![]() ![]() But Turner’s music-making became a true analogue to his poetry practice in the space of grief. And poetry is often set to music with great success (Turner himself has been set to music by the composer Jake Runestad). There are other poets who are fine musicians (Cornelius Eady is a good example). ![]() None of this should be very surprising: Both poets and musicians are required to cultivate a kind of sonic attention. He seems to have begun as a punk and a partisan of rock and roll, but has since moved outward, into the realm of electronic music, among other genres. It turns out that as he was writing, Brian Turner was also making music. Turner’s work consoles in its refusal to look away from the hard truths of American adventuring abroad, and it is unique in finding a psychic language to articulate what we have lost there. ![]() He then turned his military experience into visceral recollections and refractions on the page, first in two poetry collections and then in a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (2014). Turner got his MFA from the University of Oregon and subsequently enlisted in the American military, serving initially in the Balkan crisis of the 1990s and later in the first Iraq war (where he was an infantry team leader). Brian Turner’s poetry, of which I first knew Here, Bullet (2005), does what the best literature always does: it serves as a conscience of our times. ![]()
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