A Type of Witness: An Interview with Brian Turner

By T. Michael Sullivan

Brian Turner, a veteran and a poet, explores the harsh realities of war in an Islamic context and utilizes the spaces inherent in Arabic poetry to narrate their truths.

There exists a long tradition of soldier-poets. Do you see yourself in that tradition, and where?
It’s a great question, but one I’ll leave for others to decide.

What does a poet who has seen violence, suffering and death try to convey in the solitary act of writing poetry?

When I was writing Here, Bullet I was mostly writing poems and diary entries into my journals when I’d return to the base after a mission, or series of missions. I think I was mostly trying to remember my own life, and to remember what was happening around me. It was a type of witness. I could see what was being reported by CNN, the BBC, and other news outlets. Still, there were things happening around me that felt important and crucial (while at the same time they went unreported). When I returned to the States and began typing up the poems I’d written, I had these poems as a means of trying to understand what had happened during the year I was there. They were avenues in to that process, which is still ongoing.

The book begins in love and language (“A Soldier’s Arabic”) and ends in the desiccation of sand (“To Sand”). Is there an intentional arc to the book?

I think of the last poem as more of a warning, though it may well be a type of desiccation. I tried to create sections which function on their own—as well as giving the reader a space to breathe and take in between the sections. Arabic poetry often uses space to offer the listener/reader a moment to add their own thoughts, input, meditation. I struggled, initially, in how to order the poems within the book itself. This struggle mirrored my inability to understand what I had experienced and how the pieces might form a whole. In the end, I chose not to follow a chronological sequencing of the poetry, nor to place events in the order in which they occurred. Instead, I think the book follows more of an emotional arc.

Here,Bullet has its geographical roots in Iraq and its spiritual roots in Islam. In that, it seems both rare and organic. Can you comment on this?

This is very kind to say. I was (and remain) fascinated by the land and its people. In the poems I had written previously to being in Iraq, I see now that I would often impose myself on the process and the content—the world of the poem I was hoping to create on the page. However, in Iraq, I didn’t consciously set out to write a book. The poems I wrote in my journals seemed to inform me (rather than me pressing my ideas into them). In this, and in other ways, my writing changed considerably while writing in Iraq. It is an incredible nation, a land with layers and layers of entire civilizations lifting it up into the present day.

In the title poem you almost exhort the bullet to find you and dare it to finish the task. Is this you or an impersonal narrator?

This poem seems, to me, to be the most personal poem in the entire book. It’s very much me (and not an impersonal narrator). The bravado of the poem, the challenging tone of it, is really just the mask of the fear which creates the voice itself. Still, after a few months of patrols and missions, the pressure of being there forged this poem, and surprised me.

In “Mihrab,” the opening poem of Section IV, you write:
and if a ghost can walk amazed
through the days of its life, then it is me….”
To me that statement seems central to much of the book. Would you care to explicate?

I divorced right before heading over to Iraq. I was older, too—in my 30’s. In a strange way, part of me thought I might not come home. And what was home, anyway? I had a storage unit with some of my personal belongings in it. A few bills, here and there. In a sense, I felt somewhat like a ghost still inhabiting this world. The walking dead, that kind of thing. In another sense, it’s what we all do for much of our lives—whenever we reminisce or whenever we ponder the future, we walk in a time that doesn’t quite exist, we wander as ghosts through the corridors of the world.

What are you working on now?
I’m revising my second book (Talk the Guns) which Alice James Books will publish in early 2010. It’s a book I avoided writing for quite a while, and then simply had to do. I would say it’s a book-end to Here, Bullet in that it brings the war home, and it takes this ‘home’ to war, as well.

I’m also working on a third collection of poetry (Lost Among the Tribes of War), which takes a turn into very different territory for me—although the title makes it appear as if it’s a continuation.

And, of course, there’s the whole process of trying to evolve as a human being. A difficult job, that.


Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005). He has recently completed a second collection (Talk the Guns), which will be available from Alice James Books in early 2010. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and the Crab Orchard Review, among others. He has received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He currently lives in California and is working on his third collection of poetry.


T. Michael Sullivan is the coordinator of the William Joiner Center’s annual Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He edits the center’s newsletter and has published poetry, most notably in the Poetry Ireland Review.