Hi James, this sent me googling to check out the story. I wonder whether the mention of Iraq confuses the story a little - it' s a powerful story on its own. The ' reading is amusing (if you can can it that) - but is it the Lord Jehoval (here my biblical knowledge lets me down) that can be blamed rather than a human/group of humans?

A wonderful rant nonetheless powerfully written for being a rant. I adored:

From corrugated house to corrugated house

followed closely by:

down the road to nowhere.

evokes desolate images.

I thought maybe this could be tightened into three lines as well...

The corporate army of the Garden of Eden is a small militia. Just big enough to clear a village or three. The big battalions are elsewhere. Ten thousand of the soldiers in Iraq are corporate.

Run for your lives! The builders are coming!

is brutally funny - I laughed out loud then checked myself.

I agree with Joanie. I really enjoyed the biblical language, well done and immencely funny but is it really Jehovah you are talking about here?

I confess I' ll have to google too. Jehovah smacks of an Israeli company?? Maybe the God here is western capitalism and not Jehovah...

I thought that the last line would be better beginning at ' sad' .

Draft you say? Can' t wait to read the end version.

Hi James. I have to say that I, too, googled but only after I had read this a few times. I think it is very powerful and I don' t think the inclusion of Iraq confuses at all. It must be compulsory to do it when the name of the area is so similar! I think it adds to the horror of the account.

http://fra.controlarms.org/library/Index/ENGAFR120112007?open&of=ENG-2AF

I love the soldiers/construction workers comparison and especially the first line in italics.

The repetition of ' corrugated house' makes the reader pause and visualise just enough and I like the way the gated community is named specifically, as a sharp contrast to what has gone before.

I didn' t have a problem with the Biblical bit (no, it was Elsie, Oonah, not me!!) I took it to be an amusing yet very clever reference to the original Garden of Eden (Book of Avarice/Book of Genesis) and found that I smiled a wry smile as I read.

I thought this was original and a fantastic reaction to a heart-rending story. Perhaps it ought to stay exactly as you first conceived it, James, rather than try to refine it.

Very thought-provoking something we all should be aware of.

joanie

Thanks to all for the comments. I think the bit on Iraq is there because I didn’t want the Angola story to seem an isolated case. In fact it might be better to put a story from Iraq into the poem as well. Some (though not all) of the Abu Ghraib torturers weren’t US army personnel but mercenaries, security guards employed by companies called Titan and CACI (whatever that stands for). There was a shooting in September 2007 in Baghdad, in which mercenaries, hired by a company called Blackwater, killed 17 unarmed civilians. The War on Want website has a long list of other incidents. These companies get contracts from the US Government (and there’s at least one in the UK that I know about - the Armour Group, Chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind) to recruit and train soldiers. Well, what’s the difference? you might say soldiers are soldiers it certainly doesn’t matter to the folks at the wrong end of a machine gun whether the guy firing it is a ‘proper’ soldier or not. But the difference is that these private armies don’t have proper military structures of discipline, such as courts martial. They’re not regulated. They’re loose cannon. I’m going on a bit about this because I’m appalled at the idea of an army run by a private military company, accountable only to itself.

The pseudo-Biblical verses were plain association of ideas. The Portuguese development company is called ‘Garden of Eden’ so without giving it a lot of thought I wrote the ‘Biblical’ bit. Maybe to justify it I could say the ‘Book of Avarice’, if it existed, would be a kind of counter-Biblical scripture, a Devil’s Bible - the Devil in this case being all the forces which are creating the vast chasm we now have between very rich and very poor in the world.

I wonder, has anyone read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine? Having read it I really feel now that I understand the Iraq thing. (The book isn’t only about Iraq, it covers a lot more besides.) The whole Iraq adventure seems to have been a dismal, tragic failure. But there’s one way in which its success has been breathtaking. American and British companies have made astronomical profits. Private military companies, the companies that were handed Iraq’s major industries practically gratis, and the so-called ‘reconstruction’ companies hired to rebuild what the invaders themselves had destroyed (yet after five years there is still no clean water and sewage is running in the streets): all these have made billions upon billions.

The real problem here is, how to make a poem out of all this? It’s kind of Tony Harrison or James Fenton territory, but not quite the same as either. Why not just write an article? But journalistic work (with some notable exceptions) is ephemeral in a way that poetry isn’t meant to be. Whatever you write about in a poem, you’re trying to cast it in bronze. This poem, for what it’s worth, is a mixture of two styles - the lines about the Angola story etc are very flat, matter-of-fact, with no heightened language. The ‘Biblical’ bit is parody. I wonder to what extent either of these ‘styles’ can work as a way of treating this kind of subject?

James.


<Added>

Has anyone noticed that when you post a comment, some of the punctuation seems to disappear? Semi-colons especially. Very odd.

Well, what’s the difference? you might say; soldiers are soldiers; it certainly doesn’t matter...

I think the two styles worked together rather well by dint of their very contrast...and certainly the point you were making came across strongly.

there’s one way in which its success has been breathtaking. American and British companies have made astronomical profits.

I think that was the whole point of the exercise in any case. Everything today seems to be about capitalism making ever more capital even at the expense of its own citizens. They lie to their own people in order to make it happen, after all... Makes my blood boil, but worse than that is where it will lead.

CACI - Completely Arrogant Corporate Invasion................possibly!
Brutally funny poem, of which I could happily take more........I' d certainly like the Iraq aspect to be developed...............
Fine, angry piece............

Best,

Mike

Thanks, Mike...I guessed this might be your kind of poem.

James.