Poetry Postcard #41: Greetings from Fort McClellan

Of all the poetry postcards, #41 had the greatest emotional effect on me. The postcard led  me to uncover a secret, one that I found profoundly disturbing.

"Beautiful Residences along Kingston Pike, Knoxville, Tenn."

But before I explain, poet Dan Kagan has been recommending the website Post Secret for all you postcard fans. Maybe you'll find inspiration in one of the secrets written on the back of a postcard and shared on the site.

This used postcard came to me from children’s author and poet Irene Latham, who blogs at Live Your Poem.

Cancelled January 17, 1944, in Anniston, Alabama.

It reads: "Greetings from Fort McClellan. This is a really beautiful camp. I found George in excellent health. Tell you more when I get home. Love, Louise."

After reading the message, I thought my best source of inspiration would be research on Fort McClellan. I would never learn who George was, but I could invent a soldier, maybe just graduated from boot camp in 1944. That invented story might make a good poem.

There wasn’t much information on Wikipedia, so I went to the next recommended site. The blog title was "If You Went Through Ft. McClellan, Alabama... I want to hear from you."

I read the post and over 100 comments, most of them from McClellan vets. What I learned on this site  stunned me.

Fort McClellan photo http://www.mcclellan.army.mil/Info.asp

Rather than write about Fort McClellan’s history, I wove together a found poem. It is constructed from the postcard greeting and portions of a few comments from Susan Katz Keating's blog post.

The poem was published last month by the current events poetry journal New Verse News. I’ll post the opening stanzas, then the link to the full poem.

Greetings from Fort McClellan, 1944-1995

This is a really beautiful camp.
I found George in excellent health.

Love,_____

                                    Please help.

I was stationed at Fort McClellan.

I have developed a symptom of passing out.

Doctors called it "Syncope."

None of them could figure out

what caused it.

Hi my name is: _____

I went through Basic training

in Echo 1 company. We had to go through

that building they called the Gas Chamber.

Does anybody know what type of gas

or chemical was in there?

I want to hear from you.

We were exposed to toxic substances,

big time. The McClellan Cocktail:

depleted Uranium, Sarin gas, mustard gas

Read the rest at New Verse News. Thanks to NVN editor James Penha for finding the perfect postcard to accompany my poem.

The McClellan vets have been trying for years to have their health issues recognized. The neighboring town of Anniston, Alabama was a Monsanto factory site. Monsanto manufactured PCBs in Anniston. It is documented that the company dumped chemicals, affecting the water and ground in Anniston. Because of their health problems related to the spills, the citizens of Anniston sued Monsanto and won a settlement.

60 Minutes called Anniston "America's Most Toxic Town."

However, the settlement does not cover veterans who lived at Fort McClellan, drinking and bathing in that same water, training on that ground, to say nothing of the chemical exposure that reportedly took place there.

McClellan closed in 1999.

A new bill to create a McClellan registry was introduced to the House of Representatives in January. It is titled "H.R. 411: Fort McClellan Health Registry Act." Passing the bill is a first step in helping the McClellan vets.

I encourage you to sign a petition, supporting the bill, at Change.Org.

The bill has been given only a 3% chance of passing. Opponents claim that these are "welfare vets" whose claims are unrelated to Monsanto, Anniston and Fort McClellan.

For more information:

"Poisoned Patriots of Ft. McClellan" at Law Enforcement Today

"Fort McClellan, Monsanto, PCBs & Me" at Daily Kos.

An article about an earlier version of H.R. 411, at UPI.

Poetry Postcard 28: Symbolic Stamps

Happy President’s Day! If you’ve been following the Poetry Postcard Project, you know that I share a birthday with President George Washington, 2/22. (More about that shared birthday on Friday.)

 

Postcard #28 was one of the original 17 cards I bought from an Ellicott City antique shop. (Postcard #30, posted for Valentine’s Day, is by the same company.)

Originally, I was drawn to this card by the bright colors and the 40s cartoon style. It’s a little goofy. However, when I pulled the card, what drew me into the poem was on the back of the card. It came pre-stamped, and that stamp (George Washington, BTW, President’s Day celebrants), was on the postcard upside down. That rang a bell.

From the time I was ten years old through part of middle school, I went to summer camp in New York’s Catskill mountains. Camp lasted for eight weeks. Getting and sending mail was a big deal -- our best and only way of staying in touch with friends and family. Cool stationery was a status symbol, and something to trade on a rainy day.

What I remembered from camp was this: placing a stamp upside down on a letter means “I love you.”

When and how did that originate? According to About.com’s article on stamps, it began during the Victorian era.

Here's the code, borrowed from the About.com article:

"Upside down: I love you.
Sideways, head right: Love and kisses.
Sideways, head left: I'll never leave you.
Diagonal to the right: Marry me?
Diagonal to the left: Yes, I'll marry you."

But the website said there is a different if the stamp has a flag. “If you see an upside down flag stamp on an envelope today, it may be an echo of the unpopular Viet Nam war, when protesters used the gimmick as a method of protest,” John Finch writes in the article.

My postcard poem for today is in the voice of a wartime sweetheart, writing to a soldier. The opening borrows lines from the front of the postcard.

1 Cent Stamp, Upside Down

Why don’t you write?

Long time no see!

Are you stateside

or overseas?

I heard that wives
use an old trick --
inverting stamps

with one damp lick.

A flag would mean,
if upside down,
I hate the war
because you’re gone.
My stamp is plain.
I’m not your wife,

but I love you

with all my life.

Laura Shovan

For another poem of protest, visit www.newversenews.com. Postcard Poem #41, “Greetings from Fort McClellan” was featured at the current events poetry journal yesterday. I'll blog about the poem next week.

Curious about President's Day? KidzWorld.com has an article about the holiday's origins.

Poetry Friday: In the News

Lately, I've been writing poems in response to news stories.

Reading the daily newspaper (The Baltimore Sun, at our house) is a habit I formed in childhood. My father read The New York Times and our local daily, The Bergen Record every day while he ate breakfast.

When a story sticks with me over the course of the day -- whether it's funny, outlandish or gut-wrenching -- I worry at it. My thoughts lick at the news item as if it were a sore tooth. Sometimes, I just write. Other times, I sit with the story for a time before I find my path into the poem.

I am increasingly disturbed at the attacks against civilians, including children, in Syria. A few weeks ago, I heard a news story on NPR about a young protester who was jailed and tortured. The boy is the same age as my teenage son.

The poem I wrote was published at the e-zine, New Verse News. It is an online journal specializing in poetry about current events.

ROBOTICS
by Laura Shovan


They are robotic at fifteen, some boys,
quiet as proverbial church mice. Their motors
skitter discreetly beneath the hum
of the family refrigerator, beneath their mothers’
“how was school” banter, beneath the nagging,
the talk-talk, the “I’ll try anything”
to chase him out of this Tin Man stage,
this heartless construction with its monotone
and monosyllables. Even his angles are jerky.

My son called from Nebraska, at last
back at the Best Western late
from Robotics, where his machine,
concoction of metal, gears,
arm lifting objects in its ingenious elevator,
was not picked for the team. It sat
in its 18 by 18 shipping box,
ignored and folded on itself,
elevator arm tucked away.

And in the morning, driving somewhere --
a distraction from my son’s distance -- the radio.
A boy in Datta, not yet sixteen, no church mouse,
volted into protest, its jolts in his wires,
powering up his voice box. Later,
when he called home from jail, his mother said
his voice had changed, the words almost
unrecognizable. Electric shock will do that.
Still, he said what they all say.
It’s in their wiring. We have programmed them
to say it. Now they are men
and they are fine.

Our host today is Mary Lee at A Year of Reading. Mary Lee is looking for bloggers to host Poetry Friday throughout the summer and into fall. Please contact her to sign up.