ABSTRACT
Directing gaze from the urban streets toward the arena of war, the cluster of poems responding to the conflict contemplate the gendered body in war and the construction of gendered spectatorship; as individual poems, they chart a progressive change in the visual rhetoric of war, as promulgated by mass-media imagery and reporting, moving from discourses of patriotism to atrocity. This chapter focuses on how the poems both participate and intervene in emphatically public representations of war - and especially of America's role in war - registers in relation to photojournalism's growing importance in the war years in presenting the imagery of war. Loy's final war poem evokes the postnuclear anxiety and unspeakableness of living "under the blast". The sense of the incapacity of any medium to depict horror or to represent atrocity accompanies a crisis of representation across artistic, literary, and discursive realms after World War II.
