City Psalm (i)

from poet Denise Levertov

From 1964, coming out of latency, I found the air war on the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam painful. This was a matter of the growth of a self by introjecting the common world (viz. Anderson, 1983 and the Voloshinov circle, ca. 1927, trans. 1987.)

That world was on fire. No, my psychiatrist didn’t tell me this.

My doc is a peer in the human sciences. I would roll right over a therapist who offered explanations, then continue with childhood adaptations to the family drama untouched.

She has listened to me as a woman with no other role in my life while I have at last developed the self that mediates left and right (viz. Homer, ca. 3K BP and Jaynes, 1976.) That came recently this century.

To a child in the last one had come instead the assassinations of pacifists from 1965 through 1968. Then came the revelations of 1969 - the massacre.

Somewhere in there someone sent home an ear. Then from 1974 when our men observe the law together I have read and heard daily to this day the tales of those in the occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam, our ally, the killing field (viz. Hess, 1993.)

As a member of those classes in charge (viz. Hatcher, 1990 and Kabaservice, 2005) and those who did the work (viz. Connolly, 1994 and Farrell, 2007) as well as an encyclopedist in many languages I have an understanding more principled and varied than you will have heard from. I can’t relate to the arguments about it.

Any side. Not even wrong.

Not even sides. 1 of the war consultants in his belligerent candor once told a common friend that he never had seen a war crime.

No, he had not. Old now I no longer decide whether to hunt him down and beat him to death with his book (Pike, 1966.)

He died on his own the year I was as old as when he plotted the extermination of a political party. He was just a kid.

Somewhere in there I began collecting broadsides, single-sheet, one-sided publications of a poem, often political. Ran across 1 around 1981 that expressed this religious experience of my life,

vastation (James, 1902.)

Hasidim (viz. Potok, 1967) such as the poet’s father call it the breaking of the vessels (viz. Bloom, 1982.) The sense of god in his, whatever, absence and of his, whatever, creation in our, whoever’s, shambles.

What do you know, Denise Levertov published her City Psalm in 1964!

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.