Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "Afternoon: Radio Noise," Joseph Duemer channels a poetic vision both lyrical and stark, weaving the idyllic elements of a summer afternoon with the harrowing imagery of child soldiers, civil war, and a world broken by violence. Duemer’s poem becomes an unsettling meditation on power, suffering, and the futility of beauty in a landscape marred by brutality. This is not a gentle summer scene; it is one where every element, even sunlight, carries a darker significance, underscoring the poem's descent from simple pastoral into a terrain where innocence is entangled with despair.

The poem opens with the natural beauty of sparrows and starlings, creatures “who can sing” and “who can be taught to say words,” respectively. Here, Duemer seems to set up a contrast between the inherent voice of nature (the singing sparrows) and the cultivated, manipulated voice of society (the trained starlings). This distinction foreshadows the impending discord between beauty and violence as the narrator drives into a world suffused with dust and pollen, where the “cracked windshield” hints at both literal and metaphorical fractures in vision and understanding.

Duemer’s choice to cast the sun as a fiery agent that ignites everything in its reach suggests a prophecy, evoking both the Biblical intensity of divine revelation and the chaotic, unpredictable force of natural elements. The poem rapidly shifts from a scene of nature to one of technology and distortion; the radio fuzzes with static, its noise merging with the ominous image of “blistering voices” that reference child soldiers. In this moment, the poem's “radio noise” is not just a sound but a symbol of the world’s distant, barely perceived horrors. Static blurs details, hiding the identity of the perpetrators or the suffering, symbolizing the pervasive yet vague awareness of distant atrocities in everyday life.

A chilling juxtaposition emerges in the next lines, where the commonplace “invention of lightweight arms” gives way to a description of an AK-47 as “the soul of simplicity,” as if the gun, now familiar even to children, is a tragic testament to human ingenuity used for destruction. Duemer’s disturbing observation that such weapons can be “field-stripped & reassembled by a child of ten” confronts the reader with the vulnerability of innocence, here perverted by war’s demand for expendable soldiers.

In the following lines, Duemer critiques the romanticization of violence, stating that it is “criminal to invent lyrical dogs to snuffle the blood of civil wars.” His disdain for turning war into a poetic or mystical endeavor suggests a rejection of aestheticizing violence, a clear-eyed warning against sentimentalizing tragedy. His reference to “God’s voice from the whirlwind” draws on Biblical allusion, specifically from the Book of Job, where God’s voice underscores the incomprehensibility of divine justice. Here, Duemer implies that such divine pronouncements disregard human suffering, prioritizing the indifference of power over any moral history. Power, Duemer seems to argue, is a terrifying force in the absence of empathy, and it is within this “shifting & terrifying” void that myth—and violence—germinate.

Duemer further develops the poem’s classical undertones by invoking Oedipus, the tragic king who “takes responsibility for / the broken world sweltering in the heat of late afternoon.” This reference reinforces the inevitability of suffering within human history, where myth is not a distant, academic story but a living reality in the form of modern-day atrocities. Oedipus’s curse appears anew as the poet describes a child soldier, too young even to remember his parents’ killers, trapped in a world where his only knowledge is of survival and death.

The poem shifts to an indictment of ideological visions and colonial cruelty, portraying the “crackpot ideologue & revolutionary leader” alongside the “colonial overseer with a switch in his hand.” By linking revolutionary and colonial impulses, Duemer suggests that these figures share a common blindness, a faith in their own righteousness that justifies any cruelty. In a reversal of his earlier aesthetic, he denies any solace in beauty or light, reasserting that “There is no grace in sunlight,” only the relentless exposure of suffering, where “nothing like music” exists to comfort or console.

The poem closes with a visceral image of Polyneices’ corpse from Sophocles’ "Antigone", drawing the reader’s gaze to the corpse’s “drained” eyes and “opened gut.” This classical allusion reinforces the timelessness of war’s ravages, where Polyneices’ desecrated body embodies the casualties of unchecked power and the disregard for human dignity. Duemer’s final scenes echo with the “humming of flies,” the droning persistence of violence and neglect. His imagery of “dogs trembling with fear” before the “army of slim ghosts” underscores the lasting psychological scars of war, where even animals sense the trauma that violence inflicts on the innocent.

In "Afternoon: Radio Noise," Duemer merges pastoral beauty with the ugliness of human cruelty, collapsing the distance between nature and violence. His meditation rejects any easy solace in beauty, insisting that acknowledgment of suffering requires a brutal honesty. The poem, with its ambivalent stance toward light and its grim perspective on myth, becomes a meditation on the complexities of empathy, exposing the limitations of poetry itself in confronting the depths of human brutality. Through his nuanced juxtaposition of beauty and horror, Duemer invites readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that even the brightest light can illuminate humanity’s darkest shadows.

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