Michael Casey's Obscenities: A Critique of Workaday Brutality

While poems like "Sierra Tango" and "The Box Riot," show their speakers involved in a casual, unthinking violence, the later poems in Obscenities, many taking place in Viet Nam itself, show a deeper, more narcissistic detachment from the violence and death that their speakers deal with each day, an inward-turning detachment directly related to their conceptualization of violence as an occupational expectation. Because they are part of an organization built on the proliferation and support of violence, they accept its effects unthinkingly, especially when it happens to someone else. [...]as a number of critics have observed, the more 'naturalistic' the monologue, the more obtrusive the shaping hand of the poet becomes, since the more our attention is drawn to those signs which do point to the poem's condition as text. According to Beidler, Casey's best poems, such as "A Bummer" and "Hoa Binh" (the Vietnamese word for "peace") exhibit an "inevitability of poetic statement," when the juxtaposition of the simplistic, detail-driven concreteness and the elusive symbols produce a moment of lucidity for poem, poet, and reader. Whereas little "plot" happens in Obscenities and Spoon River Anthology, the lyrics contained therein are definitely bound by recurring elements, characters, and themes, not to mention unities of time and place. [...]the characters within these dramatic monologues can be said to be engaging in implicitly dialogic acts with others in the "unplotted narrative" of the collection.