While it is undeniable that poetry has glorified, even occasioned wars (from The Iliad to Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" or Kipling's imperial rhymes), the twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of a poetry aimed at rendering swords into plowshares. But the 1991 Persian Gulf War seemed to paralyze poets, with its televisual brilliance, missile-eye camera views, locker-room debriefing sessions, censorship of corpses, and blitzkrieg-like speed; in spite of this paralysis, or perhaps because of it, Barrett Watten's Bad History has emerged as the most important poetry from the Gulf War. It is a brilliant, maddeningly evasive epic that wrestles with the war in a way that is almost commensurate with the logic of what Paul Virilio calls "Pure War"-a state of preparedness for war that constitutes the real war.

Published by Atelos, a publisher devoted to experimental poetry that challenges the conventions of the genre, Bad History uses the sentence, rather than the line, as its central formal device, and combines various discourses, including art criticism, journalism, romantic lyric, and the financial prospectus. In fact, the poem is framed by an art review of "Philip Johnson's postmodern office building" and a financial prospectus. Just how a building or a prospectus can tell us about the Gulf War is the genius of the book; these cultural artifacts, in Watten's telling, all evoke the conditions of postmodernity in which a war like the Gulf War takes place. The book, in the end, is not simply about the Gulf War, but about the difficulty of narration, of history.

Bad History is a counter-epic, a poem that questions the Poundian notion that an epic is a poem containing history, and therefore outside history. Rejecting the notion that a war is simply an event, Watten's text draws backward into the 1980s and propels forward, through the end of the 1990s. The war isn't just the war, but the social historical conditions that yielded its brief, deadly blooms.

Still, the text has a running footer that marks various dates, beginning with January 16, 1991 and skipping ahead and back to other dates: March 1, 1991, January 28, 1990, April 19, 1993, and finally to December 27, 1993. January 16th, of course, marks the beginning of the bombing, but what about the other dates? How should we read the connections between the footer-date and the text itself? Watten leaves these investigations to the reader; part of the reader's work, perhaps, is not only to figure out the significances of those dates-in much the same way that Eliot and other modernists sent their readers scrambling after literary references-but to take part in the construction of meaning. Such investigations should not be treated as code breaking, but as code making.

Early in the poem, an "I"-emerges, but the "I" has indeterminate characteristics. It is a floating consciousness, with flattened affect, as if traumatized. "A bad event happened to me, but its having occurred became even more complicated in my thinking about it" (5); it is as if the speaker were traumatized by the event, which though now distinct, "had to be proved as taking place in every other event" (5). The War becomes a floating signifier, detached from any specific war, but somehow including all the permutations of war-WWII, Vietnam, Gulf War, Cold War. The Cold War-"always on the verge of not ending"-lingered over all other wars, which the speaker attempts to disbelieve, but his disbelief later yields to a feeling of responsibility. When the war ended, "it was a relief-I always doubted the extent to which the poet could just by writing think he could keep it going, even for the space of a lyric poem" (8).

The section "Iraqi" asserts the almost unbridgeable gulf between the American civilian and the Iraqis (and non-Iraqis) bearing the brunt of the bombing. He begins with a definition-"Iraqi: various scenarios for wearers of a mark of distinction and/or shame" (15)-and suggests that identification is indeed a tricky business. Quoting from Ramsay Clark's War Crimes, Watten relays the story told by a Jordanian woman whose husband had been strafed by machine gun fire from American planes; the husband, driving his cab to Amman, becomes an example of "the consequences of appearing Iraqi at a particular moment in time." Juxtaposed to this story is an American's account of wearing a pin that identified him as "Iraqi." The speaker becomes so conscious of his pin that he "always remember[s] to take my pin off for official meetings at work" (16). While the Jordanian man's misindentification as Iraqi leads to his death, the American still maintains an ironic distance from his adopted identity for "official meetings at work."

Another section "Museum of War," describes a diorama where "each display is designed to be the perfect miniature of a moment of loss" (17) that both resembles a child's toy and nonetheless recalls the Amiryah shelter bombing; Watten recalls how "at least 300 children and parents were incinerated in a structure we knew had been built for civilians; now they must reelect the entire PTA!" (19).

In Bad History, Watten considers the relationship between the arts and military adventures more generally, and how art might always fail to be oppositional: "Here an online editor objects that imitation of war in rapid displacement of incommensurate remarks is not an argument against war-it could likewise be a form of participation" (19); how to compose a poem that doesn't merely replicate war so as to make the reader simply another participant? How to evoke the devastation of the "Highway of Death" so as to remember it, so as to make it present, and erase the blank spaces left by censorship? Watten cannot "remember a flatbed truck containing nine bodies, their hair and clothes burned off, skin incinerated by heat so intense it melted the windshield" (20); and indeed, who would want to?

review published by *Indiana Review* (1999)