Writing war, and the politics of poetic conversation

This article’s premise is that war ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how write about it. The paper contends even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses global structures or ethnographies the everyday, center in ways underscore erasures non-war life, and therefore risk participating same devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives intellectual ones, ethically necessary writing war. To end, this article examines poetic production from one front US-led “Global War on Terror”: Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets have produced an analysis but also protest reduction, minds others themselves, violence-stricken present. intervention not critique alone. Focusing a new genre “resistance” poetry, shows poets resist by maintaining worlds partly beyond In this, critical content poetry are inseparable.