Reviewed by Richard Levine
Smart Fish Don’t Bite
by W. D. Ehrhart
Moonstone Press
Tim O’Brien is widely regarded as the fictional voice of the Vietnam War. Books such as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried made the experience palpable and personal. Similarly, W. D. Ehrhart’s name is the one that most often comes up as the poetic voice of that war and generation.
It is not uncommon for writers who write about a war they served in to be typecast, much like an actor relegated to one role. Smart Fish Don’t Bite, Ehrhart’s new book, challenges the assumption that he just a “Vietnam writer.” By any measure, the poems in Smart Fish … bridge the intimate and the global, they are thoughtful, honest (a precious commodity in our time), and consistently memorable. They will reward every reader’ attentions.
Ehrhart co-edited Demilitarized Zones, (East River Anthology, 1976), one of the first anthologies exclusively featuring the writing of Vietnam veterans. And his own reputation as a poet began growing from that issue, with poems like “Making the Children Behave”:
Do they think of me now
In those strange Asian villages
Where nothing ever seemed
Quite human
But myself
And my few green friends
Moving through them
Hunched
In lines?When they tell stories to their children
Of the evil
That awaits misbehavior,
Is it me they conjure?
Dozens of books followed. His early books were mostly poetry about his combat experiences in Vietnam and its aftermath. But his output began to include memoirs that chronicled the history of the Vietnam war and the 1960s in America, as much as his military and civilian experiences. He has established himself as an essayist, writing regular columns for the LA Progressive since 2014, the New Hampshire Gazzette since 2017 and the Hollywood Progressive since 2022. And these are not vacuous shoot-from-the-hip diatribes about current events. Rather they are well-argued and heartfelt commentaries on current events, and they are always marked by an impressive grasp of related history. Equally impressive is the sense of immediacy in the writing, as if lives depend on the outcomes of the political and policy actions taken in our name. Add to this mix, his ability to sometimes make his take downs smart-assed as well as smart.
With this variety and volume of literary output, one would be hard pressed not to think of Ehrhart as a writer of wide ranging interest and intellect, and one of this generation’s men of letters. And yet, he is often referred to by the somewhat limiting term of ‘Vietnam writer.’
But with Smart Fish Don’t Bite in hand, one might argue that Ehrhart’s scope of care as a writer encompasses the sleeves-rolled-up quotidian stories we can all recognize. One might further argue that he wants to encourage us to care more about each other. Consider, for example, Nothing Profound, a prefatory poem in Smart Fish …
If you need a reason to care,
consider this feather I’ve found;
consider the sweetness of bare
young arms in sunlight, or the round
perfection of a ripe pear.
Let me to propose a thought experiment. Suppose Ehrhart did not intend those three reason(s) to care, to be the only reasons. Suppose he intends some, many or each of the book’s poems to be another reason to care? And if the poems address a wide range of human experience, not just war experiences, say, that might make a good argument that he is “… a writer who fought in Vietnam, rather than a Vietnam writer.”
So let’s consider some of the poems in Smart Fish Don’t Bite, and use reason(s) to care as a measure. In “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” the book’s first poem, Ehrhart addresses a bout he’s had with cancer. And, yes, (if you’re wondering) “I Heard…” is also the title of an Emily Dickinson poem. Dickinson’s next two words make it entirely apt for Ehrhart’s cancer-narrative, because they are “… when I died.”
More than expressing his love for Dickinson’s work, he takes us into his confidence, to show us that as a high school teacher … I’ve taught her poems in school for years,/got fifteen-year-old boys to love her/or at least appreciate her skill/and ingenuity … Her poem’s next lines give a glimpse not only of Dickinson’s character, but, I believe, why Ehrhart was so enthralled with her. As much as his admiration for her ingenuity as a poet, it is … her steadfast will/to be herself despite convention. One can read this into Ehrhart’s own life and writing.
In keeping with our experiment, we should ask: does Ehrhart’s poem encourage us to believe that art is worth caring for? It certainly seemed true when his doctor informed him that he had the Big C and needed an operation ASAP. “… but first I want to go/to Amherst, Massachusetts, for a weeklong/seminar I’ve been accepted to.”/In Emily Dickinson’s very home! Perhaps trying to capture the moment of silence before his doctor responded, the poem closes with Ehrhart considering aloud the risk, and mixing his own words with a quote from “I Heard a Fly, …,” says … there are sadder things to die for/than “The Stillness in the Room.”
Before we line up more poems as a test of whether there is a thematic thread of caring unifying this book, I should point out that the poems appear in chronological order in which they were written. So an autobiographic poem may follow a love poem, followed by a political poem on fire and turn to a slapstick satiric one. To borrow some of Ehrhart’s own foreword … along with poems like “Another War” and “History Repeats Itself,” you will find “Fishing for Winter Flounder” and “Poetry in Motion.” And assortment of my “Thirteen” poems spoofing Wallace Stevens.
Now approaching 80, Ehrhart says he has learned … to see humor in what Herman Melville calls “this vast practical joke” we call life. In an excerpt from “Turning Seventy-Five” … I do not understand at all/why I see an old gray-haired man/in the mirror when a small/boy still lives in this body/wondering/what causes laughter, why/nations go to war, who paints the startling/colors of the rainbow on a gray vaulted sky/and when I will be old enough/to know.
Consider, too, whether this passage from “To the Future” makes a case for caring: On behalf of my species, I’m sorry/for the mess we’ve made of this/ planet. It must have been a nice/place, before we got here. … if you’re reading this,/I send my apologies, and wish you/wisdom greater than ours.
And closing my argument on caring, I reference the adage you can choose your friends but not your family. Is there, after all, a more fertile or challenging arena for caring than family?
In “Brothers” Ehrhart speaks of four estranged brothers and, … the unacknowledged pain/of what we share. And don’t share. And … How to explain the miles between.
In “Teaching My Father How to Hug,” one of several about his relationship with his father, he proudly admits …I had to teach my father to hug./…We had our problems, Dad and me,/a lifetime of arguments and ugly/moments …/but he learned to hug before he died/and I feel pretty good about that. There is a comic-tragic quality to the way his father used to hug: … he’d grip me by both arms/one hand on each bicep firmly/holding me away from him.
“Things My Mother Gave Me” is literally a listing of some of things Ehrhart received from his mother, beginning with … a Webster’s/New World Collegiate Dictionary/and the money to buy a typewriter. This was 1969, when he went off to college. The typewriter, an Olivetti lightweight, gave up the ghost after a dozen years and a first draft of his memoir, but he still owns the dictionary, despite the internet and Spell Check, suggesting there aren’t enough words to express all “… My Mother Gave Me.”
You will also find in this collection powerful, haunting war poems, but enough compassionate, elemental poems about life in general to understand that this is the work of a writer who fought in Vietnam, but has also walked in and written about walking in the shoes of a merchant marine, a master teacher, anti-war activist, a son, brother, husband, father, and has written about them all, and, so, should not be considered just a Vietnam writer.
And speaking of mistaking him for something or someone else, he is not the man pictured on the cover of Smart Fish Don’t Bite, posing in fly-fishing gear, holding a (not so smart) trout.
About the reviewer: Richard Levine is the author of Taming the Hours: An Almanac with Marginalia (forthcoming), Now in Contest, Selected Poems, Contiguous States, and five chapbooks. A Vietnam veteran, he co-edited “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems,” is Associate Editor of BigCityLit.com, and the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award.