On writing
Review: Alan Farrell, Expended Casings In his foreword (whimsically rendered “Deployed Forward”) to this collection of his poems, Alan Farrell ridicules pretension, incomprehensibility, poetry as therapy, literary critical jargon, posturing, the cult of free verse, swingebuckling, and shallow war poetry cliches. You sense that he is trying to be restrained and polite, and barely succeeding. … Read more
Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam is a wonderful documentary, with an engaging mix of period video, talking head remarks, contemporaneous cassette letters home, and some judicious computer graphics. The film depicts the chaotic evacuation of Americans and some Vietnamese as Saigon fell, ending the Viet Nam War in 1975. Rory Kennedy focuses on how … Read more
Michael Casey has once again offered his readers a collection of amusing, deceptively simple poems about daily life as a military policeman during the Viet Nam War, in Check Points, published by Gary Metras’s Adastra Press, 2011. Unlike many contemporary books of poetry (books that gather unrelated poems, loaded with enough filler to remind me … Read more
OK, footnotes might seem boring, and they might frighten some potential book buyers, but any book concerning the controversy over Robert Garwood needs rigorous footnotes identifying the source or sources of various assertions. In Spite House (1997), the few footnotes are really odd; some minor matters are footnoted, major matters are not. The footnotes appear … Read more