A brief history of how the Vietnam poems in Monkey Screams originated

     In the early 70s I was involved with an interactive veteran’s support group (as a writer/journalist not as a counselor) in Austin, Texas. One of the things we did was get those involved to talk about their experiences, or write about them. At one point we mimeographed the comments, experiences. For a while I had the mimeographs but they long ago disappeared; however, I had a version of them that I’d typed, thinking I might sometime publish something using them. Later in the 70s after I moved to California I taught an off-campus writing class sponsored by a university connected group. Several of the participants were Vietnam vets and wrote about their experiences—or brought poems they’d written when they were in Vietnam. As a magazine journalist I was then writing for a number of military magazines—Army Magazine, Retired Officer Magazine, Vietnam Magazine, American Legion Magazine, etc. so I was tied in to military experiences (my own having been rather mundane) and wrote a few poems about Vietnam. Much later, in 1997, I wrote the poems that were included in Monkey Screams intending it to be a chapbook. I based the poems on the old ‘70s accounts of events in Vietnam and decided to make each poem a separate narrative told by a participant. The events described—the jeep hitting the buffalo, the return to the town burned by the Cong, the missing supplies, the marine’s trip to the monastery, etc. all actually happened though not exactly as narrated in the poems. The one exception is the four-part poem “Good Reports” which is based on experiences related by a friend and was written a year or two before the others but like the others is not an accurate journalistic account but a poetic rendering of the events described.