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Chris Semansky's Essay: The Vietnam Memorial

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In Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students Chis Semansky explains how the poem "Facing It" and a memorial, Vietnam Memorial, are relatable. The Vietnam Memorial and the poem both are not as they seem is the first point Semansky makes in his article. He believes that people who view the monument and the poem keep having "perceptual mistakes"(121) about them, and that in order to not have these we must look deeper. The monument itself has a few mistakes, so even if we understand everything about the monument as it was intended we will still experience a mistake. Most people however, do not understand it correctly, so the average "beholder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial"(121) just add to the mistakes completely accidentally.
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"Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa contains a very reflective tone, lost in the memories the Vietnam Veterans Memorial contains. He compares his own experiences of survival to the perspective he carries as he stands before the wall. As Komunyakaa reads through the inscriptions on the stone, he “half-expect[s] to find [his] own letters like smoke” (6-7). This implies despite his survival, part of him is still living among the fallen soldiers, stuck in the war as if his survival is only physical. The Vietnam War was a great controversy among Americans, most trying to erase the battles they've witnessed in history.

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Soldiers typically lacked sympathy for what they went through from society ignoring the trauma they brought back from the Vietnam War. The following quote from the article presents the thought process of most soldiers to us: “By forgetting, he said he could prove that he was strong and could master his anxieties… by remembering, he felt he was admitting that he was weak and no longer in control” (Penk and Robinowitz 3). The previous quote shows how the soldiers felt that forgetting made them appear strong rather than letting their emotions weaken them, and this is why we see a soldier’s inner conflict as they force themselves to remember in the poem. In this quote from the poem the soldier has come to the monument for remembering those who passed in the war and as he looks at those names his first thought is: “No tears.

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In “Grass” Sandburg creatively describes the cyclic nature of human to forget past mistakes, and be doomed to repeat them. He does so by describing a scene in which bodies continuously pile up from wars in a chronological order, and each time the bodies pile up the grass “works” in order to cover them, effectively erasing them from our memories, and ensuring another pile of bodies to come. Stafford agrees with the sentiment that we are liable to make the same mistakes over and over if we forget our past, however Stafford relates this idea to monuments, as opposed to Sandburg who describes a lack thereof. “At the Un-National Monument” briefly mentions monuments in the same scope as the rest of the poem; representing them as non-existent in his unfortunately fictitious space of peace and harmony. Thanks to the context of the poem, it can be inferred that Stafford is acknowledging that monuments are a necessary evil, symbolizing suffering, loss of life, and humanity’s lowest points in the hopes that each monument will be the last one that must be erected.

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