Bruce Weigl's Poems on the Vietnam War

To this day the Vietnam War is still considered to be one of the most devastating wars in history and has been a topic of resentment to the American culture thirty-three years after its end. For the American public it’s marked as being the point in history where distrust in our government was at an all-time high, mainly because most of the war’s carnage was witnessed on television for the first time. For all the bloodshed American and Vietnamese soldiers suffered through, the war has left a perpetual mark not only on the United States but ultimately has left a permanent scar on the soldiers who fought and managed to survive the war. Renowned war poet, Bruce Weigl, like most young American men during the time was only nineteen when he participated in the war and fought for three years. The traumatic experiences he faced in the war and post-service back home in the United States helped him develop a distinctively emotional and explicit poetry which dealt bluntly with the atrocious images of Vietnam. When being interviewed by fellow poet and student of his, David Keplinger, Bruce openly states that, ““…it did not occur to me to write poems about the war for a long time. It was not exactly that it had not occurred to me, but I questioned why anyone would want to read about the war because it was already terrible enough” (Keplinger 141). With his time after the war, Weigl obtained his PhD. at the University of Utah and also made stops at Oberlin College and the University of New Hampshire prior to that. Weigl’s encounter with the war has enabled him to depict graphic illustrations of it and that effect seems to plod into the present. His work is highly saturated in the brutalities of Vietnam War and echoes that very sentiment.

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...able amount of decadence to be highlighted from such an encounter but Weigl weaves his way to have it come off very artistically.

Bruce Weigl’s work gives readers an accurate glimpse of what took place in Vietnam. His poetry reveals a harsher reality of the war that goes beyond the raw number of people who perished. The idea that real human beings are casualties in war is a burden Weigl and fellow Vietnam War poets share. To this day American’s simply see the fallen as just names and bodies, nothing further. Weigl serves as a forefront example of just how painful and disturbing the war was and his poetry is greatly influenced by it in nearly every facet. Moreover, it’s a reminder that the images he witnessed are unforgettable and are completely ingrained in his mind to the point where horror is the focus and projecting it as beautiful if his main goal.