Dear Editor,

In Poetry's October issue, Eleanor Wilner asked of the NEA's Operation Homecoming program, "How could it be more wrong?" As Thoreau reminds us, public dissent against the government is one of the strengths of our democracy. In this case, however, a reasoned argument would have been more effective than an uninformed denunciation.

The National Endowment for the Arts created Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience to reach out to an entire stratum of our society often excluded and even ignored by the literary establishment—military men and women and their families. Because they have lived through something the rest of us can barely imagine, the NEA believes it is important to offer an opportunity to use literature, specifically writing, to begin to clarify these life experiences.

Those who teach at universities certainly understand the value of writing. But they also can be blind to life outside those same privileged circles. Not everyone is given the time or the opportunity—or the encouragement—to use writing as a means of expression or reflection.

The NEA is offering writing workshops on military bases to those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the families who waited for them. The workshops encourage them to write about their experiences in memoirs, fiction, essays, poetry, letters, and journals. The workshops are run by a distinguished team of journalists, historians, biographers, novelists, and yes, poets. Many of these writers are veterans themselves or grew up in military families.

Veterans teaching workshops or reading on our educational CD include novelists Richard Bausch, Shelby Foote, Joe Haldeman, James Salter, and Tobias Wolff. Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country, and Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, are also teaching workshops. Numerous poets are teaching workshops too, including Judith Ortiz Cofer, Andrew Hudgins, E. Ethelbert Miller, Marilyn Nelson, Wyatt Prunty, and Daniel Rifenburgh. In addition, Marilyn Nelson, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur have contributed to our educational CD for the troops. Simpson and Wilbur, both World War II veterans, read particularly moving poems about their combat experiences.

The NEA and the Department of Defense signed an agreement that allows the NEA to conduct writing workshops on bases and to solicit writing directly from the troops, even those who do not attend a workshop. The DOD will not be involved in the selection of writing for the anthology, and the program will be free of censorship. As poet Dana Gioia, who serves as Chairman of the NEA, states, "We don't tell the writers what to teach. We don't tell the troops what to write. Freedom of artistic expression is the sine qua non of all NEA programs."

More than thirty news organizations and cultural publications have sent correspondents to the bases with the NEA and have repeatedly noted the free flow of opinions in the workshops. Unlike the New York Times and NPR reporters who filed lengthy considerations of the program, Eleanor Wilner never bothered to attend one of our workshops, speak with the agency, or interview any of the authors, military personnel, or spouses participating in the program.

Yet, devoid of facts, Wilner questions whether "it is literature that can be produced or even encouraged under such circumstances." Notwithstanding her view that a military base is not "an educational setting," surely she is aware that for generations American writers have produced extraordinary works of art in these very places.

Some of the best writing submitted to Operation Homecoming has come directly from the front, particularly in the form of blogs, email journals, and letters home. While war literature has given us Catch-22, The Things They Carried, and other masterpieces created years after the conflicts ended, it also has given us the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, works penned in the midst of battle. It is too early for anyone to predict whether the current troops will write most powerfully about their experiences now or later. Soon after the NEA announced the launch of Operation Homecoming, submissions and letters of gratitude began pouring into the agency. The NEA staff quickly found itself corresponding with hundreds of young American writers completely outside the literary establishment. These soldiers and spouses refuse to be marginalized simply because they are not writing from what Wilner called "bona fide writing programs." Instead they are writing from the school of experience:

I am an Army Reservist, called to duty for one year. Without the reserves, this war could not be pulled off. I think my essay reflects the hardships that many citizen soldiers endure when they leave their lives behind to serve. It's an important story that should be told and I hope you will use my piece to tell it.


Enclosed please find a letter written to me by my nineteen year old son. It is an honest letter written by the hand of a young American Marine who just found himself in extraordinary circumstances.


Writing about those things that we combat veterans keep locked up inside is tremendously cathartic. I lost my creative voice after Mogadishu; putting things into perspective took a long time, especially without any encouragement or understanding. Thank you again for this project.


Surely open-minded people can agree that these soldiers should not be silenced. Nor should they be told they have spoken too soon. Nor should they be told that they can speak or write legitimately only from the institutional base of a university writing program.

The NEA already has received more than three hundred submissions from troops and their spouses. These are powerful stories of living in difficult times and places. Whether reading poetry to us over a satellite phone from Iraq or emailing journal entries from Afghanistan, these young men and women have thoroughly embraced the written word. Giving voice to these individuals is essential in human, historic, and literary terms. In a society too often divided, Operation Homecoming creates an essential dialogue between and among military families and artists—and ultimately the American public—about lifechanging experiences. Such dialogues can be at once therapeutic, cathartic, and calming.

The need for such conversations is understood most clearly by the dozens of Vietnam War vets who have written the NEA expressing their support of the program and sharing their own wartime experiences. After that war the vets had stories to tell, often harrowing ones, but unlike today the nation was not prepared to hear them.

In historic terms, Operation Homecoming offers an opportunity to amass what may be an invaluable archive of this period in American history, written not by journalists or politicians, but by the men and women affected by war on a very personal level. The NEA has had discussions with the National Archives and the Library of Congress regarding housing this vital archive.

From The Red Badge of Courage to The Naked and the Dead, war and military service have been major subjects throughout American literature. We hope and expect to discover a few good writers through this program whose work will be read for generations to come.

The NEA looks upon the writing workshops as the central part of the program, but the anthology will be the most tangible outcome for the reading public. Through an independent, transparent panel process administered by our Literature staff, the NEA will select the best submissions and will publish them regardless of point of view. The panel will consist of twelve to fifteen distinguished writers, including the National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson and Andrew Carroll, editor of War Letters and executive director of The American Poetry & Literacy Project, which he co-founded with the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky. Other panelists will be announced in December.

Literary excellence, historical importance, and the desire to present a diversity of opinions and genres will be the guiding selection factors. The submissions already published online by the New York Times and read on NPR's "Morning Edition" should address any concerns that the program is biased toward a pro-war or anti-war stance.

Rather than diverting funds from the Literature fellowship program to support Operation Homecoming, the NEA increased the Literature budget by $150,000 this year and secured funding from The Boeing Company to support arts initiatives for military communities, such as Operation Homecoming. Sometimes those privileged to teach at universities forget how little access most people have to the arts—especially people who live in isolated and rural areas, which is the setting for most military bases. It would be hard to imagine people more in need of what the arts provide than those who face the trauma of war. The NEA strongly believes that military families should not be excluded from our arts and arts education programs.

The National Endowment for the Arts is proud of the Operation Homecoming program, the thirty writers currently involved in its success, and especially our service men and women.

Jon Parrish Peede
Director, Operation Homecoming
National Endowment for the Arts
Washington, D.C.



Dear Editor,

Operation Homecoming was born of a conversation between NEA Chairman Dana Gioia and myself, so I leap to its defense. While I understand Eleanor Wilner's suspicion of the support it has received from what we used to call "the military industrial complex," her arguments against the project seem to be based on a belief that this "unholy alliance" must necessarily co-opt the intention of the project's architects and somehow harm the returning troops the project hopes to support. Wilner must be uncomfortable with the funding of the Nobel Peace Prize as well.

It is true that the roster of writers involved in Operation Homecoming ranges widely—witness the chasm between millionaire thriller-writer Tom Clancy and myself. Clancy and I participated in a workshop at the Norfolk Naval Station on September 22 and 23. The military personnel I met took Clancy's literary advice (He jangled his car keys and said, "Mercedes Benz. All you have to do is tell your stories, and you can have one, too.") about as seriously as I did. I suspect it was no accident that there were lots of media people but no military personnel in the room when Clancy pronounced in our press conference that, "Oh, yeah. Poets make the best killers."

I spoke the day after Clancy. The lengthy Q&A period which followed my brief presentation of writing tips ranged from copyright laws to how an elderly couple can find a writer willing to help them record his WWII stories. A Navy nurse is writing about her grandmother, one of the first African-American nurses in the Navy. Another sailor wants to write about his eating disorder. Several people asked how to encourage their children to write. I told them about literary journals. I recommended books. I told them to avoid widely advertised poetry publications which I know to be scams. I encouraged them to use the discipline they've learned from military service to commit themselves to disciplined literary apprenticeships.

Tom Clancy is not the voice of Operation Homecoming. Nor is Boeing, Inc. NEA Chairman Gioia has made clear the fact that "the Boeing money comes without restrictions and that submissions will be based on artistic merit, not on whether they're pro- or anti-war." (Hillel Italie, Associated Press) And the editors of the planned Operation Homecoming anthology will come from a wide spectrum of political viewpoints and have been assured that they will be given free rein. Wilner asks, "Are these returning troops once again being used as a shield against the scrutiny of the very policy which put them in harm's way in the first place?" A shield against scrutiny? I should think the words of these returning troops will more likely beam a very intense light on the effects of that policy.

As to whether the program "serves poetry," and whether the products will be "literary," I remind Wilner that such questions may not be answered in our lifetime. As a matter of fact, those of us who consider ourselves "poets" might well ask them about our own work.

Marilyn Nelson
Storrs, Connecticut



Dear Editor,

As a military service member who has spent a year prosecuting the war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, I've heard no neutral language describing our foes, nor any bestial comparisons; simply terms describing the importance of self-defense, avoiding fratricide, and harming non-combatants. On returning home I have been offered therapy to help deal with the angst and stress of taking lives. The GI Bill continues to offer me further educational opportunities, as it has other veterans since World War II.

Speculation about the fruits of Operation Homecoming is premature and unproductive. Allowing these troops an avenue of catharsis is a noble endeavor. Certainly, for some, it will be too early, the experiences too fresh and horrific. For others the experience will prove enlightening. Whether or not people will be able to benefit immediately from the workshops, surely the act of teaching people new methods of expression will be useful later in life. Those who needed time to sort through the chaos of their surreal war experiences will have better tools.

I hope that those people who only want to read about the horrors of war are disappointed. I can only hope that the editors of the Operation Homecoming anthology will be evenhanded, highlighting a full spectrum of experiences.

Stuart Tiffen
Navarre, Florida



Dear Editor,

Eleanor Wilner's paranoid and self-righteous attack on the the NEA's Operation Homecoming program seems to me altogether unreasonable. That there may be a potential for abuse is no reason to reject the possible benefits the program offers those veterans who are interested. Even before the invention of psychotherapy, men and women understood that writing can be a way of at once distancing themselves from their experience and gaining at least the illusion of control over it. These are the reasons for which most of us began writing and many of us continue to do so.

The cooperation of the Department of Defense and the contribution by Boeing do not fatally taint the program. Wilner is an American citizen and it is her government, her country, and her DOD. Boeing is not a criminal conspiracy but a corporation engaged in lawful and productive business. But her anti-war rage nudges her beyond the limits of rationality. Dana Gioia and Eleanor Wilner are both friends of mine, and I am deeply distressed that she gives him and his agency so little credit and publicly attacks his motives. She cannot make the case, however, that anybody will be telling writers what to teach or the soldiers what to write, and unless something like that were to happen, then the program seems to me perfectly benign and even of considerable potential benefit.

David R. Slavitt
Cambridge, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

No grunt who has seen a friend lose a leg to an IED, killed an insurgent with a shot to the head at point-blank range (as the kid next door did), or survived a mortar or RPG attack, will come home to Fort Lewis, WA (for example) and sit in a workshop with officers all over the place and write about the experience in an intelligible and intelligent manner. It just will not happen.

It may be therapeutic to write of the experience (as in art and music therapies), but until the immediacy of the experience can be worked through, it is naught but a literary exercise under military supervision: dangerous for a soldier who is told to support the war effort by a superior officer in all he or she does. This is all a propaganda effort by the Pentagon, akin to Laura Bush's selected invitations to her poetry tea party last year to talk about Whitman, Hughes, and Dickinson. The former librarian probably could not have picked a better trio of tea party protesters. This "literary" event will also fail.

Robert B. Godwin
Lacey, Washington



Eleanor Wilner responds:

Whew. I have become the grinch who stole Christmas. I have neither the power nor the desire to deny voice to anyone, though, under any circumstances. There are others who have that power, and that is what concerns me—and not just me, but many others, some of whom I quoted in my piece. There isn't much more to be said here, because the real subject is not art but politics, or rather art in a political climate of a particularly chilling kind.

I respect Marilyn Nelson, her family history, her poetry, her motives, and am sure that there is benefit from her presence. Of course some individuals will benefit from and feel acknowledged by this program. Our difference is our sense of the context within which individual actions are framed, and it was to my distrust of that context that I spoke. My questions remain about the political use to which this program can be put; and in what setting, and under what aegis, real disclosure can take place. Reading the glossy NEA booklet with its large claims for art and truth about war, its PR boost for Boeing, and its partnership with the Pentagon, I felt the shadow of the commissars fall across the page—a shadow too many Americans still can't see on their own ground.

I never said that soldiers "can speak or write legitimately only from the institutional base of university writing programs." Jon Peede's error reveals a bias that repeatedly attempts to connect my views with higher education and both with an out-of-touch "privilege." In fact, it is the Administration that embodies and serves privilege against public interest, whose ideology therefore attempts to discredit intellectual work so necessary in a democracy, for it enables us as citizens and writers to move beyond personal experience —compelling as it is—to the larger context in which governments and their funding agencies come under scrutiny. In fact, in American culture, making everything personal is one way in which political blindness is enforced.

To this writer, the proposed war anthology being designed to circulate at military bases, libraries, and schools, under the aegis of government agencies—as things stand now in America—is already shaped by its ultimate context. The frame itself interprets what is seen, what excluded, even influences a self-censorship of which we may be unaware. If the outcome proves me wrong, I shall be both surprised, and exceedingly glad.

Eleanor Wilner



Dear Editor,

William Logan's complaint about the "badly kept secret that Hopkins is often nearly unreadable" ("Antagonisms," October, 2004) is akin to complaining that God is nearly unknowable. I said akin, not analogous—because, though Hopkins's poems are not God, they are linguistic enactments of a mind floundering towards God in the modern world. By his time that world had grown hostile to authentic faith channeled into religious terms, a hostility that is still with us.

"Donne is religiose," Logan protests in advance to this response, "yet I'd happily convert if apostasy meant I could no longer read the Holy Sonnets." However, Donne's world accommodated his religiosity; Hopkins's did not. If Donne had breezily announced an intention to "convert" to the wrong faith or engage in "apostasy" from the right one, he could easily have lost his head, and not metaphorically. However much we deplore such religious intolerance, its existence stemmed from his age's immersion in what Hopkins's contemporary Matthew Arnold called "the sea of faith," which Arnold declared at an ebb. Arnold and the early T. S. Eliot could pacify themselves with lamenting this sea's departure, but Hopkins has the lone distinction of trying to sing the high tide back both for himself and for a public that didn't especially want it. In doing so, he became, like many poets modern and contemporary, an incorrigibly idiosyncratic voice.

All poetry is prayer, however much it diffuses itself horizontally into the world. Hopkins's oddity stemmed from his refusal to shed the vertical reach of poetry toward an unseen heaven—a refusal carried forth with unshakable conviction and true belief. He had the genius to realize, however, that he could not with integrity carry this refusal out in forms that had habitually suited poets such as Herbert, Donne, and Milton. The latter lived when men of faith could render interior discoveries in publicly intelligible forms because of publicly held assumptions—the Incarnation, judgment, eternity, heaven, hell. Hopkins's oddity, which sometimes seems like "cornball theatrics" or "barnstorm oratory," became necessary because the Western imagination misplaced the blueprint for the wheel. This doesn't make Hopkins a major poet, but it does make him an indispensable one.

Brian M. Amend
Lynchburg, VA



Dear Editor,

This is a letter of appreciation for David Orr's reviews [August 2004 and June 2003]. He makes his subjects enjoyable to read about by writing with humor, clarity, and graspable examples. He makes it clear when he likes a book and when he doesn't, and he gives enough information to inspire further investigation if the poet in question—warts and all—seems interesting.

It's refreshing to read straight-ahead criticism that is intelligent, honest, and fun. Thanks, David Orr, for doing more than your part toward sorting out the current array of choices and voices in poetry books. And thanks, Poetry, for publishing these reviews.

Cecelia Hagen
Eugene, Oregon