Coal Hill Review

Memorial Day: We should mourn for all who have died because of militarism.

by John Samuel Tieman
May 31, 1993

I remember the first time I prayed for an enemy. It was just outside An Khe, a village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A helicopter gunship rocketed some North Vietnamese regulars who were about to attack us. I prayed for those kids. My top sergeant berated me for my prayer. I realized then that my enemy was not the North Vietnamese, not the Viet Cong, but militarism. As for the first sergeant, he was a good man who was simply unaware, unaware of the fact that loving an enemy means loving specific people, North Vietnamese in this case.

Loving can also involve mourning. We mourn the loss of people loved. If we truly love our enemies, then we truly mourn their loss. For it is we the living who have lost a loved one. In this way can we realize not only the humanity of an enemy, but our own humanity as well. 

In the Tao Te Ching, a victorious warrior is advised to dress for mourning. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme by Western standards. But it is to the point, for it makes the warrior and his neighbors consider what has been done. War is no victory parade. It must be seen for precisely what it is, a choice. A painful choice. A choice that calls for mourning. 

Memorial Day honors soldiers who died for our country. Since I’m a Vietnam veteran, that’s OK by me. I would expand the memorial’s concept, however. I would like a day in which we mourn for all–men, women, children, soldiers, civilians, friends, enemies–who died because of militarism. The Iraqis, for instance.

Greenpeace estimates that at least 120,000 Iraqi soldiers and 76,000 civilians were killed during the war. Since then, the civilian death toll related to the war and its aftermath has reached perhaps a quarter of a million. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, between January and August of 1991, 50,000 children died as a direct result of health problems brought on by the bombing of the Iraqi infrastructure. Total deaths among children are estimated to be 170,000.

Can we mourn for 170,000 dead Iraqi children? I suspect the answer is “Hell No!” That answer is disturbing, because the opposite of mourning is not rejoicing; the opposite of mourning is being numb to suffering.

Or perhaps, instead of expanding the concept of Memorial Day, we should create an entirely separate day of mourning. Perhaps we should simply mourn for the children of the world. A Children’s Memorial Day. Consider the following. According to UNICEF, 1.5 million children have died in wars during the last 10 years; 4 million are disabled by land mines, firearms and torture; 5 million live in refugee camps; 12 million lost their homes in a war. Whole generations have lost years of schooling. Millions are vulnerable to famine, illness and disability. UNICEF admits that it cannot measure the numbers of orphans or the psychological traumas brought on by war.

And consider also that the United States is the world’s leading arms merchant. I recall reading somewhere that the third leading cause of death in Cambodia is land mines–mostly American-made land mines.

A Children’s Memorial Day would have a civilizing effect on us, for, in addition to mourning for these, the littlest victims of war, it would allow us to mourn what we have become. And to love ourselves for what we can become.

Being civilized is not something we are just given. In many ways, civilization is a constant series of choices and assents. Granted that from the cradle we are given language, culture and so forth. To be a peaceful society, however, this we choose. To be peaceful in our language, in our actions, in our prayers, to this do we assent. And assent and assent again and again, for in each instance when we feel threatened are we required to assent anew to peace.

I once heard another veteran, a North Vietnamese poet, say that every time he shot an American, he first aimed at the heart of that soldier’s mother. And for that soldier, and for that woman, did he mourn.

Let me be perfectly clear. I do not begrudge our veterans their parades. I’ve marched in a few myself. I ask my neighbors to join us old vets, to mourn for all soldiers and all civilians, to mourn for all victims of militarism. And to mourn those people by name. Yes, to mourn for Robert, my childhood companion, a 20-year-old who died in ‘Nam in 1968. But to also mourn for Ahmed, a 5-year-old stranger, who died in Baghdad this year for lack of clean water. And to mourn for their mothers, their fathers, their families, relatives, neighbors, friends. To mourn. To love.

Originally Posted in the Los Angeles Times

_____

by John Samuel Tieman

Perhaps the most memorable character from the First World War is “The Red Baron.”

Manfred Von Richthofen died about 11 AM on Sunday, the 21st of April in 1918. There is almost nothing about his death that is not disputed, the exact time, the manner of death, even who shot him. But there is one thing certain.

He was 25. His 26th birthday would have been on the second of May.

Von Richthofen is a romantic character. And I say ‘romantic’, and I say ‘character’, because, in the popular imagination, there is little of the real person that survives. Snoopy has been shot down by him several dozen times. There is a pizza named after him. His red triplane is emblematic of the romance of aerial combat and, indeed, The War To End All Wars. When I enter “Red Baron”, my computer’s search engine brings up 2,900,000+ entires, three out of the first five being the beagle, the pizza and racing bikes.

What survives is a caricature. The red Fokker triplane. The long scarf around the neck. The rattle of machine guns. The noble last salute between victor and vanquished.

All of which, in this time of war, is exactly what I am the least interested in. I am interested in that kid, that sad kid who died so many years before his time.

The myth of the Red Baron has obliterated the fact that that actual man, Manfred Von Richthofen, lived a rather narrow life. He entered military school when he was eleven, and spent the rest of his life in uniform. He like hunting. He liked riding. He seems to have had no intellectual interests. He was an indifferent student. He never traveled. He only spoke German. When I see photographs of his rooms, there are hunting trophies but no books. While he had the social graces of his class, there is little indication of enduring friendships. Rumor of a brief war-time liaison notwithstanding, he seems to have shown little sexual interest in women or, for that matter, men. My point is not that I find any of this remarkable. My point is that I find it young. The guy died before he had time to do much beyond go to school and kill people.

Not everyone who dies in war is young. But most are. So it is curious that, when we read about World War I, many of the histories dwell on the youth of the technology rather than the youth of the soldier. Powered airplanes were barely a decade old. Machine guns were a relatively new technology. Putting machine guns on airplanes, then crafting aerial tactics, all this was new. Yet, when I read about Richthofen’s most famous dogfight, against British Major Lanoe Hawker, V. C., I sadly note that no one else notes that Hawker died at age 26. The man who killed Richthofen, Canadian Captain Roy Brown, was 25.

Not long ago, when I was watching “The Newshour” on P. B. S., I once again paused for that moment when, in silence, they show names and pictures of those who recently died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have grown accustomed to those usually stern pictures of young folks in uniforms. But sometimes, when the military photo is not available, there is a picture of this kid at a ball game or a party or some such.

But nothing quite prepared me for one photo. A Private First Class in her wedding dress. I seem to recall that the linguistic root that gives us infantry also gives us the word infant.

Life never gave Manfred Von Richthofen much of a chance. But then neither do we. We want to see him as The Knight Of The Air. The Red Baron. Or a pizza. A cartoon. It’s easier to see him as a cartoon. Why? Because if we see him as a kid, if we know him as sad, lonely, traumatized, maybe, just maybe, we would see him as someone just like us. But we can’t. We don’t dare. Why? Because it’s easier to kill a cartoon.

Thus the greatest lie of any war, regardless of what side you are on – that the people we kill are remarkably different. That because they have a different language, a different religion, different race, that they are nothing like us. That the enemy is never just a kid. That the enemy is never sad, lonely, traumatized. That the enemy never wears a wedding dress.

_____

by John Samuel Tieman

 I generally share my poems with a few friends before I mail them out.   A sample audience, as it were.   Because of this, I’ve been asked how I came to write the enclosed, as the voice and tone are different from poems I’ve written lately.   Perhaps the following note, written to a friend and editor, Mike Simms, may be of some interest.  I enclose my poem, and the influences to which I refer.

     In the immediate, I was responding to Mike’s comment that my poem sounds “like Charles Bukowski goes to Vietnam.”

———-

            It’s funny you should say that.   I was just reading Bukowski early this morning.   I wanted to find and forward a poem of his, “The House”, to my wife, Phoebe.   She counts Bukowski in a category she denominates “Literary Pigs.”   Henry Miller.   Gregory Corso.   And like that.   Anyway, I sent her one of his poems.   Phoebe is perfectly comfortable with the concept of loving the writing and shooting the writer.

          Maybe something in that working class thing stuck.   As I wrote my poem, I had to decide which way to go with the voice, middle class or working class.   For example, the original read “nonetheless”, which I finally decided to change to “anyhow”.   And so on.   Something about the situation seemed to call for the working class voice — but with a specific requirement.   The voice needed to couple a tone that carries a certain dignity with a crude vocabulary.   A requirement that just cries out for The Tieman Touch.

          At the very end, I was actually thinking of the ending of Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait”.   Thinking ‘How does he make that 50 year shift in two or three lines?’, to which question I just answered ‘He just does.’   So I just did.

          I also just watched last night the 1979 movie version of All Quiet On The West­ern Front.   For a long time after my war, I couldn’t bring myself to read that novel.   I think I finally read it toward the end of my junior college days.   I still think it’s one of the great anti-war pieces.

          The situation in my poem is, of course, a real memory.

                                                legion

                                                there was this guy I used to talk to
                                                in Nam a Vietnamese
                                                corporal just like me only gook

                                                most the time I couldn’t understand

                                                a word the fuck said but for all

                                                his accent I liked his slant

                                                eyed ass anyhow

                                                so this one day

                                                he disappears so I figure

                                                he’s in the bush

                                                hunting the little evil people until

                                                the next month

                                                I see he got hunted

                                                shows up without a left leg

                                                nobody talks to him

                                                I mean me too

                                                all I could do was for a second

                                                just stare and go

                                                forty years after the war

                                                and all I can do is still stare

_________

by John Samuel Tieman

My mother is slipping slowly now.   She has no sense of the real world around her.   Yesterday, she told my sister that she is flying.   When sis asked her where she’s flying to, Mother answered, “To heaven.”

I find myself in this strange world that my wife Phoebe calls, simply, a death watch.   I’m supervising two student teachers, so, fortunately, my job is not too demanding right now.   They’re teaching most of my classes today. But it’s strange and sad.   It has a kind of rhythm,a kind of schedule.

 
I go to work, check on my student teachers, leave them with the class, go to a near-by office, remember my mother is dying, cry a little, have lunch, think of mother, cry, come home, call Sis, see if Mother died, cry some more …

Friday, I took off work because I just couldn’t deal with it.

So that’s my life.   I thank God for those hours when I just forget.   Like last night, when we went to a play.  Strange… I can’t remember the name of the play….

She could die tomorrow, or it could go on like this for months.

My greatest prayer is that she comes to a peaceful end.   That she doesn’t suffer.

_________

by John Samuel Tieman, Ph. D.

by John Samuel Tieman

J. D. Salinger died on the 27th of January.   He is best known as the author of one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the twentieth century, The Catcher In The Rye.   A contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, he made many notable contributions to literature, including Nine Stories and the novella, Franny and Zooey.

What is less well known is that, as a young man, he served with the 12^th Infantry Regiment of the 4^th Infantry Division.

A few months after Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army.   He was twenty-three.   He did his basic training at Fort Dix, and was assigned to the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth.

Salinger carried a portable typewriter everywhere.  He remained a prolific author throughout the war.   In 1942, he published “Personal Notes Of An Infantryman” in Collier’s.

In 1943, because of his fluency in French and German, Salinger trained in counter-intelligence at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.

In 1944, Salinger published “Soft-Boiled Sergeant” and “The Last Day Of Furlough” in The Saturday Evening Post.   In March, he transferred to England, where he was assigned to the 4^th Infantry Division.

On the 6^th of June, 1944, J. D. Salinger landed on Utah Beach.   He went on to participate in five of the bloodiest campaigns of World War II, including the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle Of The Bulge.   The son of a Polish Jew, who sold kosher cheese in Manhattan, Salinger was one of the first translators at the liberation of a concentration camp, an event that scarred him profoundly.   Interestingly, it was during the liberation of Paris that Salinger met Ernest Hemingway.

Staff Sergeant Jerome David Salinger was honorably discharged in November of 1945.

by John Samuel Tieman

Concerning public schools, we know all we need to know about educational reform.

So what do teachers, principals and administrators know about reforming the public schools? Where do we begin?

Four points. We need order in our schools. We need teachers to be empowered. We know that instruction should be individualized. We know that we should have smaller, intimate classes.

First things first. Discipline. One of the most radical acts the public schools could perform would be to enforce their disciplinary policies as they are written. This is not about being punitive: it is about bringing order. Numerous educational reformers present their program by saying, “When I was a principal, I got a grip on discipline first, then I implemented this program.” The problem is that reforms are imposed, but discipline is not. Any orderly school can implement almost any program it wants. Without discipline, all reforms are doomed.

Teachers and administrators tell tales of students who walk the halls all day, students who assault staff and go unpunished, students who constantly disrupt classes. Much of the problem has to do with funding. In most states, public schools are funded according to the number of kids in the seats. Administrators are pressured to keep down the number of suspensions and expulsions. That pressure is passed along from the central office to the school office to the classroom. I witnessed an incident wherein a boy assaulted a teacher, then put his fist through a window. This boy was in that teacher’s class the next day.

It is worth emphasizing that fault lies not with administrators, principals or teachers. The solution lies in reforming state funding.

Likewise it should be emphasized that true discipline is not about submission: discipline is about a form of order that furthers educational dialogue.

Secondly, teacher empowerment. We always talk about teacher empowerment. The very fact that we always talk about it is proof that we never do it. The reason is simple. Elected and appointed politicians, meaning boards and administrators, are going to have to give-up some power.
by John Samuel Tieman

Teachers are a bit like the Queen of England. We have the right to be advised, and we have the right to consent. Like the queen, often we don’t even have the right to choose our own words. For example, I once taught a program that was entirely scripted. “Teacher-proof education.” I have a Ph. D. and thirty-five years as a certified teacher, yet I was not empowered to choose my very words. It was a bad program, and every teacher in that school knew it was, in fact, counterproductive. But we could do nothing. There is no power unless the individual owns at least one word, “No.”

I remember this workshop. A teacher asked a question of an administrator. The teacher began in a self-deprecating manner, but the administrator interrupted, saying, “There are no stupid questions, only stupid teachers.” Not one teacher said a word. Why? We have so little power.

My third point is the need for individualized instruction. There is a trend in society in general, in education in particular, toward one-size-fits-all reforms. In foreign policy, spreading freedom means converting countries to the Madisonian formula for governance. That and that alone. In the our school districts, schools are forced to adopt one-size-fits-all programs like Step-Up To Writing and Open Court and Direct Instruction, despite the near universal objection of teachers to one-size-fits-all programs. In truth, these are perfectly fine programs when implemented on a basis that limits them to students who need them. In a district where there is great diversity, there are limits to any one program. Instruction needs to be varied and various. The problem with such a singular vision is that its limitations are likewise singular, which is to say that such an implementation inherently contains the formula for its ossification.

Lastly, we need smaller classes. Twelve should be the maximum. Ten is better than that. Wherever possible, these classes should be in a neighborhood setting. The object is intimacy. Unfortunately, we have gone in the opposite direction. We have closed neighborhood schools. Teachers often manage huge classes I know a sixth grade teacher, a truly inspired woman, who had a class of forty-six. I will forever remember her crying outside her classroom. She left teaching shortly thereafter. She is not unusual.

Nothing I have said here is new. But, in simply doing what we know we need to do, these four points would be radical reforms. Fortunately, teachers, principals and administrators know all we need to know in order to implement these reforms. We know where to begin.

by John Samuel Tieman

I read the other day about the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the duel in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and Burr politically ruined.

This tragedy is a bit of a mystery.   No one can say why, at some point, they didn’t withdraw from the duel.   But I have a good guess.

They lacked the humility.

Humility is associated with religious values.   It is generally thought to be a private concern.   But humility has cross-over value.   It is a virtue that is in service to others, because humility is the essence of dialogue.   And politics without dialogue is mere tyranny.

A humble dialogue presumes a simple skill.   Listening.   That simple skill, however, has some demanding habits.   The habit of validating the concerns of others.   The habit of suspending one’s own bias.   The habit of recognizing the full humanity of another.   All these have serious implications for civic discourse.

True humility is liberating, because it allows citizens to understand their role within the larger community.   In this sense, humility is the quintessential civic virtue.

Civic humility begins in a question.   Is public discourse better served by my silence?

Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.   But history is not lacking for instances wherein the community, religious and secular, would have been better served by more silence and less chutzpah.

The Catholic Church would be better-off if most bishops had listened to victims of sexual abuse, if bishops had let the justice system do its work.

Iraq would be better-off if Pres. Bush had listened to, well, the world.

Humility might have given our country some insight into the history and culture of Vietnam.

And, yes, Hamilton and Burr might have had many more years of public service if they practiced a bit of humility.

Civic humility is a virtue in service to the local level as well.   Aldermen, for example, would be better served by listening to the poor rather than dictating to them.

It is worth taking a moment to note what humility is not.   Humility is not a neurosis that leaves one immobile.   Humility is not self-loathing.   Nor does humility imply that people devalue their insight, lucidity or expertise.   Above all else, humility is not a disguised version of pride.   Thomas Jefferson didn’t invent democracy.   He listened to great philosophers, then took-up his pen.

It is worth repeating that humility is not self-effacement.   For example, the G. I. Bill transformed the nation, and this veteran, for one, is glad people spoke forcefully in favor of it.   I am equally grateful to the people who listened.

As music is defined by sound and silence, so too is dialogue made-up of respectful speech and humble listening.   And I mourn for the loss, these days, of this respect, this humility.

With the exception of the Watergate crisis, I cannot recall a time when the divisions in our country were so rigid and acrimonious.   Everybody has the answer, and nobody has the answer.   Bishops tell parishioners to sit-down and shut-up, and parishioners tell bishops to sit-down and shut-up.   The poor live on one side of town, and the rich on the other.   CEO vs. union.   The US vs. the UN.   Rural vs. urban.   Does anyone doubt that, during the next election, there will be vicious attack ads that midlead the public?

Where’s the humility?

A republic is defined by its dynamic dialogue.   Such a dialogue presumes the give-and-take of loyal opposition.   To put it differently, we are a great nation because we have the freedom of speak.   But that’s only the first half of the equation.   When we are at our best, when we are at our most democratic, we are a great nation because we have the humility to listen.

And when we think of the leaders we love, when we ponder a Lincoln or a Washington, don’t we love them more for their humility than their army?

by John Samuel Tieman

I read the other day about the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the duel in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and Burr politically ruined.

This tragedy is a bit of a mystery.   No one can say why, at some point, they didn’t withdraw from the duel.   But I have a good guess.

They lacked the humility.

Humility is associated with religious values.   It is generally thought to be a private concern.   But humility has cross-over value.   It is a virtue that is in service to others, because humility is the essence of dialogue.   And politics without dialogue is mere tyranny.

A humble dialogue presumes a simple skill.   Listening.   That simple skill, however, has some demanding habits.   The habit of validating the concerns of others.   The habit of suspending one’s own bias.   The habit of recognizing the full humanity of another.   All these have serious implications for civic discourse.

True humility is liberating, because it allows citizens to understand their role within the larger community.   In this sense, humility is the quintessential civic virtue.

Civic humility begins in a question.   Is public discourse better served by my silence?

Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.   But history is not lacking for instances wherein the community, religious and secular, would have been better served by more silence and less chutzpah.

The Catholic Church would be better-off if most bishops had listened to victims of sexual abuse, if bishops had let the justice system do its work.

Iraq would be better-off if Pres. Bush had listened to, well, the world.

Humility might have given our country some insight into the history and culture of Vietnam.

And, yes, Hamilton and Burr might have had many more years of public service if they practiced a bit of humility.

Civic humility is a virtue in service to the local level as well.   Aldermen, for example, would be better served by listening to the poor rather than dictating to them.

It is worth taking a moment to note what humility is not.   Humility is not a neurosis that leaves one immobile.   Humility is not self-loathing.   Nor does humility imply that people devalue their insight, lucidity or expertise.   Above all else, humility is not a disguised version of pride.   Thomas Jefferson didn’t invent democracy.   He listened to great philosophers, then took-up his pen.

It is worth repeating that humility is not self-effacement.   For example, the G. I. Bill transformed the nation, and this veteran, for one, is glad people spoke forcefully in favor of it.   I am equally grateful to the people who listened.

As music is defined by sound and silence, so too is dialogue made-up of respectful speech and humble listening.   And I mourn for the loss, these days, of this respect, this humility.

With the exception of the Watergate crisis, I cannot recall a time when the divisions in our country were so rigid and acrimonious.   Everybody has the answer, and nobody has the answer.   Bishops tell parishioners to sit-down and shut-up, and parishioners tell bishops to sit-down and shut-up.   The poor live on one side of town, and the rich on the other.   CEO vs. union.   The US vs. the UN.   Rural vs. urban.   Does anyone doubt that, during the next election, there will be vicious attack ads that midlead the public?

Where’s the humility?

A republic is defined by its dynamic dialogue.   Such a dialogue presumes the give-and-take of loyal opposition.   To put it differently, we are a great nation because we have the freedom of speech.   But that’s only the first half of the equation.   When we are at our best, when we are at our most democratic, we are a great nation because we have the humility to listen.

And when we think of the leaders we love, when we ponder a Lincoln or a Washington, don’t we love them more for their humility than their army?

by John Samuel Tieman

First, remember it’s not my funeral.   It’s yours.   I won’t hear the music.   I won’t hear the prayers.   I won’t hear the cries or the laughs.   I won’t be of much use.   So indulge yourself.   I only have a few requests.

Do my funeral like I did my life: don’t be cheap but don’t be wasteful.   A good funeral is like a good wine.   The best is rarely the most expensive one on the list.

I want the wake.   I want the Mass Of The Resurrection.   I want the graveside service.   And I want this not for me but for you.   There is much wisdom in the Roman Catholic tradition, much consolation, much hope.   You will need each of these.   Take solace in the thought that such services have comforted folks for centuries.

Have me embalmed or have me burned.   That’s up to you.   I won’t complain either way.

At times like this, heed the women in our family, for they have a rich inner life.   Funerals are about the inner life.   The priest should craft his sermon from the words of these women.   Listen my wise wife, my fierce sister, my rock-solid nieces.   They can trace the contours of the soul.

Let my brother, in so many ways my father, and my nephew, in so many ways my little brother, lead my pall bearers, for the strength of the men in my family is in the courage they find when bearing the heaviest sorrow.

Have a Jew read the “Kaddish” in Hebrew and in English.   It’s short, so it will be OK.   All my life, I’ve lived around Jews; all my life, I’ve had friends who were Jews.   Like the Mass of the Resurrection, the “Kaddish” is a song of praise.   Funerals need a bit of praise that isn’t forced.   Likewise, all my life I’ve had friends who were Black; all my teaching career I’ve had students who were black.   As I can’t imagine my life without their voice, so I can’t imagine my funeral without someone Black reading a psalm.

If poets want to read verse, make it short.   And good.   For reasons that elude me, funerals seem to attract long and bad poetry.

Indulge yourself emotionally.   Feel the finality.   There’s not much I learned in life, but this much I know: there are no correct emotions.   Sadness.   Anger.   Gratitude.   Regret.   Laughter.   Melancholy.   A good joke.   A snicker.   There’s room for all that and more at my funeral.

Go to the graveside.   Look in the hole.   When my body is lowered, throw a handful of dirt on the casket.   This is the needful bit for the very reason that you just can’t make it easy.

Put on a good feed.   People need a good meal after a good burial.   And if someone wants seconds or thirds, or if someone even drinks a bit too much, this is not the day for being judgmental.

Be kind to my memory, but don’t be false.   In my youth, I drank too much, did drugs, womanized.   In a war of questionable morality, I killed a boy.   I traveled the world in order to run from my troubles.   I spurned the love and kindness of people who truly cared for me.   There is much I regretted, and much more I simply learned to live with.   I know it, and so does anyone who knows me.   But I got better with age.   So say that I tried my best to love, that I taught a few kids to read and write, that I spent much of my teaching career helping the poor and the immigran, that I was a good and faithful husband, a good friend, a pretty good writer, that I created a few works of art.   If nothing else, say that I made a few people laugh.   So let the truth also bear its kindness.

On the other hand, I hope someone will exaggerate at least one story about me.   Something about my life lends itself to exaggeration.

In any case, regard what I say about my funeral.   Or don’t.   I won’t know.

by John Samuel Tieman

So the army lets me out a few days early to register for college.   I should have been in till February, but they send me home from Vietnam on 7 December 1970.   I have to enroll right away.   Until then, I’m still on active duty, a member of the 4th Infantry Division.   But from the moment I’m enrolled, I’m a civilian.

So on the 8th, a Tuesday, I went to enroll at the junior college.

What I remember is walking out of the registrar’s office, sitting beneath a tree, looking out over the campus — somebody’s throwing a frisbee — and being overwhelmed with a simple thought.   I’m alive.

I was twenty years old.

It occurs to me that, thirty-nine years ago, at about this very hour, I returned home to St. Louis from Vietnam.   I always remember it because it’s Pearl Harbor Day.

One day a rocket flew right over our hooch.   The next day we were down on the coast, checking out of the Nam.   The day after that, I was in Ft. Lewis.   That day after that, I was taking the first hot bath — or for that matter shower, or hot anything — I had taken in six months.

Thirty-nine years.   Thirty-nine years.   I feel so sad that life is so short, and so grateful that it is so beautiful.

by John Samuel Tieman

I, too, went to bed amidst the howling of the autumn wind and
awoke early the next morning amid the chanting of the priests …
Matsuo Basho

My Young Friend,

After almost sixty years, I have learned so little in life that I’m not sure if I can impart anything except sure methods for garnering angst.

Today I play catch-up. That’s my method just now. Catch-up. I run through the morning so that I can run through the afternoon so I can get to bed early tonight.

It makes no difference where I start prayer or how I pray. It matters that I start and that I pray. Except for the view, I find little difference between praying the “Hail Mary” in the St. Louis Cathedral before a statue of The Virgin, or praying the “Hail Mary” in The Golden Pagoda in Kyoto before a statue of Kuan Yin. I do like the mosaics in St. Louis.

Focus helps. It helps when I do a rosary or a litany or make love to my wife or make

sacred lyrics on my harp of paper. Yet focus is vastly overestimated. Better to pray the prayer of the prematurely senile. Draw circles in the dust. Let Jesus stretched out on the couch. Imagine the Buddha doing The Times crossword.

I like to meditate upon the “Nicene Creed”: in truth, I find it strangely vague.

You want method? Here’s method. Doubt everything. In the end, you will be left with a faith born of vast questions. Keep the questions. Let go of the exhaustion. Find comforte in never getting a burning bush. Miracles are for the uninitiated.

What is best in life is the question. An answer is a rescheduling of confusion.

In other words, method is good place to start. Indeed, method is truly central. But once you’re done with the center, nowhere is good place to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I listen to the great saints. Aquinas. Gandhi. MLK. Teresa of Avila. But marvel at Blessed Bert of Belleville, Illinois, our patron saint of wisdom dinners with fried catfish, hush puppies. And the Venerable Sally of Sedalia, Missouri, our patron saint of late night Friday friends then sleeping in on Saturday. Bert and Sally have no answer. They’re only method is wonder.

Blessings

Dr. T.

A Book Review by John Samuel Tieman and Phoebe Ann Cirio

Literature teachers are often want to say that anything can be made the subject of poetry.   And this is the collection that proves that point.   From diets to seafood to the treadmill, Nancy Pagh’s No Sweeter Fat makes the reader laugh, cry and reflect, often in the same poem.

Concerning style, Pagh often evokes Walt Whitman.   Perhaps she most purposely resembles Whitman, and his spiritual heir Allen Ginsberg, in her poem “A Gold’s Gym In Bellingham, Washington”, a poem that explicitly harkens to “A California Supermarket” in Howl.   As she works-out in her gym, she imagines Whitman “puzzling over the MP3 players”, while “Allen’s glasses didn’t hide his tears when he came out / from the men’s locker room alone.”   But Pagh’s poetry is more than simply an homage to the roots of much contemporary American poetry.   From her treadmill — “While I ambled along on my cyclical highway, / ambled along in my fat-lady sweatpants, / ambled along in my slow-rolling gait” — Pagh carves out her own America, one filled with “faded U. S. Navy tank tops”, “George Bush’s latest war on t. v.”, juice bars and suburbs.

These poems are womanly.   In theme, these are poems of the earth, the sea, the body, poems grounded in food, in sexual longing, in keen observations of the way people sweat, eat, and bathe.

Like Whitman and Ginsberg, Nancy Pagh celebrates the body.   Her celebrating is welcome in these times of gastric bypass surgery.   Her poem “G.B.S.” is about her sister’s gastric bypass undergone to transform her from three-hundred-sixty pounds to a size six.   The procedure puts the two of them on different paths.   Pagh’s poetry shows us the complexity of her relationship with her fat female body, and so helps us with our own relationship with our bodies.   She questions the ideal of beauty, the cost of which is often alienation from our bodies.

Pagh is not alienated from her body.   She does not sugar-coat life in a fat body.   Early in the book, her poem “Fat Lady’s Bath” is full of anger and self-hatred.   “You will never see the fat lady in her bath, / never know your casual barb / of pig, cow, hippo whale/ struck hard and fast, transforming / her—even now, even years later / and all grown up, in her bath.”   “Fat Girl Haiku” evokes the hurt of rejection and the humiliation of getting the hippo Valentine, and the way her family hides Pagh in the photographs so her size does not show.

But Pagh does not want pity.   She wants understanding.   What emerges from these poems is a candid woman spurned because of her size and longing for human connection.   She expresses her humanity poignantly.   Whitman said, “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”   Nancy Pagh celebrates herself with all of the pain, regret and sorrow of years of taunts.   Yet every atom of her belongs as good to us.

Pagh, Nancy. No Sweeter Fat. Autumn House Press, 2007.

by John Samuel Tieman

At some point during the academic year, educators and administrators at all levels will be called upon for their quarterly cognitive meta- paradigm projection. Such folks will need all manner of fuzzphrase.

“The Teacher’s Guide” transitionalizes this problematic function by facilitating the following referentials. Choose any three numbers between 0 and 9, say 3-8-5. From the three columns below, choose word 3 from the first column, word 8 from the second, 5 from column three. Thusly does 3-8-5 yield “periodic rhetorical predisposition”. Think of it: 7-3-8, a “targeted comprehensive normative”, could almost be something.

The prefix “meta-“ is to be added anywhere on an as-needed basis, as in 9-2-3, “modulated transitional meta-entity”.

_________________________________________________________________________________
0. reciprocal 0. administrative 0. projection

1. cognitive 1. substantive 1. portfolio

2. informal 2. transitional 3. download

3. periodic 3. comprehensive 3. entity

4. mainstream 4. imaging 4. determination

5. certificated 5. motivational 5. predisposition

6. retrogressive 6. conceptual 6. function

7. targeted 7. referential 7. schedule

8. group 8. rhetorical 8. normative

9. modulated 9. paradigm 9. involvement

by John Samuel Tieman

I teach English at Soldan International Studies High School in St. Louis.   Last Thursday, a student asked one of those questions that are near impossible to answer.   Like, “Would Juliet have lived if Shakespeare had been a woman?”   Or, “Who’s the greatest poet who ever lived?”   Questions like that.

Except last Thursday it was personal.   “Dr. Tieman, who was your best high school teacher?”

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A Book Review by John Samuel Tieman

Here’s something new: an anthology that can be appreciated both as a collection of beautiful poems, and as an aesthetically pleasing textbook.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “God himself does not speak prose.”   Certainly that case is well made in this excellent anthology, Joyful Noise:  An Anthology Of American Spiritual Poetry, published by Autumn House Press of Pittsburgh.

This is a book with wide range and varied voices, all of which makes it very American.   It covers four centuries of spiritual verse.   There are Native American songs, traditional African American spirituals, poetry from the colonial period, verse from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   We find poems from writers many consider conventionally religious like William Everson, known in religion as Brother Antoninus, a Dominican.   There are also poems from surprising and delightful sources like Ezra Pound, a writer not noted for his spirituality, and Allen Ginsberg, a poet who was noted for a spirituality of the most idiosyncratic sort.

In many ways, Autumn House’s greatest contribution is its inclusion of a great number of contemporary poets.   One expects to hear from Phillis Wheatley, for example, and to read William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”.   But this is a book that is filled with the unexpected, the surprising.   Some of the modern poets are known to a wide audience, like the former poet laureate Billy Collins, as well as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.   Other poets, excellent poets like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jack Myers and Arthur Sze, are best known to fellow poets and that ever so small coterie of contemporary verse connoisseurs.   One poet, Nichole Collen, is just twenty-four.

Our contemporaries, in addition to the excellence of their writing, show something most people do not associate with modern American verse, our spiritual heritage.   This anthology demonstrates a consistent concern among poets throughout our history, the search for God, the longing for the spirit.

In religious circles these days, we all too easily dismiss intellectuals who find God in the unorthodox religious practice.   Yes, as ironic as it may sound, the American spiritual tradition is a history of the heterodox and the unorthodox.   This is very American.   Lest we forget, we need merely recall that Puritans were termed Dissenters.   And so it goes from then till now.   Take Ruth Schwartz, for example.   Schwartz is a self-declared shamanic counselor, who, in her poem, finds true holiness in the trees.   In this regard, she places herself squarely in a long line of poets for whom nature leads straight to the transcendent.   Interesting, her spirituality is not altogether unlike that of another poem in this anthology, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, which, in its turn, is not unlike the verse of the colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, who writes, “Then on a stately Oak I cast mine eye …”.

In two words, this anthology is profoundly American.   The editor, Robert Strong, has given us the very substance of American spirituality.   All this, from the Pawnee to the Puritan to the Moslem to the shaman, this is our liturgy, this is our worship, that most American of all prayers, these our poems.  Joyful Noise indeed makes the case, to borrow from Emerson, that the American spirit speaks through its poetry – in this case, great poetry.

————

There is one other application for this book, one that makes it most useful not only to the literature lover and the English teacher, but also, among others, to the historian, the sociologist, the theologian.   This is an intellectual history.   To be specific, this book is an intellectual history of American spirituality, from the animistic Native to the Renaissance Protestant, from the Enlightenment Deist to the Transcendentalist, from the Modernist to the Post-Modernist.   From the spirituality of the Pre-Columbian Native to that of the post-modern urban poet, its chronological layout makes it accessible to the specialist and the general reader.

Joyful Noise is a collection of primary sources.   And those sources are great poems.   In that sense, it is a bit unusual.   One tends to think of primary sources as records of events.   However, the sources herein are records of the prayer, the transcendent moment, the salvific instant.   Indeed, one can regard this anthology as the poetic record of the search for theophany in America.

This is an elegant book that at one and the same time has both a vast range and a surprising specificity, the range given by its historical breadth, the specificity given by the vision of the artifact.   In this context, it is worth repeating that the artifacts range from the conventionally religious to the heterodox to the completely unorthodox.   There are any number of writers who may be viewed as conventionally religious.   Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor were both ordained ministers.   Langston Hughes, on the other hand, is widely regarded as a pro-Communist, free thinker.   Yet in his poem, “The Negro Speaks Of Rivers”, he recalls a time when, as a young man, he crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis, and was moved by the holiness of the river.

Joyful Noise:  An Anthology Of American Spiritual Poetry is a beautiful book.   Regardless of the reader’s purpose — poetic, educational, theological, sociological, historical, or just reading for the plain old fun of reading — the end result is an explanation, a poetic and historically accurate explanation of the place of spirituality in American life.

Joyful Noise Robert Strong, ed. Autumn House Press, 2007.

A Book Review by John Samuel Tieman

When a poem is at its finest, it is concrete, set in time and place, specific yet transcendent. Like a hymn, it exists both in the voice and the soul, in the text and in the mind. By these means is it savored and remembered. Like that hymn, which transforms notes on a page to prayers on the tongue, so the true poem moves from craft on the page to emotions in the reader. One danger lies, ironically, in being too crafty, that moment when the poem calls attention to its cleverness, rather than its purpose.

J. D. McClatchy is one of the most distinguished living poets and editors. Educated at Yale and Georgetown, he edits The Yale Review. He is the author of six collections of poetry, one of which, Hazmat (Knopf, 2002), was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of numerous works of criticism, and the editor of over a dozen collections of poetry, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Second Edition (Random House, 2003).

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