Writing war poetry means making predictable choices. One may choose, for example, to depict violence graphically or abstractly. Jeremy Bentham, who was not a poet, believed that vivid detailing of wounded bodies and grotesque deaths would shock readers out of complacency and into pacifism.
Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of English at New Jersey City University. He won a Hopwood Award in poetry at the University of Michigan in 1996 and was a semi-finalist for the 92nd Street Y’s “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry competition in 2001.