Bedrock Honesty

by Gerald Nicosia

Smart Fish Don't Bite, W.D. Ehrhart, Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, 2025, 101 pages, $22.00, www.moonstoneartscenter.com.

W.D. EHRHART IS KNOWN as many things: an outspoken Vietnam veteran peace activist, a top-notch historian of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, an acerbic columnist for several internet publications keeping tabs and giving his insights on current political events, and maybe least well-known of all as a profound, dedicated, and extremely prolific American poet. Among the few readers who know his poetry, most know only the handful of Vietnam War poems that have been highly anthologized, such as "Beautiful Wreckage." But the complete body of his work is far more ecumenical and cosmopolitan than his war poet reputation would suggest. For me, he is the poet of honesty—a subject rarely dealt with in contemporary poetry. In fact, his work is so different from what we ordinarily call poetry that a lot of readers have had difficulty finding a way into it.

Smart Fish Don't Bite is his eleventh full book of poetry (along with more than a dozen chapbooks), in a poetic career that began in the 1970s, and he says it will be his last. Not because he is sick or dying, though we learn he might be, or even because of his age (seventy-seven), but because the task of writing poetry, honest poetry, has literally torn him apart. The first poem in the collection deals with that issue, with what poetry means to him. In "I Heard a Fly Buzz," he tells how he put off a cancer operation for the chance to teach a seminar in Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Delaying that operation allowed the cancer to remain in his body, and yet he has no regrets! "…there are sadder ways to die / and sadder things to die for," he writes in that poem, "than the Stillness in the Room."

Ehrhart knows well what those "sadder things" are. Though the Vietnam War makes only sporadic appearances in this collection, always with the poet are the brutal images of combat, and the horrors of war have forever shaped his views on human life. Even more to the point, his worldview was shaped by the lies told about that war, the lies that made that war possible and kept it going for so many years. Instilled in the poet was a belief that only honest words matter, only honest words belong in a true poem—and for Ehrhart that honesty has to begin in carefully observed and documented human experience.

I have no idea if Ehrhart ever read any of the Objectivist poets, but the Objectivists would certainly have recognized him as one of their own. There are some poems in this collection that are little more than a direct series of careful observations of the physical world, such as "The Night You Returned," which reads like a series of notes Ehrhart might have written as he traveled home from the airport after returning from thirteen months of combat in Vietnam:

A road crew was paving the highway…

It was March; they had set up floodlights;

the black viscous tar steamed in the cold.

The workmen didn't notice you…

Black. Viscous. Steaming.

Mile after mile after mile.

Deep into the night.

Someone might even wonder, What makes this a poem? But Ehrhart starts from a poetic premise that the power of observation, if sharpened enough, will finally reveal truth. The poem puts us right into Ehrhart's head, what he is experiencing that night: the darkness, the steaming, tarry road. But also the workmen he passes, who don't notice him. And that additional observation becomes the key to the poem. The poem, in so few lines, shows how each human being is locked in his own world—and the poem seems to ask if there ever is any meaning that can cross over from one person's world to another. But the fact that he writes this poem, and that we read it and understand it, proves that, in fact, there is.

And therein lies one of the ways that Ehrhart moves beyond simple objectivism, because in his poetic universe, there is the added belief in the power of truth to remake the world—at least in small ways. This is not some sort of poetry of simple optimism, however. Quite the contrary. Ehrhart's world is one of endless darkness and pain, and a frequent outright denial that God could possibly exist in such a terrible world. In the poem "Who's in Charge Here?" he talks about the Twelve-Step Program, to which he's belonged for more than ten years, as the only means he found to escape from the chronic alcoholism that dogged him after the war. But his insistence on absolute honesty means he cannot accept at face value that program's foundation on belief in a Higher Power:

Name your poison, there's a program.

And it seems to work for lots of folks;

lives transformed, walking miracles.

Good for them. God bless 'em,

every one. But what about the ones

who try and try and never make it?

Where's God when some drunk driver

kills a husband, wife, and infant?

Where's the Higher Power when

a Muslim woman's raped by thirteen

Hindus on a city bus in Gujarat…

If there's a Higher Power who's

in charge of all this madness,

someone ought to take Him out

behind the woodshed with a 2 by 4

and whack Him upside the head.

One of the things I like about Ehrhart's poetry is that he will keep playing with an idea, with a feeling, with an approach, and turning it in new ways. He keeps his bedrock honesty from becoming mere preaching, for instance, by sometimes shifting to a kind of black humor. In the poem "A Humorless Profession," he recounts the unpleasant details of the colonoscopy he's forced to have every three years because of chronic polyps. But one of the details happens to be his own wisecrack to the anesthetist each time just before they put him out for the minor surgery:

"I don't care if I expire on the table

because I'll never know the difference

if I do. Lots worse ways to die."

They never laugh. They always look

as if they've swallowed a goldfish live.

And when I come around, I always say,

"Your lucky day. I didn't die this time."

Like telling a Polish joke in Warsaw.

Like farting at a First Communion.

Such black humor turns some readers off; but for Ehrhart, humor, irony, and deadpan observation are all manifestations of the same shocking honesty that constitute the core process of his poetry. Most of the time, people cannot handle living with the harshness of such absolute truth, so we dress it up with euphemisms, rationalizations, and so forth. And that is why, for Ehrhart, poetry is so valuable; because it is the one place he is allowed, and can bear, to be completely honest with himself. There is a double-edged value in such poetry. In the poem "On the Road to Damascus," for example, Ehrhart again recounts in deadpan detail how he proceeded through life confident he had "managed alcohol / about as well as anybody should" until the day he woke up

…in the Radnor Township

Police Department Drunk Tank

in a white paper jumpsuit, shoelaces

removed to be sure I don't hang myself…

A one-piece stainless steel toilet.

Not even a cell with bars; just a door

with see-through full glass window.

The poem ends with Ehrhart's sudden realization "Maybe I should reconsider/ my approach to alcohol." Writing the poem allows Ehrhart, for the first time, to see clearly the dark trajectory that his life took after the war, but it also serves to open our eyes, readers' eyes, to the way we all often proceed in life without ever realizing where we're really going.

What I especially like about Ehrhart's poetry is that his insistence on complete honesty often leads him to contradict, or at least approach contradicting, his own steadfast beliefs. Despite his being a diehard nihilist, who will not hear of the possibility of God's existence, in the poem "Squirrels," the poet suddenly finds himself feeling an unaccountable compassion for the squirrel he has just accidentally run over in his car:

in the rearview mirror what I saw

was tail and hind legs motionless,

head and front paws jerking, waving

frantically, bewildered, dying, still alive.

I don't care what you say, that squirrel

was in pain. I hope it died quickly…

This was fifteen years ago at least,

but I still see that broken squirrel

frantic in the mirror of my memory

Without any maudlin rhetoric, Ehrhart's poem "Squirrels" presents an almost Buddhist sensibility, not just an empathy and compassion for another sentient being, but an even grander sense of wonder at the miracle of all life. It made me recall Blake's statement that "Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it." In a similar remarkable way, the atheist Ehrhart, because of his refusal to varnish his feelings in even the slightest way, sometimes seems to be of God's party without knowing it.

There is, in some ways, a holding back of the feelings in his heart that makes the revelation of them all the more powerful. In "The Day I Discovered Racism," a great poem which could have become a screed against bigotry, Ehrhart narrates without a single comment a teenage cross-country drive in a barely-running English Vauxhall automobile that gets a flat tire in the middle of New Mexico. Two black men stop to help Ehrhart and his friends. Suddenly two white rednecks pull over, brutalize the blacks and drive them off, and then with big smiles offer to help Ehrhart out. The rednecks drive Ehrhart and his friends to the nearest town, get their tire fixed, and even buy them breakfast. Then, after the tire is fixed, the rednecks drive them back to their car

…and put

the tire back on before wishing the four

of us a safe trip home to Pennsylvania.

The poem ends there, as if all is now right with the world, but we are left shaken by the stark horror of a nation that can dispose of certain of its citizens as if they are garbage to be rid of, and then leave with a smile.

But I don't want to give the impression that all of Ehrhart's poetry, even granted its objectivist roots, is just a dialectic about the good versus bad in human life. His poetry sometimes rises to a lyric beauty equal to that of the great Romantics like Shelley and Wordsworth. In the poem "When I'm Gone," a kind of love poem from beyond death, he hopes that after he dies his spirit might live

…in among the leaves of those

magnificent old trees you love so much.

…Just a whisper,

but enough to let you know I haven't

really gone so far away, and I still

love you even now, even forever.

So let me be a whisper in the trees,

a gossamer wisp of fog, a twinkling

star in the heavens of your heart

Another poem, "Team Photograph, 1957," left me simply breathless in the way he portrayed the future of a whole grade-school swimming team condensed into the single moment that their team photo was taken:

One of the boys will join the Marines

and survive a tour in Vietnam.

Another will join the army

and die in the Central Highlands.

One will kill himself with a shotgun

after he's exposed as a queer.

One will become an anti-immigrant racist.

None of us knows any of this.

We are all smiling.

There are some poems in the collection almost maddeningly simplistic, where the enumeration of the facts becomes itself the poem. The poem "How I Became an American War Hero" lays out one after another the eleven medals Ehrhart earned in his military career, along with a succinct, sometimes wry explanation of why he got each one:

Cross of Gallantry Unit Citation:

for randomly getting assigned to 1st Battalion, 1st Marines…

Pistol Sharpshooter Badge:

for hitting a paper target with a pistol

Some people might ask of this poem, Is this poetry at all? Or in many of the poems that lay out, detail by detail, the history of Ehrhart's psychic tribulation, one might wonder if what he is writing is poetry or psychology. In the latter category is the poem "All the Children Were Above Average." The poem recounts various episodes, occurring during the years when Ehrhart taught English and history at a prestigious prep school in Pennsylvania, when students or their parents argued, pleaded, or bargained with him to change a grade:

One time a student of mine earned a B.

He wanted to go to Yale; his mother

and he believed his life would be ruined

if he didn't go to Yale…

…"This

is a disaster," his mother said. "No,"

I said, "a disaster is when your son

steps on a landmine and loses

both of his legs. This is just a B."

This poem, like many others in the book, is poetry because we are carried along by the language, not rational thought, not intelligence or logic. Ehrhart's language makes hard truths dance and play—with its unusual rhythms, its hypnotic repetitions, and the frequent trick of turning simple and common phrasing inside-out to make hidden truths surprisingly visible. Honesty is Ehrhart's mode of going through the world; and as a poet he works on the premise that if he can reflect his own thoughts and perceptions accurately enough, the words will begin to embody much more than just their surface meaning. The accretion of string after string of such honest impressions will begin to embody the kind of depth we associate with poetry, the depth that is part and parcel of any fully-rendered human life.

Because of that depth, a poem such as "All the Children Were Above Average" bears multiple rereadings. What is not explicitly in the poem, but what becomes obvious to the careful reader, is the heavy price (in pain and many other currencies) that the poet pays for his relentless, constant honesty. By hewing to the line of only what he truthfully experienced, Ehrhart forces us to see that the poet and the poem are inseparable. He also forces us to see that every life is a tug-of-war between the need to be honest and the urge to make life prettier or more acceptable in the retelling. In Ehrhart's case, there is never a question which way the argument will go. If there is any "news that stays news" in Ehrhart's poetry, it is that happiness and happy endings are not always possible, and the even more bitter truth that in much of life there is no redemption. The poems he writes—seems compelled to write—are a way of making that truth comprehensible, even acceptable, to himself. That is no small achievement. But the gift becomes even larger when others read the poems, and can draw from them acceptance in their own lives.

This affinity for darkness in Ehrhart's poems reaches its apex of apocalyptic vision in the poem "To the Future." The arrayment of damning facts, line after line, is so powerful it bears quoting at length:

…How could we avoid

the warning signs? Talk about denial.

But we did. Year after year. For decades.

Until it was too late. And then all hell

broke loose, the mad scramble to evade

the hurricanes, tornados, flooding,

glaciers melting, ice caps shrinking,

oceans rising, burning forests,

burning prairies, burning cities.

Those with the guns took what remained

of food and water—as if their might could

somehow alter the laws of physics—

'til they too were drowned or starved

or broiled alive.…

But what makes this poem truly stunning is its ending, where Ehrhart juxtaposes his own humanity—which is also a fact that cannot be denied—beside the catalogue of horrors that human beings have made of this world:

…Whatever you are,

wherever you are, if you're reading this,

I send my apologies, and wish you

wisdom greater than ours.

The concluding poem, "Strange Little Reveries," one of the most beautiful pieces among all the work of Ehrhart that I have read, is a kind of synthesis of his need to meticulously catalogue the facts of his life along with the lyric, even hopeful tendencies he cannot ever completely suppress in himself. The poem begins with the savagery and atrocities of war that are permanently imprinted on his psyche:

I had nightmares for a dozen years,

mostly the same recurring dream:

me at a party with friends from every

stage of my life, people who had no

business being together or knowing

each other, but we're all having fun

until a squad of Marines shows up

and starts shooting and bayoneting

everyone, a total bloody slaughter,

and I see myself in a mirror and

I realize I'm one of the Marines.

But as the poem progresses, the series of dreams become more innocuous, even heart-warming in their camaraderie:

In a third one, Captain Bacheller,

Father Lyon (the battalion chaplain),

and Gunny Koch are standing together

on top of a hill near the DMZ

reading a map. And they call me over

and ask me what I think about digging

in for the night at this location.

I've no idea where they come from,

why, or what they mean. Ghostly

remnants of a long ago life. Fragments

of memory, real and imagined. All

that's left when the war's finally over.

Most significantly, in "Strange Little Reveries" the war becomes a series of dreams which are no longer able to hurt him. In the same way, Ehrhart's poems are a kind of consciously-created dreams, made to inoculate him against the real violence, pain, and destruction of war—and against the similar attrition we experience from daily life. The poetry, much like the magic of dream, transforms those horrors, that terrible loss, into objects of beauty, humor, and permanence, that he can base his life on—and which serve as a similar gift to his readers.

At the end of this poem—as, indeed, at the end of the book—the reader is left with the big, unspoken questions: What is life? Is it something real, is it more real than dream? As Ehrhart said about poetry in an earlier poem, "The Uselessness of Words," the continued asking of those questions at least keeps us sane, and for Ehrhart that is a sufficient goal to live his life in pursuit of—a serious lesson for us all.

Gerald Nicosia is best known for two nonfiction works, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac and Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement, selected by the Los Angeles Times in 2001 as one of the "Best Books of the Year." He is author of the poetry collections Lunatics, Lovers, Poets, Vets and Bargirls and Beat Scrapbook, and has worked extensively as a journalist and organizer of literary events. Memory Babe has been translated into several languages, including Mandarin. In 2013, Gerald Nicosia received one of the first Acker Awards "for avant-garde excellence." He made his home in Corte Madera, California, for many years.

— posted MAY 2026