On Keeping On. Borling’s poems were tapped out in code, letter by letter, on the walls of a wretched cell in Hanoi during his six and a half years as a prisoner of war. Borling and his fellow captives committed the verses to memory and, 40 years after his release, they have been compiled in a book. It doesn’t matter that “Taps on the Walls: Poems From the Hanoi Hilton” will probably not be taught in Ivy League English lit classes. His poems were spirit-lifters, mental calisthenics, acts of defiance and a way of improving the odds that his memories would make it home to his wife and daughter, even if he did not. Brian Johnstone. David Ferry's Beautiful Thefts. Poetry is innately related to theft.
The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe—the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.
The war poets. Jason Sturner.