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Canon Fodder An Epilogue : d a l e r i t t e r b u s c h Aircraft scattered thousands of mines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other infiltration routes into South Vietnam. Dale Ritterbusch was an army officer responsible for coordinating shipments of those mines—a responsibility that detonated his innocence about war. Any residual naiveté about the human drive toward belligerence vanished during a lifetime of the study of war through literature and the arts. As an invited panelist at the War, Poetry and Ethics Symposium, convened at the United States Air Force Academy in 1998, Ritterbusch referred to Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea, based on Goya’s disturbing series of war paintings. “You see the terrible beauty of art conjoined with war. It is a strikingly fine work of art, although not nearly as well known nor as highly regarded as his war painting Guernica.” Then: Pablo Neruda says in one of his poems that there are people who are going to ask him why he doesn’t write about the sunlight on the sea or the flowers that are growing outside his window. And the reason he doesn’t deal with these things in his poetry is because of the refrain in the poem where he says, “Come and see the blood in the streets.” And he repeats that a couple of times. “Come and see the blood in the streets.” What he is getting at, then, is that it is very disingenuous to create poetry that is not in any way mindful of the political realities in which one lives. It would be very disingenuous , I suppose, too, to think that the prescriptions for a poet are so constrained that one is only to deal with leaves changing color in the fall or dew on the grass. Ritterbusch is himself the author of two collections of poetry. His collection Lessons Learned, centered on the Vietnam War and its aftermath, won the 1996 Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Posner Award, a prize given to a Wisconsin author for the finest book of poetry written the previous year. His second collection, Far from the Temple of Heaven, was published C A N O N F O D D E R : A N E P I L O G U E | 2 2 9 in 2005. He is currently at work on a book about the history of war poetry . A professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, Ritterbusch served, during 2004–2005, as distinguished visiting professor in the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. In this epilogue, Ritterbusch does more than reiterate; he distills the necessity of personal accounts of the dread, baggage, and fallout of war. —Donald Anderson Within the academic world, the literature of war has been marginalized, relegated to a provincial outpost where a few stalwart readers and practitioners of the arts of poetry, of memoir, of storytelling, station themselves to repel the forces of willful ignorance. Perhaps this skirmish was lost long ago, and perhaps that is justification for the exclusion of war literature from any required curriculum. Perhaps this is a way of avoiding the critical nature of self-examination, both individual and collective. If we were, individually and as a nation, to engage in such examination, we would learn more than we want to know; certainly any pretense to innocence would be destroyed. But it is within the confines of war literature that we also find a parable of redemption, of salvation, for despite all attempts at dehumanization, the recording of some triumph over inexorable geopolitical, ideological, and other multifarious, repressive forces contributes to an acute understanding of human possibility: we are better than we pretend to be, despite the contrary evidence that we are far worse. Academic skittishness, the fervent embrace of a traditional but misguided canon, some natural repellency to dealing with real-world issues, relegates war literature to the province of pulp fiction, lowbrow literature thatofferslittleofintellectualvalue,nevermindtheextraordinaryexceptions —the great works of world literature that have dealt with war since the inception of storytelling as an art. Such misperceptions abound, ironically, at all levels of our warrior culture. As the Vietnam War memoirist and poet John Balaban frequently reminds us, Dante considered the primary themes of poetry to be love, virtue, and memories of war. Despite Dante’s instructive prescription, we respond otherwise. [3.17.154.171] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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