Fool, Starbuck, Dickey

George Wallace chimed in on op-ed poetry the other day in his usual valuable manner, offering some lines from a George Starbuck poem. I’m not quite sure what he meant by this comment though: “As certain presidential candidates seem regularly to suggest, everything was better during the War in Vietnam.” But the four stanzas he offered make me want to find the poem.

I always thought one of the most powerful Viet Nam poems was one written not about that war, but about World War II instead: James Dickey’s “The Firebombing” published in Buckdancer’s Choice in 1966. It speaks of a suburbanite who has never come to terms with his role in a firebombing over Japan

I can’t find the entire poem on-line but I have found the following lines from James Dickey: An Appreciation by Chris Lott:


Fire hangs not yet fire
In the air above Beppu
For I am fulfilling

An "anti-morale" raid upon it.
All leashes of dogs
Break under the first bomb, around those
In bed, or late in the public baths: around those
Who inch forward on their hands
Into medicinal waters.
Their heads come up with a roar
Of Chicago fire:
Come up with the carp pond showing
The bathhouse upside down,
Standing stiller to show it more
As I sail artistically over
The resort town followed by farms,
Singing and twisting
All the handles in heaven kicking
The small cattle off their feet
In a red costly blast
Flinging jelly over the walls
As in a chemical war-
fare field demonstration.
With fire of mine like a cat

Holding onto another man's walls,
My hat should crawl on my head
In streetcars, thinking of it,
The fat on my body should pale.