trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca, AZ, and cruised through her Arabic courses at the military's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA.). She was sent to Iraq to conduct interrogations and translate enemy documents in 2003.
Evie Shockley's "a half-red sea" can be purchased at Carolina Wren Press.
This picture of Evie was published along with her poetry in the All Ladies Issue (Volume 20) of MiPoesias Magazine earlier this year.
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