Words of War : Writing: Poets Reading Inc. of Fullerton has published ‘Journal of the Gulf War: Poetry From Home,’ a collection of 38 works on the conflict.

When Gloria Alm of Tustin saw on television the tanks, the tears and the gas masks of the Gulf War, painful memories returned. Her husband was killed in 1966 in Vietnam, leaving her with two babies and a lifetime to re-experience the loss.

To cope, Alm put pen to paper. And though she hadn’t written a poem since adolescence, she read the lines she wrote to a standing-room-only crowd of 200 Saturday night at the Fullerton Museum Center:

“My husband was killed in the other war more than twenty-five years ago. His name is on that long black wall with all the names row after row .

“The images of battle in this new war the praying, the suffering, and the pain, stir up the wounds inside me and I wonder what we gain.”

“I was feeling a lot of stress” when the Gulf War began, Alm said later in the evening. “This was just something I wanted to do.”

Alm’s poem was one of 38 chosen for “Journal of the Gulf War: Poetry From Home,” an anthology published here last week and the focus of Saturday’s reading--an evening of laughter, sober contemplation and heartfelt applause.

Those who came to recite or to listen were crammed into the museum center’s small auditorium, and some watched the action on a large-screen TV outside. But they sat or stood in rapt attention for three hours as nearly every poem from the anthology was read.

The poets were diverse in age, dress, politics and economic status, but they were united by a need to voice feelings aroused by the 43-day battle that left an estimated 115 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead. As they read, they expressed outrage, fear, confusion, patriotism, hope, yearning or compassion.

“I wrote this for my son the day the war broke out,” Dawn Allred Viotto of Upland said about her 5-year-old boy as she prepared to read her work. “It’s difficult to explain what’s going on in the world when,” when, as her poem says, “cartoons have stopped” and “bombing has begun.”

To acknowledge the war dead and those who lost friends or loved ones in the conflict, a group formed in front of the museum center and held candles aloft in a candle-lighting ceremony at the end of the evening.

“I don’t think any of us here want to isolate blame,” poet Jim R. Emch II of Cerritos said. “It’s just a matter of recognizing human anguish.”

“Journal of the Gulf War” was published on a $4,000 budget by Poets Reading Inc. of Fullerton. The nonprofit organization, which has previously published a book of Viotto’s poems, stages readings four times monthly around Orange County.

Founder Michael Logue and fellow poet Meg Reed (both of whom edited the journal with John Penner, a local writer, and co-founder Tina Rinaldi, Logue’s fiancee) said they were compelled to assemble such an anthology just after the war erupted in January, when reactions to the conflict dominated an “open” reading in which poets were free to address any topic.

They issued a call for poetry “on, about, for, against, because of or in spite of the Gulf War.”

Although the atmosphere Saturday seemed decidedly anti-war, the editors wanted an apolitical anthology that would bespeak “the collective experience of those of us watching the Gulf War from home,” Logue said.

More than 300 submissions from all over the country came pouring in, including work by novice poets such as Alm and by well-known writers such as Gerald Nicosia, biographer of Jack Kerouac, Neeli Cherkovski, biographer of Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Kerouac were leaders of the Beat Generation, the political and literary movement that laid the groundwork for the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.

That sort of response to a grass-roots effort reflects a nationwide “poetry renaissance,” Nicosia said Saturday night after autographing copies of the anthology. (The collection is now available only through Poets Reading Inc.)

“We feel there’s a new underground in America that’s been growing the last few years,” said Nicosia, who lives in Los Angeles. “You can see it with readings like this in local bookstores and cafes. People are enthusiastic about poetry, and the enthusiasm down here tonight is tremendous. There’s a real energy here, and it’s going to break through--just as the Beats broke through in the ‘50s.

“This kind of thing is revolutionary because it’s the voice of the ordinary people speaking to ordinary people--talking about things that were censored or that the mainstream media didn’t talk about.”

A theme of free speech underlies a poem by the journal’s youngest contributor, 13-year-old Manuel Schwab of Irvine. He wrote “Yellow Bliss” after taking part in an anti-war protest on a Santa Ana street corner.

“It’s about the atmosphere at the protest and like, even the insults,” said Manuel, who wore a ponytail and single small earring. “People stuck their heads out of their cars and yelled, and it felt valid to get that kind of feedback. You could see everything people felt about the war.”

Charles Webb of Los Angeles said his inspiration came from an ad for a men’s support group that averred: “The new man is sensitive and shares his feelings without being a wimp.”

“It talks about how this war was a showdown between Saddam (Hussein) and (President) Bush, who didn’t want to be a wimp,” Webb said.

Terri Brint Joseph, a Chapman College literature professor who came to listen, praised Poets Reading Inc. for publishing the anthology so soon after the war ended.

“We live in a world that’s trying to eliminate war, yet war has been a recurrent historic menace,” Joseph said. “When we’re at peace, it’s easy to forget how terrible war is. So it’s important that this group has recorded the feelings and the response to the conflict while the full intensity of feeling was still intact.”