{"id":27475,"date":"2014-12-08T06:30:11","date_gmt":"2014-12-07T17:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=27475"},"modified":"2014-12-07T22:01:48","modified_gmt":"2014-12-07T09:01:48","slug":"my-life-as-a-foreign-country-us-poet-brian-turner-on-nzs-sunday-morning-programme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2014\/12\/08\/my-life-as-a-foreign-country-us-poet-brian-turner-on-nzs-sunday-morning-programme\/","title":{"rendered":"“My Life As A Foreign Country”—US Poet Brian Turner On NZ’s Sunday Morning Programme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"My<\/a>In case you missed it, there was an excellent interview with US warpoet, Brian Turner<\/a>, discussing his memoir, My Life As A Foreign Country <\/strong><\/em>on Radio New Zealand’s Sunday Morning programme yesterday.<\/p>\n

The interview focuses on Brian Turner’s experience in the US military in Iraq and Bosnia. To hear the in-depth interview, which is well worth your time, click on:<\/p>\n

US Poet, Brian Turner, On Sunday Mornings<\/a><\/h3>\n

Earlier, Brian Turner’s experiences resulted in two acclaimed poetry collections: Here, Bullet<\/strong><\/em> and Phantom Noise<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I am a great admirer of the poetry contained in these collections, which I have featured on two occasions. The first poem featured was AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)<\/a> from Here, Bullet<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

“Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,<\/em><\/span>
\n just under the turbulence, with anesthetics<\/em><\/span>
\n dripping from an IV into her arm,<\/em><\/span>
\n and the flight surgeon says <\/em>The shrapnel<\/span>
\n cauterized as it traveled through her<\/span>
\n here, breaking this rib as it entered,<\/span>
\n burning a hole through the left lung<\/span>
\n to finish in her back, and all of this<\/em><\/span>
\n she doesn\u2019t hear…”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Here,<\/a>At the time, I offered the following commentary:<\/p>\n

\u201cI first heard of Brian when I was driving to one of the Autumn Poetry Readings of the Canterbury Poets\u2019 Collective in 2009 and tuned into a public radio documentary on contemporary war poetry. Brian Turner was one of the featured poets and I heard his poem \u2018AB Negative (The Surgeon\u2019s Poem)\u2018 for the first time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I found the poem deeply moving because of that connection it gives us to the frail humanity of Thalia Fields who is \u201cabout as far from Mississippi\/\/as she can get.\u201d<\/em> Currently, I am slowly working my way through the Here, Bullet<\/strong><\/em> collection and it is full of poems that make that same connection. These poems are about the war in Iraq and the key adjective I would use to describe them is \u201cobservational.\u201d\u00a0 The poems observe, record, note, but make no judgments outside of the personal\u2014leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind on the subject of this war, its brutality and its human cost. In this sense, I am finding it war poetry in the tradition of the First World War poet, Wilfrid Owen, who wrote: \u201cMy subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

To read the full poem and commentary, click on:<\/p>\n

AB Negative (The Surgeon\u2019s Poem)<\/a><\/h3>\n

Subsequently, I also featured VA Hospital Confessional<\/em> <\/strong>on the Tuesday Poem Blog:<\/p>\n

“Each night is different. Each night the same.<\/em><\/span>
\n Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don\u2019t.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,<\/em><\/span>
\n gesturing, as if saying, Aren\u2019t you ashamed?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When I don\u2019t, he douses himself<\/em><\/span>
\n in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A dog barks in the night\u2019s illuminated green landscape<\/em><\/span>
\n and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.<\/em><\/span>
\n My lover has learned to face away…”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Turner<\/a>The commentary included the following :<\/p>\n

“I felt, both on first hearing and subsequent reading, that it had the element I most look for in writing of any kind, which is what I call ‘heart.” In the poem I heard the note that I believe resonates in all great art and reaches out to the listener, the reader, or the viewer: that depiction of what NZ poet, Dr Glenn Colquhoun, has described as the “ache” of our human condition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of that depiction may be gritty reality, another part may be compassion\u2014both qualities that I found in Brian Turner’s first collection Here, Bullet…Brian Turner’s second collection, Phantom Noise, is still war poetry, but this is no longer the poetry of the combat zone but of its aftermath, that return to civilian life where the experiences of war, even when the individual tries to keep them locked down, still bleed into everyday life …”<\/span><\/p>\n

To read the full poem and commentary, click on:<\/p>\n

VA Hospital Confessional<\/a><\/h3>\n

Again, to hear yesterday’s in-depth Sunday Morning<\/a> interview, check out:<\/p>\n

US Poet, Brian Turner, On Sunday Mornings<\/a><\/h3>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"brianturner2\"<\/a>Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq, from November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. His poetry was included in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with a feature-length documentary film.<\/p>\n

Brian Turner\u2019s latest book, My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir<\/em> has been called \u201cAchingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful\u201d<\/em> by Nick Flynn and \u201ca humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature\u201d<\/em> by Tim O\u2019Brien. His collection Here, Bullet<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. In 2009 he was given an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. His second collection, Phantom Noise<\/em>, is published by Alice James Books in the US and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. It was shortlisted for the 2010 T S Eliot Prize.<\/p>\n

To read more about the poet and Phantom Noise you may also enjoy the following article that appeared in The Guardian newspaper in October 2010: “Brian Turner, words of war.”<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you missed it, there was an excellent interview with US warpoet, Brian Turner, discussing his memoir, My Life As A Foreign Country on Radio New Zealand’s Sunday Morning programme yesterday. The interview focuses on Brian Turner’s experience in the US military in Iraq and Bosnia. To hear the in-depth interview, which is well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27475"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27491,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27475\/revisions\/27491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}