Poet Bruce Weigl, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will give the first public reading from his new collection, “On The Shores of Welcome Home” on Tuesday, Sept. 17, in the Readings by Writers series at the University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul. The free program begins at 7:30 p.m.
Weigl, who served in Vietnam in 1967-68, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldier-poets, exploring the emotional toll of war and bringing those memories home. A native of Lorain, Ohio, he was awarded the Bronze Star. As he writes in “The Circle of Hahn,” his bestselling prose memoir about his struggles in the aftermath of war: “The paradox of my life as a writer is that the war ruined my life and in return gave me my voice.”
He will be joined at the University Club by Chante Wolf, reading excerpts from a journal, written when she was on active duty deployment to Saudi Arabia in 1991, which were published in “Objects of Deployment: The Veterans Book Project”; David Mura, memoirist, fiction writer and poet, recipient of Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award; and Stefan Lovasik, U.S. Army combat Vietnam veteran whose poetry collections are “Persona and Shadow” and “Absolution.”
Weigl is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, criticism, essays, memoir and translation, including Pulitzer finalists “Song of Napalm” and “The Abundance of Nothing.” He edited “Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War and its Social Consequences” (1997).
He also edited or co-edited four Vietnamese-English poetry collections and has received awards from Vietnam’s arts community for promotion of Vietnamese literature around the world. In addition to teaching at Lorain County Community College as the school’s first Distinguished Professor, Weigl founded the online North Coast Review.
Weigl’s early work, according to Poetry Foundation, engages directly “with the horror of his experience of war, while more recent work explores themes of family and childhood. His Buddhist practice influences his compassionate and unflinching attention to what he terms ‘ordinary people in extraordinary situations.’ ”
Here is a searing, war-inspired excerpt from “On the Shores of Welcome Home”
We don’t know how someone could kill that way,/
the children in their classrooms safe at school./
Our world is named guns, and bullets spray/
free as our American minds are to fool/
ourselves that we are good; there’s nothing left to do./
Dead children wait in their classrooms/
for their mothers and fathers to view/
their small bodies; the doom/
it is to see your child dead and blue as frozen snow;/
you’ll never be the same again; you’ll never know/
the quiet peace of simply how to be./
We want to give our lives to bring them back/
although I know how foolish sacrifice may sound;/
words can say but words can never be,/
or stop the bullets, not even a single round/
from cutting through the air, until they almost see/
the flesh and bone they blast away./
You have to know the fear of how it feels/
before you understand.”
