Reading My Friends #1: Losing Mogadishu by Mark E. Harden

For the Podcast, click here.

Welcome to Reading My Friends.

I take my title for this series of talks from the mid-20th Century American poet Laura (Riding) Jackson, who wrote “we are one another's record:  we must read one another." 

She was writing about large and complicated matters, like truth, poetry, metaphor, being, wholeness of self and language, rational meaning.  But I am simplifying this compound sentence to use it primarily as a motivation to do something I should have done for the past thirty years:  Read the books of poetry written by my friends. More can be said about this in later blogs and podcasts, but let’s get started.

Today I want to talk about Losing Mogadishu by Mark E. Harden, published in 2015. You can find the book on amazon.

I can’t honestly say that Mark Harden and I are really friends. We are friends on Facebook. I think I have met him. Shook his hand. Maybe listened to a poem or two at some reading or another. We were colleagues at Austin Community College. I was Dean of the Arts and Humanities Division, and he was manager of the Office of Veterans Affairs and adjunct faculty in the Business Department. We learned of each other—or rather I learned of him—as soldiers began returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and the college recognized that some returning service men benefitted from creative writing classes. And we civilians benefitted from hearing their stories and poems. Professional collaboration ensued. I learned that he spent twenty-six years in the Army, retired as a Chief Warrant Officer 3, and as becomes clear in Losing Mogadishu, he served and led in Somalia in 1993, during the events most of us know through the partially accurate film Black Hawk Down.

Losing Mogadishu is a 70-page book.  It features 26 free verse poems (strophes mostly one to four lines long and lines vary from one to twelve syllables or so—most lines are short, however). The poems are spare, and mostly quiet. The book also includes 25 stream-of-conscious prose-poem like works that are fascinating but kind of defy definition. The poems and the prose are interspersed one after the other. Kind of like what Hemingway did in In Our Time, except Hemingway’s book was all prose. Those who have read In Our Time will know what I mean, and the effect it can have. There is a hint of a fragmented narrative. But the real effect of the book is not the story but the mood and texture of a mind and emotional structure.  There are traumas, but the heart of the book is the songs (in prose and poetry) one sings to one’s self post-trauma, because there really isn’t any post to trauma.

The first poem in the book “No Reason” introduces the mood:

No Reason

This very night

an owl

spoke

three times

then was gone-

in the autumn twilight

beneath the arbor’s browning

trumpet vine

and falling blossoms

we listened for it in the stillness,

you wondered aloud of the reason for its flight

as I wonder alone of mine

before the war,

when our shared silence

was woven with unspoken knowing

I could have told you…

You need to remember that-

be careful not to drift

too far from the edge of this moment

and ask why I’ve not come home

The prose piece that follows this poem begins “…hard to explain how I see it all sometimes,” and we begin to get a sense of what the narrator’s current life is like as he sits in his suburban house watching weather reports for storms miles away.

Throughout the book, these prose works—like journal entries but more artful--display a man’s mind pondering life in the confines of his home.  They are full of day-to-day occurrences, teaching, drinking, listening to music, reading family mail, and thinking about those things.

In one of the prose pieces, he contemplates on the writing of poetry:

 …been revising a little poetry…working with the space between the lines…they call it white space…that distance between one thought and the next…an empty line that reveals so much but can be so misunderstood…

So much of this book is about the “the distance between.”  Between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, teachers and students, war and peace, a soldier’s life and a civilian’s life, and our pasts and our presents.  Being home and not at home.  Freud and, later, Lacan, expounded on the concept of “unheimlich,” a not-at-home-ness.  Freud’s use of the term (the uncanny) is not appropriate for what Harden is doing, but I sense in this book an effort to employ language and its partner, silence, to survive in a place where the “not-at-home” and the “at home” can co-exist. 

Here is a poem:

Fresh Air on NPR

idling at the end

on the corner of Parmer and Lamar

panhandlers with cardboard signs

shuffling up and down the line

my radio program shows me a photo

it’s a real beaut-

a profane Pulitzer prize winning snap

of a dead, mutilated American soldier

face up on a dirt road

in Mogadishu

through my Chevy windshield

I watch

the frenzied crowd

drag the bound corpse

past the Citgo station

into the parking lot of the CVS.

I am not doing Mark or his book justice here. First of all, I need to be clear. This book is not “about Mark.”  It not Confessional Poetry or Identity Poetry. There are many, many characters in this book, as seen/experienced by this one perspective. Again, that is what I think this book is about—this perspective, the emotional texture of one person’s experience in America in the late 20th century and early 21st. 

I could use words like warrior, hero, and bravery.  But I think Mark would disapprove of such language. But I don’t think that he would object to love, compassion, duty.  These poems and prose reflections are clear-eyed and stoical—a philosophy I embrace.  There are heart-break, tears, pain, tragedy, and “losing.” There are also strength, helping hands, and survival.

We will close with Mark Harden’s words, but I think he speaks for all of us.  It’s one of his prose pieces:

…sometimes the words just aren’t there—no matter how many different combinations of keys I press, the letters don’t reflect on the page what it is I’m trying to say, what I’m try to get out…it’s the damnedest thing—

…I can only imagine that it’s been a beautiful day—working in an office for eight hours has its price—but I’m home now…lots of familiar sounds in the house—some light jazz floats in the background…dryer’s tumbling my PT clothes…every now and then the ice maker dumps a few more cubes, doing its best to keep up…

…I was hoping the few rays of late afternoon sun streaking my kitchen window would warn away my inner shadows—but that old, indefinable mood is hanging around—an “I’m missing something here” feeling…it rests just beyond the reach of my reason…

 ..my mind is still on the men we lost last week in Afghanistan…I’ve tried to figure it out—Lord knows I’ve tried…it made little sense to me all those long years ago in the streets of Mogadishu—it makes less sense to me now…

Thank you for listening.  See you next week.

 You can purchase Losing Mogadishu on Amazon.