This sestina, "The Men on the Wall," is actually the second poem that I wrote about the same summer job I held as a teenager, typing up reports for the Veteran's Administration during the Vietnam war. Wearing the Dictaphone earpiece all day, I directly absorbed the words of these traumatized, returning veterans trying to make sense of their lives. In addition, many of the V.A. building employees were older men who had returned long before from other wars--and all of them were maimed. This job not only made a powerful impression on me, it also was my end of innocence.

When I began to write poetry seriously many years later, I found that every detail of that pivotal summer came back to me. The first poem I wrote about the experience was a sonnet, "Inside the V.A. Dictaphone Typing Unit, Division of Outpatient Psychiatry, 1969" (Poet Lore, Winter 1998, and recorded on this site). I think the discipline of the sonnet form helped me organize and deal with my chaotic thoughts and feelings, forcing me to compress them into 14 lines. The problem, I soon realized, is that 14 lines wasn't enough for all that I needed to say. When Enid Shomer, I poet I studied with, suggested that I try my hand at a sestina, I found myself returning to the same material. This time, the form was even more rigorous, but 39 lines gave me the space I needed to develop the subject in more depth.

I am grateful to the Notre Dame Review's editors for their openness to "big themes" and recognition that the greatest impact can occur when the universal and personal intersect.