Andy Fitch In Conversation With Rachel Galvin

For the Los Angeles Review of Books's blog, BLARB, Andy Fitch discusses literature written in times of war with Rachel Galvin, whose News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 explores literature written off the front lines while observing the front lines. Fitch leads their conversation, asking Galvin, "Could we start by addressing this book’s foundational concern with 'an epistemology based in immediate bodily experience and the ethical, political, and aesthetic problems it generates for the civilians who would write of war'?" More of his inquiry: 

Could we situate this early-20th-century predominance of embodied rhetorics (historically rooted in a Romantic subordination of reason to lived sensation-in-the-flesh, formally cultivated through 19th-century extensions of the lyric and its first-person address, then reinvigorated through a privileged vein of World War I testimonial poetics) as a critical starting point for poets prominent in News of War?

RACHEL GALVIN: You’ve just put your finger on this book’s central concern. Tensions related to an epistemology of bodily experience become the engine for poetic innovation for each writer I discuss. W.H. Auden, for instance, along with many contemporaries in the 1930s, was keenly aware that his father’s generation had gone to war, whereas he had no in-the-flesh combat experience. He and his group knew that they lacked the experience of the trench poets they admired, especially Wilfred Owen. Owen wrote out of an immediate experience of war. This gave his work an ethical standing that Auden idealized to the extent that he thought he couldn’t write anything meaningful about war without undergoing a similar experience. But this self-doubt regarding one’s ability to write poems about war without direct experience of it has very long roots, which I trace in part by drawing from studies in military history as well as poetics.

News of War departs from that specific set of ethical questions, exploring how an international set of civilian writers wrote about war. This can become a bit complex to untangle, especially when looking at poets such as Gertrude Stein. One might say that Stein had no combat experience, and therefore did not have firsthand knowledge of war. But she did live in a war zone, in occupied France, with German soldiers quartered in her home. So my book considers how having distinct angles of proximity to war ramifies for civilian poetry.

Continue reading at BLARB.