- The poet's ability to capture meaning with words has long been one of humanity's great gifts.

Today's guest has that muse and uses poetry to explore enduring questions of love and loss.

He's Brian Turner, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's and Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Brian Turner, a U.S. Army combat veteran of Iraq and Bosnia.

He's also an accomplished poet and a musician.

Brian, thank you so much for being with us.

- Oh, I appreciate you having me here, thank you.

- So we came across your work based on an opinion piece that you had written in "The New York Times" last year, "To Fall in Love with the World" A Late Summer Meditation on Time, Loss, and Solace in the Natural World" which featured your poetry and some remarkable photography by Mary Manning.

So we knew we wanted to have you on.

We're gonna talk to you a little bit about your art, the poetry, your life, but start with your childhood in California.

What was it like growing up?

- I lived near Fresno out in Madera County which is I could see the snow capped mountains of Yosemite off in the distance to the east.

We lived where the foothills, basically where the agriculture land like orange groves and grape vineyards sort of shifts into cattle range land.

So I could hear coyotes hunting calves off at night, and we could see satellites up in space, and we'd sleep out on the front grass and it was a very kind of isolated and kind of lonely childhood in a lot of ways.

I was a latchkey kid, but my parents worked in towns that were 20, 30 minutes away.

So it was a lot of reading and just me and my imagination.

- Is that where you began to sort of find your poet's voice?

- I believe so because I had a massive stammer that lasted well into adulthood, into my 20s, and so I had difficulty just creating a sentence like this.

I think what I had was a freight train of language that was trying to get out of my head, but I couldn't land the sentence and I would just get all gummed up with it.

So I had an interior life and I listened and I read, and I think that led a lot to and paid attention.

I think mostly paying attention, and I lived in a very spare place.

It was very just like dirt.

We had to plant everything.

It was sandy loam.

We planted I think it was 99 eucalyptus trees and over time it became a grove of trees.

But my early childhood there was paying attention to the solitary bird, this type of insect.

It wasn't like living in a city where you just have a wash of sensory detail constantly sort of streaming over you where you have to pick out, and isolate, and remember certain things, but you simply can't remember it all.

- So then you went into the Army and you saw duty both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and then Iraq.

Can you give us an overview of that service?

So it's our understanding that you were in combat situations.

- Well, the first one in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was with the 10th Mountain Division and that was near the tail end of that.

That was 99 to 2000.

So as a NATO peacekeeper there, the American military had drawn down quite a bit so we were mostly packing up and moving back home.

So my job was to go to much of Northern Bosnia, grab anything expensive, put it on a truck to ship back home.

So it was a very interesting time to see that space.

Very much in contrast to my time in Iraq.

I was there from 2003 to 2004 with Second Infantry Division and I was more of a straight leg soldier.

11 Bravo infantrymen there and we did a lot of raids, lots of patrols, and a year of mission after mission after mission until I could come home.

- So you have agreed to read three poems and we're gonna have you read those momentarily.

The first you wrote, you told me before the show, you wrote while you were in Iraq, and if I recall correctly, you said you hand wrote it on a piece of paper and put it in your pocket, and is that correct?

It's called "Here, Bullet" and somehow it got back, it survived.

How did that happen?

- Well, we had a plastic bag inside our pouches inside our uniform.

They kept our ID and things like that, and I tucked it in there with that information.

So I carried that poem.

I wrote that poem, it was one of the quickest poems I ever wrote.

Maybe 12 or 15 minutes, and then I put it in my chest pocket and wore it the rest of the time that I was in country.

So if I were killed, they would've found that poem on my body, yeah.

Yeah, I knew the mortuary affairs specialist and he had taught us, I had done some cross-training with them, and so I remember thinking maybe he would read that poem if I were killed 'cause my body would be processed through his office.

And I remember seeing him in Kuwait and it was like he was following us, and we had a joke between us where I would say, "I hope I don't see you again."

And then we stayed in Kuwait while we went into Iraq, and then eventually I guess he got busy enough where they sent him up north.

And I remember seeing him in chow hall or the dining facility in Mosul in the northern part of Iraq, and the joke wasn't quite as funny then.

- Wow, so if you wouldn't mind, can you read a bit of that poem?

- Sure, "Here, Bullet."

"If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta's open valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood.

And I dare you to finish what you've started because here, Bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring hissing through the air.

Here is where I moan the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have inside of me, each twist of the round spun deeper because here, Bullet, here's where the world ends every time."

- Brian, that's powerful, can you remember the moment, the inspiration, what were you giving voice to in writing that poem?

- I was listening to Queens of the Stone Age.

We had what we called our hooch.

We were standing, we were on our base, and I wrote it very quickly, and I had one of their songs on repeat.

So it really became wallpaper sound that blocked out the noise of the world, and I think what it was is after several months of foot patrols, and vehicle patrols, and mortar attacks, and sort of oblique attacks, snipers potentially, roadside bombs, basically someone hunting for your soul and in turn, being a part of that same process.

And I had taught rifle marksmanship and I think the knowing that potentially at any given moment, somebody may be practicing the fundamentals of marksmanship on me with my body in their sights, and I think the pressure of that led very quickly to that poem over a series of months and then just sort of appeared.

- Before you were in the army, when you were as a child living that introspective life, that life of the interior, were you exposed to other war poetry?

I can remember still back to high school, my senior year English class we spent an entire month looking at poetry from World War I and "Dulce et Decorum," right?

"Dulce et Decorum est," right?

One of the classics of English poems from the war.

Were you familiar with that as you were sort of entering into service and still responding to your own inspirations?

- Yeah, when I was a kid, my dad was a welder but he was a voracious reader.

And I remember after dinner oftentimes I'd be washing the dishes and he would read episodes from a book, chapters over a course of nights or he would read poems.

And I remember him reciting a poem from Kipling where he says, "When you find yourself on Afghanistan's planes and the women come to cut up what remains, just roll your side and blow out your brains and go to your God like a soldier."

I'm watching the dishes and I'm like 14 or something thinking, "Holy cow, that's what poetry can do?"

And so also I got a master's in poetry before I joined the Army.

So I'm a very unique, I think I'm fairly unique in this because usually it happens the other way around.

So I had gone up to University of Oregon and studied poetry with the hopes of, well, it became a love of mine.

So I had studied Yusef Komunyakaa and Bruce Weigl, a lot of the Vietnam era poets who are contemporaries still today writing wonderful poetry still, going back to Wilford Owen and Sassoon and others too.

- Yeah, so Brian, we'd like you to read next an excerpt from "The Goodbye World Poem."

It's from the collection of the same name.

It was published in the collection, the collection was published last year by Alice James books.

It's about your late wife, Ilyse, who died of cancer in 2016 and she's in many of your poems in many different versions or in many different iterations.

Can you read that excerpt now?

- "Ilyse, all of this is ours, the stupefied eucalyptus, the trembling air, every bird and leaf and flower, every cloud rolling by, the very architecture of loss, and the human heart itself, all of it so lovely and deep.

It's true, fish gather to hear what the old gods might say while lovers glow all around us, that we might see one another across the years marking the divide between the living and the dead.

Our bodies launching into the unknown over and over until we finally get it right.

Our wings shivering in flight as the invisible carries us into the heliotrope of twilight.

Oh, my love, it is something to see.

Flying over the curvature of the Earth, over the wavetops swaying on the prairies, over the rooftops of cities where the lips, and tongues, and fingers of lovers discover the soft vowels of the word love as it has always been, with time sliding over us all like water.

And my god, how beautiful we are in the ruins.

How sweet and brave in the face of disaster.

The way we carry everything with us, my love, the way we carry everything with us when we go."

- So I teared up reading this poem when I read it over and over again and I had the same reaction with other poems' reading.

One theme here is that death is not the end and it's a theme you return to or that you get into with "Wedding Vows" which is the last poem we're gonna ask you to read toward the end of the show.

Talk about that, that death is not the end.

- Well, I think in many ways, I don't understand how pretty much anything or everything works, but Ilyse very much believed in the landscape of time and that things do not simply disappear.

That there's a rolling landscape of time where the past is still very much alive and happening.

And I think of us as sort of the House of Wisdom which comes from Iraq with the Bayt al-Hikmah.

There's a place called the House of Wisdom.

We are sort of memory palaces.

We live in the past.

We carry the past and house it in our bodies, and so those we love who cross over, the dead, they live within us and how do we live with them?

How alive do we keep them within us and how do we stay in conversation with them?

Over the last 10 years or so, my mother just passed in October, the core of my life passed over in a very short period of time, and so I have memory and poetry as ways to be in conversation with those I love.

- Yeah, could I just pick up on that one piece, the idea of poetry as memory?

I think anybody who's even dabbled in it knows that creative process is in and of itself sort of writing memory into our consciousness, right?

Can you talk about that experience for you, particularly in the sense of that a lot of your poems are reflections on loss?

But they, themselves, seem to be sort of evoking the life of the person who you now miss.

Am I overthinking it?

- No, no, not at all.

I remember one of my first teachers, Philip Levine, the former poet laureate of the country, I remember him saying something along the lines of, "If you want someone to experience loss in a poem or in art, you have to first give them something to love and to care about, and then take it away."

And that's a brutal craft sort of choice, but I mean, he's right.

The reason I write, I use the architecture of language to house those I love so that I might revisit them, but also so that I could share them with others so that they might too fall in love with the people I love.

And in some small way, Ilyse, and my father, and my mother, and others can live on in the world beyond me.

That's why I do it.

- So Brian, do you ever, obviously you write these poems and that's a creative act, and you're doing what you just described.

Do you ever go back and read some of your poems again or again and again to bring that person back into your house as you call it?

- Yeah, I do, I love to read Ilyse's work.

She was a poet and she had a book called "Small Hours," and a posthumous book called "Angel Bones."

And so I can go back to her poems and also read them and hear her voice directly.

But most of my poems, I basically have them in my head.

I have them typed up so I can read them today and all, but normally I can kind of revisit that way and I remember most of the lines.

But those that are 10 or 15 years back, I sometimes have to go back to them and reread, yeah.

So they're poems that still do work in me where I don't understand something, those are the ones I usually return to.

- So in "The Crossing" which is the opening poem of "The Goodbye World Poem," you write, "Dying is so intimate."

Break that down for us.

- Well, I'm in my dining room right now, but if we were to turn and go back this way just a few steps, we'd be in the bedroom where Ilyse passed away, crossed over.

And I was there in the moment and that night, there was a hospice nurse here.

And I've found death by death by death, I've been very fortunate to be involved with I guess these crossings that I think were beautiful for the most part.

And so the dying is so intimate, and it's hard.

There's a radiance to someone when they die sometimes like when my wife died that was beautiful, but I think I can only see that mostly in retrospect.

At the time, it didn't feel like that at all, but we tried to make it as beautiful.

Her brother was here, my mother was here, and we tried to make her crossing as a beautiful moment for her.

And I hope that we did right by her, yeah.

- Wow, we're gonna have you read one more poem.

But before we do that, we just wanted to get into a little bit of another hat you wear which is you're a musician.

So we're gonna have you play one of your songs or an excerpt from one of your songs called "Gasoline Love."

Before we play that, give us an overview of that song, the band, how that all came to be.

- Sure, it's another way of me trying to create, be in collaboration with those I love who have crossed over.

So like Ilyse, I try to do things that are with poetry connected with her and my best friend, he was like a brother, Brian Voight.

He also passed away from cancer in 2012 and we had been in bands all through our 20s and 30s and on.

And so in the very beginning when I came back from Iraq, I went down to his apartment in Fresno and I had moved back home, and we recorded this song playing two acoustic guitars in his apartment.

And then after he passed, I didn't think I'd ever make music again.

And I went back and I started listening to those recordings and I realized that people would never hear this wonderful song of his.

And so it was never made into a song, never had a name, never had anything else.

So I took that basic track, we cleaned it up, and then brought in other musicians, and then I brought in the vocals and created the vocals for it.

And then Chantal Thompson sang on it and you can hear his guitar track is in there.

He's playing in the song.

So we can listen to him as we hear the song and he lives on in this song.

That's part of the reason why I created the album and the band.

- So before we listen to it, tell us a little bit about the band and the vocalist we're gonna hear.

- Well, Chantal Thompson is from Canada and she's a jazz singer.

And I met her doing a poetry reading up in Canada and we just met in this lobby, and she said she was a jazz singer.

Something about when I met her, in five minutes, I said, "You should come down to Florida."

I'd never heard her sing.

I said, "Come down to Florida and record with me.

Let's make some music," and somehow that happened.

And so she came down, we recorded here.

She's got an amazing voice.

I think she started in a rock band early on when she was younger.

Went to Russia and played and then excuse me, the band itself HAs never played in the same room at one time.

So we're scattered all over the country and there's a singer in Germany.

There's a couple guitarists and such in California, a drummer in Minnesota, and we're all over the place.

But there's a wonderful engineer and jazz bassist, Benjamin Kramer, who lives here in town, a good friend, and he's got a studio at his house.

And so he's helped me to record and create and bring these things together so we can make this music.

I love the composition of music and putting ideas together musically, and then finding a way to hopefully make it feel live like it does.

- And so now we're gonna hear a cut from "Gasoline Love."

(jazzy rock music) ♪ Well, here in America ♪ ♪ Counting highways with nowhere to go ♪ ♪ Following sound down under the Golden Gate Bridge ♪ ♪ A lonesome sound you will never forget ♪ ♪ I'm reigning them in to kiss a lover ♪ ♪ To kiss a stranger in the rain ♪ - Thanks, Brian, and now the last poem which you've agreed to read.

"Wedding Vows" from the "Dead Peasant's Handbook Collection" which also was published in 2023 by Alice James Books.

Can you give us that reading?

- Sure, thank you, "Wedding Vows."

"What they don't tell you about love is that a death certificate has little sway on what happens within the human heart.

That marriage as defined by others can be both legally relevant and complete BS.

On Wikipedia, someone has typed the following.

Turner married fellow poet Ilyse Kusnetz in Orlando, Florida on September 25th, 2010.

They remained married until her death on September 13th, 2016.

What they don't tell you about love is that after a loved one dies, people will ask, 'How long were you together?'

As if they can't see two within one, the bright vessel of the body in motion, the funeral ship of love, that which the survivor has become, a brightly burning thing, who vowed the starlet amphitheater of the mind, the ancient ocean within, that landscape where memory keeps us all.

This body, this home, this housing of the soul.

What they don't tell you because they didn't lean in close enough to hear the words as they were spoken is that there are many among us who refuse to repeat the vow until death do us part."

- Wow, again, that is so moving, really just incredible.

- Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, the thing is that the Wikipedia thing, that entry in there, has been changed, somebody changed it.

And I went up to Maine and read that poem and said that, and someone in the crowd came up afterwards and said they were a Wikipedian which I didn't know was a real thing.

And they came up and they offered to change it, and I don't believe that's the author's work.

The author puts the work in the world and it's for readers and others to create a connection or engagement with them.

So, but I am glad that it was changed so.

- This is hardly the only poem in which you bring in the ocean.

Why does the ocean have such significance to you and your work?

- I think in part because it's a gesture, an immediate and very physical gesture to the infinite.

And there's something, there's a kind of a profound.

It feels like when I stand in front of the ocean and watch the waves come in and listen to it, there's some profound thing that is beyond sublime and a bit beyond the limits of my understanding.

And also in connection to Ilyse, she loved the ocean and water and always wanted to be near water.

So that seemed a very important thing.

I couldn't not have the ocean in there.

- Brian, so again, I'm going back to what you had said about your childhood and that life of, the internal life.

When did you first recite poetry publicly and was that something that you had to sort of gird yourself for?

- Yeah, when I was in Tacoma, Washington and I was a soldier there, I was writing poems in my notebooks.

I'd been doing that for years.

I already had an MFA, I'd done a couple of readings there when I was a student, but when I really read in front of people where, to answer your question, was that a couple of poetry readings that were up in the Seattle and Tacoma area, and there was a group of people there that really took me under their wings.

I showed up first for a couple open mics and my face, I'm pink or reddish normally, but I would just get like beat red 'cause it just blood rushing to my head I was so nervous.

My hands would shake and I'd sign up to read the three minutes of a poem or something.

And these people were so really kind and they liked the writing that I was doing.

They took me under their wing and they really helped me to start to find my way.

But that didn't really do it.

It was when I came back from Iraq and I had these poems, man.

I remember thinking no matter how nervous I am, I really need to talk about these things.

I felt like people needed to see another version of what was happening overseas than what we were connected to and I realized that the poems had nothing, it wasn't about me at all.

That the poems had their own life and I needed to read from the voice of the poem.

It didn't have anything to do with me, and that really helped me to separate and realize that when I read it, I have to inhabit the space that the poem comes from, not where I am now if that makes sense.

- It makes great sense and your poetry is really moving.

Brian Turner, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week but if you wanna know more (light music) about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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