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We're dying on another day
My poem "The Trouble Over" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.
I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."
I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."
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That's really nice! I was never taught any of the war poets formally, with the possible exception of Owen—my high school Latin teacher gave us "Dulce et Decorum Est" after we had read the relevant Horace. It terrified me.