War Poetry - Sam

After reading The Monday Poem, one does not necessarily think of war poetry. The poem starts out by making reference to Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning poem and the claim that “Death is the mother of beauty”. DJ Renegade leaves this thought to resonate with the readers as they continue through the poem. The general plot is about the narrator and his friend Gary recalling the death of their friend Ronald. They are walking through the neighborhood as they recall these memories and are interrupted by another old friend, Melvin, who changed drastically after serving time in prison. They proceed to talk about Melvin, cracking a joke about “The Killer”, which implies violence and hatred. They were so distracted that they almost didn’t notice the makeshift memorial set up honoring the death of a kid he had seen coming out of the liquor store just the week before. This event marks a shift in the poem to a much more somber tone as we see how prevalent death is in their lives.

After hearing this brief summary, one would clearly not classify this as war poetry. It doesn’t talk about soldiers or battlefields like the more traditional wars such as WWII or the Vietnam War. However, no one said that war poetry is confined to those strictly traditional wars. Other types of wars exist out there, such as gang wars, drug wars, racial wars, etc. Based on the context clues in The Monday Poem, it seems that the narrator lives in a world of gang warfare, alcohol, and violence. The harsh streets and even their very own front steps are their battlegrounds, as shootings take place right in front of them and lives are forever changed. They even have tributes for their “fallen soldiers”, by setting up makeshift memorials of flowers and pictures where the act of death took place. Of course the traditional wars have their famous memorials located in DC such as the Vietnam and WWII memorials. These kinds of wars are known and regarded on a much wider scale than those of street warfare, attracting more attention from the public. I personally don’t think that this makes the Monday Poem any less of a war poem. I believe that all wars are a man vs. man struggle that ends in some sort of violence, which essentially describes both of the types of warfare that I’ve described. When reading Here, Bullet, it made me realize that war is very much a struggle between man and bullet, or general weaponry, as well as the struggle between men. Whether it’s in the battlefront of Iraq or the less desirable areas of DC, the soldier’s pull of that trigger has immense and sometimes irreversible effects.

DJ Renegade concludes by challenging how Wallace Steven’s can write of war poetry when he has probably never “held a gunshot friend” or had a personal experience with death through acts of violence. Renegade writes of a kind of war that is real and happening every day, a war that is close to his heart.