R.L. Barth was born June 7, 1947 and grew up in Erlanger, Kentucky. He can trace a long line of military history in his family and that tradition of service spurred him to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. An early relative of his served in the Union Army after arriving in the U.S. from Germany, and other relatives served in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Barth enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1966 and served through 1969. During his tour of duty in Vietnam he was an assistant patrol leader and then patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He was educated at Northern Kentucky State College and at Stanford University. For more than twenty years (1981-2004) he operated his own small poetry press, while writing, sometime teaching, and working as a bookseller. He has twice been a visiting poet at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his poetry collections are Looking for Peace (1985), A Soldier’s Time (1988), Deeply Dug In (2003), and No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (2016). Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems, (2021) is published through Broadstone Books in Frankfort, Kentucky. He has also edited The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999), The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (2000), and The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000).
He lives in northern Kentucky with his wife, Susan.
Poetry and the Vietnam War
R. L. Barth is a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War from Kentucky, and the war is nearly his exclusive subject, as these titles suggest: Deeply Dug In, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, Small Arms Fire, Looking for Peace. Another collection, A Soldier’s Time, takes its title from a letter written by Dr. Johnson and quoted by Boswell in his Life: A soldier’s time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption. During his time in Vietnam, Barth wasn’t writing poetry or keeping detailed journals of his experiences. Except for the odd letter home, he didn’t write while in combat.
Arriving in Vietnam in 1968, Barth recalls the blistering heat and the bold stench. But there was beauty too: After the heat and the stench there was the beauty of the landscape – all these shades of green. He has described his work there: I was Recon, which basically meant we would take a team of eight or ten people into the jungle, the mountains, and run Recon, then run back – just a cycle … As a result, I knew the jungle very well, and certainly knew what the mountains were like.
Barth has said that his poetry has two audiences: those who served in Vietnam, or some other combat arena, and those who haven’t served. I have always tried to write in such a way that the first audience would say, ‘Yes, he got that right; that’s how it was,’ … For the second audience, I hope that, even though they can never understand to the degree that a veteran can, they can get some sense of the experience, that something can resonate on a human level.
Asked why he has written about war almost exclusively for more than forty-five years, Barth said: To understand combat. And, I suppose, Vietnam.
Poetry after the War
When he returned from Vietnam, Barth attended Northern Kentucky State College (NKSC) in Covington – what is now Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights. At that time, in 1969, much of the school’s student body was made up of secretaries, recent high school graduates and veterans of the G.I. Bill. I had the G.I. Bill and thought, ‘Why not college?’
It was there that Barth was introduced to a writer whose work would greatly impact his own. As an undergraduate, I started writing dreadful poems – free verse pieces of dreck. Junior year, I took literary criticism from Tom Zaniello. One of the textbooks was called, In Defense of Reason, by Yvor Winters. I was immediately taken.
As a result of his interest in the work of Yvor Winters, Barth was inspired to part ways with free verse and began writing formally. I’m reading Winters, thinking about the poetry I really like, thinking, ‘Why didn’t I see this before?’ I started writing the way I write now. After earning his undergraduate degree, Barth was selected as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, where Winters had taught until 1966.
While in Stanford he met Helen Pinkerton, a poet and essayist, and the wife of Wesley Trimpi, who taught in Stanford’s English Department. Trimpi was an expert in English Renaissance lyric poetry and classical literature. Barth and Pinkerton lunched together and exchanged poems. He also came to know Winters’ widow, the poet and novelist, Janet Lewis, who asked him to edit Winters’ selected poems and letters as well as her own poems. It was a major production getting the letters – they were all over the country … And Winters himself had made a big point to ask people he wrote to destroy the letters. This correspondence included letters sent to leading names in literature, among them Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, and Allen Tate. In 1999, with Barth as editor, The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters was published, followed by The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, and The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, in 2000.
After finishing up at Stanford in 1979, Barth returned to Kentucky and established his own poetry press, but after 20 years he decided he had spent too much time on other people’s poems instead of his own. Once he focused on his own work, Barth published numerous poetry collections that include, Looking for Peace (1985), A Soldier’s Time (1988), Deeply Dug In (2003), and No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (2016).
Helen Pinkerton has praised his war poetry: His collections contain some of the finest poems ever written in English on the direct experience of modern war. X. J. Kennedy has also praised his work: Barth’s best lines have a classical ring to them: it is as though Lucretius or Martial had been reincarnated in the uniform of the U. S. Marines. And Timothy Steele had this to say: R. L. Barth has done for the Vietnam war what Owen, Blunden and Sassoon did for World War I. He has borne moving and memorable witness to the tragedies of the conflict, and has done so in poems whose conscientious and clear-sighted craft does full justice to the seriousness of his subject.
Brief Poems by R. L. Barth
Small Arms Fire
Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be?
Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.
***
One Way to Carry the Dead
A huge shell thundered; he was vaporized
And, close friends breathing near, internalized.
***
Epitaph
Tell them quite simply that we died
Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified.
***
War Debt
Survive or die, war holds one truth:
Marine, you will not have a youth.
***
Initial Confusion
A sergeant barked, “Your ass is Uncle’s!” though
It wasn’t clear if he meant Sam or Ho.”
***
Saigon: 16 VI. 1963
In chaos, judgement took on form and name:
The lotus flared; more men burned in your just flame.
***
Saigon: 30 IV. 1975
We lie here, trampled in the rout,
There was no razor’s edge, no doubt.
***
De Bello
The troops deploy. Above, the stars
Wheel over mankind’s little wars.
If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.
***
Epitaph for a Patrol Leader
The medals did not signify—
No more than his suntan—
Nor the promotions; simply say,
“He never lost a man.”
***
Movie Stars
Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Martha Raye
Were dupes who knew no other way;
Jane Fonda, too, whose Hanoi hitch
Epitomized protester kitsch.
***
Ambush
For thirteen months, death was familiar.
We knew its methods and the odds. Thus, war.
And yet, I never once saw dying eyes
That were not stunned or shattered by surprise.
***
Snowfall in Vietnam
Leaflets fill the sky.
(More monostich poems by R. L. Barth are available on the Slates – One Line Poems page.)
LINKS
Text of A soldier’s time : Vietnam war poems on the Internet Archive.
A preview of Deeply Dug In on Google Books.
The Scienter Books page on No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
The Broadstone Books page on Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems.
Patrick Kurp introduces some monostich poems.
Patrick Kurp on a poetry reading by R. L. Barth.
Francis Fike reviews No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu for Reformed Journal.
A review by Clive Wilmer of Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems in the TLS.
Brief Poems 