In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4. 95 Bringing It All Back Home from anthology to action In a 2003 TV advertisement for Tommy Hilfiger, the rousing opening line of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”—“Some folks are born to raise the flag / Ooo they’re red white and blue . . .”—is sliced away from its subsequent irony: “And when the band plays Hail to the Chief / Oh they’ll point the cannon at you.” With that revision, the advertisement reduces the blistering protest song from 1970—so full of bile at class inequity and the cynical patriotism of the well-connected—to a patriotic flag-waving celebration of nubile youth. In another ad, the National Football League amputates the opening of Edwin Starr’s anguished “War”—“War / Good God y’all” from its subsequent cry, “What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” These advertisements , for those who know the songs, cannot but resurrect the Vietnam era, in which protest was at once massive and even mainstream and yet also regularly distorted by mass media. In the ongoing struggle over the meaning of the Vietnam War, these protest anthems’ beheadings for the patriotism of commodity consumption is a traumatic repetition of the loss of dissenting voices.1 One of the great fantasy screens upon which the partisans of the culture wars project their versions of the past—and therefore frame our visions of the present and imaginings of possible futures—the Vietnam War persists in the various framings and reframings not only by writers and critics but also by the architects of mass culture. What I will argue here is that the consensus view of literary criticism that the antiwar poetry produced during the Vietnam War—that it was forgettable, lamentable, or even dangerous—misses the cultural work which the rich archive of war resistance poetry contributed to and constitutes.2 This “potential archive,” to adapt Alastair Fowler’s notion of the “potential canon” (213–216)—the sum total of war resistance texts that could be included in such an archive—consists of more than a catalogue of protests or statements against the war; rather, it is an ongoing poetic engagement with and window into the movement’s identificatory investments, its conflicted rhetorical address, its resistance to co-optation and commodification as war story, and its attempt to overcome its own conditions of marginalization (both from American political culture and from the war itself). These works, to echo the title of Bob Dylan’s transitional album (half folk, half electric), “bring it all back home”—rendering the war abroad visible on the homefront. Taken as a whole, the massive corpus of war resistance poetry from the Vietnam War challenges long-held assumptions about the literariness, authority, and truth claims of poetry about war. First, it dramatizes the ongoing engagement of American soldiers and civilians alike to understand their material and psychic relationship to the war in Vietnam and to articulate a poetics of resistance. Second, it demonstrates how poets confronted their own experiential and ideological limitations to speak representatively about a conflict that exposed the deep fissures between Americans. Finally, it speaks to and confronts the increasingly technologized and bureaucratic formation of modern warfare itself, as most Americans witnessed the war principally through mass media lenses. This poetic archive, this corpus of the possible, is more than a body of material texts within books and magazines; it reaches outside the bindings into the public sphere, including symbolic actions of all sorts. Robert Lowell’s notorious letter (subsequently co-signed by numerous writers) declining the invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts (1965); the antics of Ed Sanders and the Fugs in “Levitating the Pentagon” during the March on the Pentagon (1967); Ginsberg’s pleas for peace by chanting “aum” for seven hours in Grant Park during the tumultuous moments before the police riot broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (1968); “Jackson [Mac Low] the concrete poet at Bryant Park . . . reading his ‘non-political poem,’ which he explained ‘expressed no attitudes or opinions or ideas of a political nature,’ and nearly causing a riot with a single litany of names” (qtd. in Mac Low ix); the Catonsville Nine’s destruction of draft files as a linguistic act (1968); Robert Bly’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award (1969), in which he lambasted the National Book Award Committee, universities, and book publishers, extolled acts of civil disobedience, and then gave the award monies directly to the draft-resistance movement; Levertov’s speeches...

Share