In “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” a long poem written during WWII, Wallace Stevens attempted to redefine the heroic so that it might pertain not merely to those whose victories took place on the battlefield. He offered a notion of the hero not as a person but as a “feeling” attainable to “the common man,” one in which it seemed “As if in seeing we saw our feeling / In the object seen.” Dan Beachy-Quick’s long, new wartime poem, “Heroisms,” brilliantly and comically investigates the phallocentrism implicit in that formulation (with all due respect). But instead of berating the hero outright for his masculinist assumptions and forceful projection of self onto the objective world, Beachy-Quick lets his figure of the hero, driven by the desire to possess and to master, commit one blunder after another. The poem implies that the path the hero is on may very well be one of maturing from a person who “never stops / Asking for an answer” into one who knows “There is a way to think that asks no questions / But divides every question in two,” but we never quite witness that evolution take place. We do, however, witness the hero tire and even grow frightened of gazing upon the world and finding only himself again. The poem doesn’t tell us what happens next—in part, presumably, for dramatic effect, but also because its author knows better than to imply that the changes yet to take place in the hero’s mind are all that easy to make. Moreover, we end without knowing what happens next because being at home with unknowing is, one hopes, our hero’s destination.

—Timothy Donnelly

1.

The hero comes home!–the jerk
In his journeys

His penis grown so long he loops it through
His belt-loops to keep his pants up
And still its tip drags in the dust behind him

Drawing a line pointing backward
To everything the hero’s entered. It’s a kind of pride:

Origin, that voice
The brute severed from its face, saying as if

Saying forever
“Now crowd yourself back into time.”


2.

Do the trick again where you throw your voice
Do that trick

Where you make the stone say “life is so hard”

That trick that makes the dead laugh so hard

That makes the stones follow you as you walk

The applause that is those tears in the sockets

Do the trick where you put your voice inside the head
Of one who has no voice, that one through whose mouth

You speak to yourself     golden-sandaled, purple-robed,
Descend you‚ descend you whom I love


3.

Nice to walk on the tops of their heads

But hard to keep balance. There are other tricks
The crowd applauds with their hands

As the flower swallows its own head
A green sword cuts itself in half
So a tendril somersaults into a seed

But you can’t bury yourself

Fate rings a bell when the air is on fire
Everyone can breathe fire

But can you stop breathing
He says‚ until the sky turns blue

Inhaling


4.

I speak these words directly into his yawn

Open cave of
                        his dark almost kind
of fire-lit mouth


And the shadows there my words form
These shadows in the back of the hero’s throat

We watch the trees walk past us and want to clap and clap
Except the chains are so loud when we move
We’re all afraid the leaves will grow afraid.

There are other ways to describe the year:

Acrobat bent so far backward he stands on his own head‚ or

Seasons of
The hero’s boredom.


5.

Where the horror is comparison, honor sees
Hands in the trees instead of leaves—


Honesty asks why the applause is so quiet
When the wind blows so hard–

Breath is the atmosphere at utmost extreme
Where the lungs are flowers–thought the dew—

The sun doubts everything‚ a general statement
In whose light the hero sees these helpless things

Beg mercy, beg darkness for obscurity–
We do not comprehend the awe, it comprehends us–

When leaves fold in halves they look sleepy
Like eyes, but these eyes are fists