by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]
A good poem can do many things – be clever, edifying, provocative, or moving – but a truly great poem (which is to say a successful one), need only be concerned with one additional attribute, and that is an arresting turn of phrase. By that criterion, Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War,” originally published in Poetry in 2013 and later appearing in the 2019 collection Deaf Republic, is among the greatest English-language verses of this abbreviated century. Within the context of Deaf Republic, Kaminsky’s lyric takes part in a larger allegorical narrative, but that broader story in the collection aside, “We Lived Happily During the War” is arrestingly prescient of both the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and Vladimir Putin’s brutal and ongoing assault on the broader country of Kaminsky’s birth since 2022, including bombardment of the poet’s home city of Odessa. Yet even stripped of this context, “We Lived Happily During the War” concerns itself with the general tumult of modern warfare, both its horror and prosaicness, its sanitation and its tragedy. More than just about Ukraine, or Syria, or Gaza, Kaminsky’s lyric is about us, those comfortable Western observers of warfare who have the privilege to be happy and content at the exact moment that others are being slaughtered.
To return to my initial argument, the line which lodges in the head from Kaminsky’s poem is one that isn’t exactly or actually in the lyric itself but is rather the title – “We Lived Happily During the War.” Six words, only two multisyllabic, each one hits with the definitiveness of a bullet shot or an incendiary explosion. There is an initial ambiguity to the tile – who does the pronoun refer to? What war are we speaking of? If the “We” is those who are suffering through this undefined assault, then the poem becomes a testament to human endurance through atrocity. If the “We” is someone else, maybe those contemporaneous with the war but not witness to it, then the poem becomes a condemnation of inaction. Kaminsky’s lyric is largely interpreted in the second way, and for good reason, because the only instance of the title appearing as a line within the poem itself, albeit altered by a parenthetical which makes all the difference, in the penultimate stanza which is enjambed into a one-line final stanza so that it reads “we (forgive us)/lived happily during the war.” That parenthetical seemingly makes all the difference, though there is also always the possibility that there is a need for forgiveness from those who successfully survive a war, with all of the negotiations and betrayals that implies, as well.
That interpretation, however, is apparently precluded by a fairly obvious grounding in place supplied by Kaminsky in the third stanza wherein he writes “I was/in my bed, around my bed America.” Telling that the war-torn country is not named, relegated to the undifferentiated morass of places that are “over there,” where the horrible things happen, but America itself is the only definite named place in the poem. Earlier, in the first through third stanzas, with in the first instance a line break following the final word of the former, and in the second the same pattern replicated, Kaminsky writes “we/protested/but not enough, we opposed them but not/enough.” This would seem to unequivocally be a condemnation of a certain variety of slacktavist concern with atrocity occurring somewhere else; the guilty collective first-person speaker, in the traditional supplicating pose of the congregation providing litany of their sins during the Days of Awe, does stand in opposition, does protest – but not to any end. Yet there is also the possibility that this is a more diffuse condemnation of any failed protest, which, of course, could also include those in the unnamed country. If we return to Kaminsky’s seemingly unequivocal reference to America, we’ll see that he doesn’t say that he’s “in America,” but rather that America is “around my bed.” A strange way of phrasing things, for sure, because what is the function of the name of the country in this line – a statement of location? Of philosophy, ideology, spirit? Something else?
What complicates the traditional interpretation of the poem – that we should feel guilt over not doing enough for those victims of war overseas – is that in the third to the fourth stanza where he mentions America, Kaminsky actually writes “I was/in my bed, around my bed America/was falling: invisible house by invisible house.” He’s not telling us just that he’s in America (if the narrator is actually saying that at all) because the verb in the fourth stanza after the enjambment of the final line of the third stanza tells us that the nation – or the idea of it – was “falling,” with all of those connotations of fallibility and imperial decadence. That it’s by “invisible house by invisible house” is an interesting caveat, for the adjective allows for the probability that this “falling” should not be read literally, that it isn’t the same as “And when they bombed other people’s houses/we protested” from the first line (which also makes clear that if the war is not “over there,” it’s at least not “right here”), but that it signifies at the bare minimum some sort of psychic violence. This, then, is a lyric not just about complacency, but about the effects of such a pose upon the complacent; charitably, the way that overextended exhaustion and attention numbs us, or, uncharitably, how disinterest conspires to rob us of empathy, of humanity.
More than audacity, or more than just audacity, the decision to make the best line of the poem its title is necessary in this particular case, because the twelve short lines that follow “We Lived Happily During the War” function as an exegesis for that initial explosion of a sentence. Kaminsky’s lyric, which I’ve already compared to the collective confessions that a congregation utters during the Yom Kippur service, needs to be read in that prophetic tradition of a community explicating their moral shortcomings, which is to be opposed to the breast-beating individualism associated with the American Protestant approach towards sin. Raised in a Ukrainian Jewish community, Kaminsky’s poem is very much a condemnation of not just himself, and not just us, but of the “We,” of the poet and his reader together. In that way, the popular reading of this lyric is of course, correct – though hopefully made more subtle by an understanding of how the degradations of inattention affect the soul of even the lucky and privileged. The final three stanzas of the blank verse poem, composed of five lines dividing into two lines each and then concluding with a final one-line stanza, mysteriously begins “In the sixth month/of a disastrous reign in the house of money/in the streets of money in the city of money in the country of money,/our great country of money, we (forgive us)/lived happily during the war.” Here Kaminsky returns us to the realm of fable, parable, allegory, where the “great country of money” can obviously be conflated with the America he mentions earlier – the only definite place ever referenced in the poem – but in a broader sense it’s that place, wherever it may be, where wealth means comfort, the most potent narcotic anaesthetizing us to the suffering of others.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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