Iraq War veteran and poet Brian Turner asked the crowd at his Lake Tahoe reading to hold their applause.
‘From a distance it sounds like a firefight,’ he smiled.
Turner read from his book, ‘Here, Bullet,’ at Sierra Nevada College (SNC) in Incline Village Oct. 16. While serving as an infantry team leader in 2003 in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, he penned the collection of works that would later earn him numerous awards for their unflinching grit and surreally upside down romance.
Turner kicked off his Incline reading with the book’s namesake. After 20 years of writing poetry – he received an MFA from the University of Oregon before joining the military – the soldier penned the invitingly brutal Here, Bullet in 15 minutes while listening to Queens of the Stone Age over his headphones.
‘If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh,’ he began in a deep, hollow voice.
Turner’s unit had just finished their day roaming the streets as bait for enemy fire when he wrote that. Upon completion, he stuffed the poem in a Ziploc baggie and continued to chronicle his war experiences in verse for the duration of his tour.
‘I’ve read that poem many times,’ Turner told the crowd at SNC. ‘I’m still not sure what it means, you know? It’s kind of weird.’
After the reading, the wine-and-cheese meet-and-greet, and the book signing, Turner sat with his plate of fruit and bottle of Sierra Mist and talked with me about his poetry. He talked about how such work could help sharpen the public’s focus on the war in Iraq, which he feels is currently overshadowed by an economic meltdown.
‘We need to know what happened,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be a part of that dialogue.’
Turner’s words paint a chilling portrait of the war in Iraq. They shock with high-definition clarity and soothe with an eerie, muted calm. He doesn’t let his audience escape the messy tragedy or confused beauty of war.
In his poem ‘Eulogy,’ Turner describes a young soldier committing suicide ‘on a blue day of sun.’ The sound of his fatal shot ‘lifts the birds up off the water, a mongoose pauses under the orange trees.’
Turner joined the military at the late age of 30 in the late 1990s. Before enlisting, he had already earned a Masters in poetry, and written several other unpublished collections – including ones about South Korea, Bosnia, and inventors. But Turner believes his work on Iraq is more powerful than any before. ‘The one in Iraq had a certain pressure on it that none of the rest had,’ he said.
While serving in Iraq, he never talked about his poetry with others. He never shared his vivid accounts of their collective experiences. The team leader didn’t want to somehow cloud working relationships in the field.
In 2005, Turner’s collection of Iraq poems was published. It won that year’s Beatrice Hawley Award, the 2006 Northern California Book Award in Poetry and snagged a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection among a host of other accolades.
The writer is currently working on a companion piece titled ‘Talk the Guns.’ It will deal with the Iraq War’s effects on America – ‘to see the war that isn’t here, but is here,’ he said.
In an effort to offer a preview, Turner described a scene he witnessed during leave in Washington state. While attending a carnival-esque event, he watched an oversized pink Energizer bunny roller-skate by beating a bass drum. The bunny was followed by a woman leading a Speedo-clad man around on a leash. The Abu Ghraib connection was inescapable for Turner.
Although he was already studied in poetry, Turner told the audience in Incline Village that his time in the military helped him find his voice.
‘I was always a listener,’ he said, drawing parallels with his stint playing bass in a band with friends – ‘you can always kick back by your speaker and let the singer and guitarist do their thing.’
Reading from Here, Bullet, Turner did not kick back by his amp. He spoke with the authority of someone that has pointed guns and shouted orders, of someone that has seen things he can’t forget. His relaying of war can be both booming and consoling.
When all the wine and cheese had disappeared, and the English students long since shuffled into the parking lot, Turner recalled some academic philosophizing from his college days.
‘Does poetry really matter,’ he remembered pondering. ‘Is poetry dead?’
The poems Turner read in Incline dripped painfully with life: ‘… shrapnel traveling at the speed of sound to open him up in blood and shock…’
Wrapped around the subject of war, most of the poems in Here, Bullet grapple vividly with death. But while the words dance on decay, the poems are undoubtedly alive … Turner forces his readers to open their eyes on the battlefield, and rewards them with scattered moments of bizarre beauty in Hell.
‘I think they were just happy it wasn’t Lord Tennyson,’ he joked.
