Walter McDonald: Vietnam Witness Poet
Poets and critics alike agree that the poetry of Walter McDonald is some of the best poetry available. Poet Andrew Hudgins, for example, says, “Nobody has ever written better poetry about Texas than Walt McDonald” (“What the Critics Say About Walt McDonald”). McDonald uses his experiences, good and bad, and crafts them into poems that people can relate to. His poetry finds surprising and sometimes startling similarities between his experiences with death and life in Vietnam and Texas, and through examining his own experiences he allows the reader to inspect his or her own.
Walter McDonald was born in 1934 in Texas. His father was killed in World War Two, a subject which many of his poems discuss. In 1956 he married Carol Ham, with whom he would later have three children and seven grandchildren. He served his first term of service in Vietnam in 1957 when he joined the Air Force. In 1960 he went from active duty to teaching English at the Air Force Academy, a job he stayed at for two years before going back to Vietnam. He returned to teaching at the Academy in 1967 and continued to do this until 1971 when he retired from the Air Force as a major. He began writing poetry while he taught at the Academy, because he “felt a need to say something to them [his fallen comrades]” (“Walter McDonald: Biography”). He went on to teach at Texas Tech University, and in 2001 he became the Texas Poet Laureate. He retired from teaching in 2002. In that time he published over 2000 poems in various journals and collections (“Walt McDonald, Biographical information and bibliography”).
Walt McDonald has several collections of his poetry. His 2300 poems have been published in such magazines as American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, First Things, Journal of the American Medical Association, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Poetry (“People’s Poetry Series to bring bring former Texas poet laureate to ACU”). His collections of poems include Caliban in Blue and Other Poems (1976), One Third Leads to Another (1978), Anything, Anything (1980), Burning the Fence (1981), Working against Time (1981), Witching on Hardscrabble (1985), The Flying Dutchman (1987), Splitting Wood for Winter (1988), After the Noise of Saigon (1988), Rafting the Brazos (1988), Night Landings (1989), A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (1989), The Digs in Escondido Canyon (1991), All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems (1992), Where Skies Are Not Cloudy (1993), Counting Survivors (1995), Blessings the Body Gave (1998), Whenever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest (1999), All Occasions (2000), Climbing theDivide (2003), Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains (2003), A Thousand Miles of Stars (2004), and Faith is a Radical Master: New and Selected Poems (2005) (“Walter McDonald: Biography”). The incredible amount of his poetry is matched only by the quality of these poems. He has earned many awards, such as Lon Tinkle Memorial Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career (“Walt McDonald”).
Walt McDonald’s very successful writing career began as a response to the horrors he had seen while serving in Vietnam. He, like many others, was so changed by what he did and saw there that he could not remain silent. Vietnam was one of the most horrific wars in U.S. history, and was certainly the war the public hated the most. Vietnam was the first war to be broadcasted on the news into the living rooms of the average American, and as the average American began to see the horrors of war they also began to wish for the war to end (“Vietnam on Television.”). The alarm of the public eventually pressured President Johnson into not running for a second term, and President Nixon for finding a way out of Vietnam (“Richard M. Nixon – the vietnam war”). The soldiers, themselves, suffered extreme conditions that left many of them mentally and physically scarred (“The Postwar Impact of Vietnam”). Many of the soldiers turned to drugs to combat the terror they had to deal with, and even more, doctors believe, got post-traumatic stress syndrome from the fighting (Berinsky). Even after Vietnam ended and they were home, they continued to suffer from this mental illness, and unlike their fathers and uncles before them, they were not war heroes. The public hated them, having seen them commit horrible atrocities in the jungles of Vietnam. People on the street did not cheer for them or salute them. They spat at the soldiers and held protests calling for the wars end, something no other soldiers had had to deal with before Vietnam (Mongrain). The soldiers of Vietnam had to find some way to cope with what they had done and seen, and many, like Walter McDonald, dealt with it by creative means.
One of Walter McDonald’s poems that relates to what he had seen in Vietnam is “The Children of Saigon.” “The Children of Saigon” is a poem about the children who live on the streets of Saigon during the Vietnam war. The persona reacts with these children after he sees them searching through the trash for food. He goes without his dinner that night, getting as much food as he can and giving it to the children, who react by taking the food and quickly moving away from him. “The Children of Saigon” is a blank verse poem made up of eight stanzas, each stanza being three lines long, each line indented slightly more than the one before it. There are several cases of enjambment in the poem, including enjambment across stanzas. The poem uses regular sentence punctuation and capitalization, and if it were written in one line there would be four sentences. “The Children of Saigon” describes not only the “ragged” children he sees, but includes many images of fire and burning. Soldiers in Vietnam often burned villages to the ground, an attempt to get rid of an enemy that looked civilian. In 1963, several Buddhist monks set themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon, burning themselves to death in protest to the war. Bombing and the use of napalm were used on villages and cities alike during the war. As a member of the Air Force, McDonald would have seen these instance of fire during his duty, and he repeats these fiery images in his poem. He combines the current pain of the homeless children searching for food with images of what made them homeless in the first place; the war. “The Children of Saigon” is one of several of McDonald’s poems that looks back on his memories of Vietnam and describes the things he saw there.
However, not all of McDonald’s poems are about Vietnam. He also writes poetry about his homeland, Texas, and his father’s death. However, even these poems deal with the issues of war, as his father and uncles served in World War Two, and especially since his father was killed in action there. One of these poems is “Digging in a Footlocker.” “Digging in a Footlocker” describes the persona’s discovery of a box full of WWII memorabilia in his uncle’s home. It also shows how the persona, a young boy at the time, deals with the realization that his uncle and his own father are killers. “Digging in a Footlocker” is a blank verse poem of five stanzas with four lines each. There are many cases of enjambment in the poem as well as heavy use of metaphor, describing “a human ear” and “teeth” found in the box, evidence of the people who lost their lives at the hands of the persona’s uncle. “Digging in a Footlocker” begins by describing some of the “prettier” aspects of WWII. The footlocker has “Stiff uniforms on top, snapshots/ of soldiers young as our cousins,/ a velvet box of medals/ as if he fought all battles/ in World War II” at the top. It is only underneath these thing that he finds the evidence of his uncle’s darker days in the war. This image is very interesting in comparison to the way the WWII was viewed by the public, especially in light of how Vietnam was later viewed when the public saw the dark things before the pretty ones. In WWII, the soldiers returning from duty were treated as heroes. The people on the home front saw their uniforms and young faces, not the people they had killed. Later, in Vietnam, the shock of seeing soldiers as killers first changed the world. In his own smaller, private way, McDonald also goes through this when he comes to realize that his uncle and father are murderers. This startling change in view point is described in “Digging in a Footlocker.”
Sometimes, McDonald’s poetry talks about both his experiences in Vietnam and in Texas. A good example of this kind of poem is “Plowing through Ashes.” “Plowing through Ashes” is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be a memory about McDonald’s family farm. However, it also holds images found in his poems about Vietnam, including guns and fire. It is a blank verse poem with three stanzas. The first stanza is eight lines, the second stanza is five lines, and the last stanza is twelve lines long. There are many instances of enjambment again, as there are only five sentences in the poem. The poem begins by describing winter months spent searching for pheasants to kill and eat in the fields left littered with crop stalks from the fall before. Here, McDonald describes how his family “took our necessary meat” from the pheasants in the field. The image of hunting for these birds and them reluctantly but necessarily killing them also brings to mind the war in Vietnam, with soldiers moving through the jungles searching for small groups of the enemy amongst the trees. Another parallel comes when McDonald talks about burning the stalks in the spring to fertilize the ground. He describes “the orange flames/ spreading like a prairie fire.” Here, again, is the image of fire that pervades the Vietnam war. Even the word choice he uses to describe setting the fields on fire is reminiscent of violence, “we torched the stalks.” Paired with the title, “Plowing through Ashes,” the fire imagery is thick here, and very reminiscent of Vietnam. The final stanza describes McDonald’s father plowing the field and planting grain in it. This stanza is the one with the most lines, and symbolizes the future after Vietnam. By using the ashes from the old field, McDonald’s father fertilizes his field and makes his future crops grow better. This represents McDonald’s own choice to use what he saw and did in Vietnam to create his poems. He uses the ashes of his past to create a future for himself in his writing and teaching. “Plowing through Ashes” is a wonderful example of McDonald’s body of work. It contains Texas, Vietnam, his father, and hope for the future in a few beautiful images that stick in the reader’s mind after they have been read.
Walter McDonald’s large and prestigious body of work is his way of dealing with his past and moving beyond it. In his poems he confronts his memories of his father, his father’s death, his home in Texas, and his duty in Vietnam. He uses thoughtful and clear images to do this, creating some of the best witness poems of his time. McDonald’s work uses language and images that are so universal that even those who have never been to the places he describes can imagine them and feel what he feels, a skill that has led to McDonald’s success as a writer.
Work Cited
Berinsky, Adam. “Public Opinion During the Vietnam War: A Revised Measure of the Public Will.” Web.mit.edu. MIT, n.d. Web. 18 March 2011.
Mongrain, Jacob. “The Effects of the Vietnam War.” Cyberlearning-world.com. Cyberlearning, n.d. Web. 18 March, 2011.
“People’s Poetry Series to bring bring former Texas poet laureate to ACU.” ACU.edu. ACU, January 2004. Web. 17 March, 2011.
“Richard M. Nixon – the vietnam war.” Presidentprofiles.com. Presidentprofiles, n.d. Web. 18 March, 2011.
“The Postwar Impact of Vietnam.” English.Illinois.edu. Modern American Poetry, n.d. Web. 18 March, 2011.
“Vietnam on Television.” Museum.tv. MBC, n.d. Web. 19 March, 2011.
“Walt McDonald.” Poets.org. Poets, n.d. Web. 17 March, 2011.
“Walter McDonald: Biography.” poetryfoundation.org. poetryfoundation, n.d. Web. 18 March, 2011.
“Walt McDonald, Biographical information and bibliography.” Christianchronicle.org. Christianchronicle, September 2005. Web. 17 March, 2011.
“What the Critics Say About Walt McDonald.” Mockingbird.Creighton.edu. Nebraska Center for Writers, n.d. Web. 18 March, 2011.
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