Poetic Healing

Basil B. Clark, Mark E. Huglen

Description

Recounts the poetic healing of a Vietnam veteran with poetry and plays. Describes the five phases of healing through commentary and explores intrapersonal and interpersonal conflict, dialectic, and metaphysics, as well as suicide and anti-relational and relational communication.

Sujets

• Poetry
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602359871
• Langue: English

Extrait

—Enter Vietnam—
—manteiV evaeL—
—Leave Vietnam—


Poetic Healing
A Vietnam Veteran’s Journey from a Communication Perspective
Revised and Expanded Edition
Mark E. Huglen (Critical Commentary)
Basil B. Clark (Poems and Plays)
Afterword by Bernard L. Brock
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2005 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition published in 2002 by Unlimited Publishing, LLC
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huglen, Mark E., 1 962-
Poetic healing : a Vietnam veteran’s journey from a communication perspective / Mark E. Huglen (critical commentary) ; Basil B. Clark (poems and plays) ; afterword by Bernard L. Brock.-- Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1 -932559-54-X (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1 -932559-53- 1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1 -932559-55-8 (adobe ebook) 1 . Clark, Basil B.--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1 96 1 - 1 975--Literature and the conflict. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1 96 1 - 1 975--Veterans--Mental health. 4. Vietnamese Conflict, 1 96 1 - 1 975--Poetry. 5. Vietnamese Conflict, 1 96 1 - 1 975--Drama. 6. Bibliotherapy. I. Clark, Basil B. II. Title.
PS3603.L356Z69 2005
8 1 8’.609--dc22
2004025283
Printed on acid-free paper.
Cover photograph: © 2003 by Camilo Jimenez. Used by permission.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in cloth, as well as in Adobe eBook format, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


In Memory of
“Doc” Hurley
Jose
Brian Morrow
Lt. Conner
Larry Parr
Gary Johnson
Bob Hawkins
Rodney Evans
Tommy Fowler
Capt. Reaume
Sam Wadell
Dedicated to
Rocky and Derricka;
a second son and a second grandchild,
from a second son.
I have shared in your shadows.
Oh yes, and peeking around the corner, you too, Jeremy.
—Basil Clark
The Vietnam Veteran


Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Enrollment and Recognition of Pain
Turn It Off, Please
A Series of Poems on Tinnitus
A Dialogue: “Tinnitus” Part I and Part II
Commentary:
The Problem of Pain
2 Reflections of War in a Postwar Terrain
Poetic Recollections of War
Remembrances Associated with Genre of War
Starkle, Starkle, Little Twink
To Choose or Not To Choose, That Is the Consequence
Commentary: The Root Metaphor, and Reflections
3 Engaging Postwar Zones of Combat
The Question of God and Patriotism
Obstacle Battlers Anonymous
Sanity, of Questioning
Internal and External Battles
Commentary:
Metaphysics and Other Dynamics
4 Burning the Postwar Terrain
The Complicated Self
The Relationships
In and Near the Grave
Commentary:
The Dreadful Shadowlands
5 Beyond the Postwar Mindset
Water
Seeds for Growth
Growing and Reaching
Commentary: Living in the Garden
Afterword: Transformation to a Symbolic Reality
Authors and Contributor
Works Cited


Acknowledgments
We acknowledge and respect the obligation placed upon humans throughout the world who have been called upon to serve their country or locality in war. Such people have to make significant judgments about wars—really about life and death. These kinds of judgments are not easy to make.
We hope to see the day that marks the end of all wars—both the more obvious physical killings that occur during material wars and the less obvious “symbolic killings” that occur during word wars in contexts of communication in human relationships.


Introduction
Alternate realities Some things rearranged What is normal for you For me has been changed.
—Basil Clark
We had heard about southern hospitality and were about to experience it firsthand because Professor Clark had invited us to stay at his home our first night in the area. He taught speech and theater at the college and lived near the top of an Appalachian mountain. It would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to drive our truck pulling our car on a trailer up the mountain with my limited truck-driving experience. So we parked our big “rig” at the college, unloaded our car from the trailer, checked the directions provided by Professor Clark, and headed up his mountain.
We moved in the fall of 1995 . I had just completed graduate work at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and landed a teaching position in communication at Pikeville College, a small private institution in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky.
After waving goodbye to friends in Detroit out the window of our rented moving truck, my wife, our son, our dog and I, all sit ting in the front seat, headed south. It was about a 12 hour drive straight through in the truck, going down through Lexington, and then heading southeast through the Mountain Parkway, eventually jigging down again to Pikeville.
The scenery was beautiful in eastern Kentucky. It was Brushy Creek where we were going and into a “hollow” (pronounced “hollar”) called “Ray Branch.” Emma Ray, Basil’s wife, grew up in this area and taught at the local elementary school. While the original house is gone, the Ray Branch homestead is where Basil and Emma make their home together, a special place cozily tucked away in the beautiful mountains.
We had real southern food and talked and talked that evening. Finally, we turned in for the night, but Basil decided to stay awake a little longer than the rest of us. We slept like babies without a care in the world that night; it was so peaceful, it was so comfortable, and it was so relaxing.
In the early morning, Basil already had the coffee brewing. We sat on the deck to enjoy the view. Beautifully, almost mystically, the fog hovered over the top of the Appalachian mountain range out there in the distance beyond the deck and eventually lifted around 9 : 30 a.m. It was incredibly gorgeous that day, and what a wonderful garden in the yard.
“Yes, I spend a lot of time in the garden,” Basil said.
We drank some more coffee, and before long our family was back in the car and on our way to doing the things needed to be done to get settled in the area, because the first day of classes was right around the corner.
One day that first semester, I visited my colleague, Professor Clark, in his office. His office was full of books on the shelves and even some on the floor. Amidst the books was something shiny hanging on the wall. Upon looking closer, I recognized that it was a Silver Star from the Vietnam War.
Over time, our friendship as colleagues grew.
Another day, while sitting in his office talking, Basil reached in his desk drawer and pulled out a stack of papers: “I have gone through some phases since the war,” he explained to me, “and most of what had been going on with me is right here in this stack of papers.” He chuckled and put them back in the drawer, and we walked down the hall to the cafeteria to get some food.
We started to talk a lot about those papers over lunch, and our desire to do something with them grew. The poems and plays alone could be published we thought, because they would be great for use in the acting and oral interpretation classes, as well as rhetoric and communication in human relationships. There seemed to be something intriguing about his phases that could be passed along to students and others, but we could not quite put a finger on it at the time. Through many more conversations, however, our interest grew, and this is how the record of one Vietnam veteran’s experiences started. In a way, this record, the book, is a chronicle of Professor Clark’s successful self-help methods through a miraculous journey of “poetic healing.”
The reader needs to know a few key ideas to understand the focus of this book. Our book does not exploit wartime onslaughts and victories, nor does it focus on 4 th of July celebrations and events. This book does not focus on paying homage to or even consider condemning either those veterans who are still living or those who are dead: such stories already have been articu lated many times in the popular press and entertainment industry and seem ridiculously out of tune with the focus of this book.
Poetic Healing does not offer much of an historical account of the Vietnam War or any other war; because, comprehensive accounts have been written by others. For example, in Vietnam: A History author Stanley Karnow traces the war as far back as 208 BCE to a self-proclaimed emperor. In his account, Karnow reconstructs a comprehensive history of the war and includes reference to the first American casualty in 1945 , the activation of troops by the United States of America in 1965 , and the withdrawal of troops in 1975 .
This book does not even belabor the jolting detail that over 500 , 000 troops were sent to Vietnam or pay specific attention to