Books
story by Jarret Keene
Brian Turner: A great, unforgettable poem. I’d come across it during my college years, too, but not in class. It’s one that haunts the reader, I believe. DC: After earning your MFA, did you set out to be a war poet? BT: Not a chance. I was writing poems about drug use and poverty. After college, I moved to South Korea and wrote a book of poetry about that. As I learn more about myself, I realize that the best poems that I can write are the ones that choose me, rather than the other way around. DC: Why’d you enlist? BT: A ton of reasons. Some big. Some small. I often joke with people that we’ll need to sit down and drink through a bottle of vodka to get to the root of this question. DC: Are you tired of the question, “Did everything in these books really happen”?
Brian Turner went from soldier to poet.
Warrior poet
Army vet Brian Turner translates the experience of war and its aftermath into powerful verse Finally, America has its own Homer, a bard obsessed with delineating the grief and horror of armed conflict. His name is Brian Turner, and he’s a professor at Sierra Nevada College and a winner of many prestigious literary awards and fellowships. Though his work doesn’t sustain the epic narrative of a hero’s rage and jealousy à la Achilles, Turner’s two books, his 2005 debut Here, Bullet and this year’s Phantom Noise, possess just as much scope and as many characters. Turner earned an MFA in creative writing from University of Oregon before serving seven years in the U.S. Army. Turner was an infantry team leader in Iraq for a year and later articulated his experiences in his first poetry collection, which was praised for its savage and beautiful music, and for its necessity, by The New York Times. The 43-year-old poet spoke to me recently from his home in Lake Tahoe to share his thoughts on being “truthful” in a poem, his novel-in-progress, playing bass in a rock band, and more. Desert Companion: Haven’t read much Randal Jarrell, but Here, Bullet made me think of a richer, broader version of Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which I encountered in an American lit class in college. Know it?
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Desert Companion
SEPTEMBER//OCToBER 2010
BT: Not at all. Of course, it’s not something I really answer either, and this might be frustrating for some. Still, I believe that a poem finishes in the reader. My hope is that a given poem “rings true” to the reader’s gut and that the world of the poem is a place a reader might want to revisit, or, in other words, read again. What’s true and what’s not true is slippery ground. Consider car wrecks or divorces, for example. Those involved each share a portion of what might be called “true,” though even that might be argued. In both cases, accounts of the events that took place can be wildly different. What, then, really happened? DC: Your poem “The Hurt Locker” has a great final line: “Open the hurt locker and learn/how rough men come hunting for souls.” I prefer the compression of your poem over the [unrelated] two-hour film. Did you enjoy the movie? BT: I’d first heard the phrase — which means, broadly, a private place of pain —when my squad leader expressed frustration with so many attacks from mortars, roadside bombs, and snipers. “Sometimes I just want to put them in the hurt locker,” he said. The phrase stuck with me for a while before I wrote the