socialmedian: An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem

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An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 07, 2009

Summary

In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present

Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock – thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me.An Equal

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