COLUMN ONE : Pen Has Its Day Amid Swordplay : In a gentle twist on Army-Navy rivalry, cadets and midshipmen match verses in an annual ‘read-off.’ The aspiring officer-poets savor a chance to make art as they learn the craft of war.

It is Saturday morning at the U.S. Military Academy. Just off The Plain, as the vast lawn that has served as the parade ground for the likes of Lee, Grant, MacArthur, Patton and Schwarzkopf is reverentially known, cadets cradling M-16s squat beside bulging green nylon packs on a Tarmac apron, their faces streaked with camouflage paint.

A field exercise is under way. Soon, the cadets will clamber aboard UH-1 Huey helicopters and go whap-whap-whap up into the gray skies over the Hudson River. A few blank shots ring out in the hills above the campus.

Close by on Doubleday Field, the Army baseball team is playing Fordham. At Michie Stadium, the football team is at spring drills.

But what’s this going on in Cullum Hall? Beyond a facade of Greco-Roman pillars flanked with trophy cannon lugged back from some forgotten war, under a copper roof painted “Beat Navy” in enormous letters, just past an entryway plaque saying the building was “Erected for the Reception of Such Objects as May Tend to Elevate the Military Profession,” Cadet Sgt. Kyung (Mike) Min is reciting a poem--his own poem.

“A million years ago / Upon wax-fruited plains,” begins the third-year, civil engineering student, in a quiet voice. In a circle around him, uniformed cadets and midshipmen visiting from the U.S. Naval Academy listen in respectful silence.

Reading a poem ? Here, against the din of gunships, amid the rows of spiked artillery pieces in verdigris, with all the character-building athletics going on outside?

Roger. There may be little in the way of garrets at West Point, no frail consumptives knocking back tumblers of absinthe in foul romantic dens.

But there are poets, trim and ambitious young officers-in-the-making who find the time in their stiffly organized lives to go down into the smithies of their souls and make art.

And for at least three years now, the poets of West Point gather every spring for a “read-off” with their counterparts, the poet-midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy. It is certainly not a day of riotous, bardic foofaraw, or of in-your-face comparison of poems.

Though the spirit of rivalry is there just under the surface--”I think that our poetry is a little better,” confides one Annapolis man, Midshipman Jim Hicks--the young people insist that what they have really come for is artistic sustenance.

“This is being hosted by our archrivals, whom we degrade in every respect,” admits Midshipman Roxanne Rusinko. “When we talk, it’s always, ‘Beat Army, Sir!’ But it’s interesting for me to find out that, hey, there’s someone else like me, who writes.”

Indeed, far from these dour granite buildings, out in the cultural surf of the civilian world, poetry is making one of its periodic comebacks. English department enrollments are rising; arts commissions and philanthropies face a swollen volume of applications for poetry grants.

Nighthawks in the great American cities now pass evenings at open-mike coffeehouses instead of dance clubs. MTV is airing 30-second clips of poets excerpting their work. Even President Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read at his inauguration.

And yet, poetic self-absorption is not at all what one associates with the two senior military academies--or the ferocious late-adolescent rivalry long a tradition between them.

(Cadet-poets from the newest of the nation’s service schools, the U.S. Air Force Academy, have so far missed out on the Army-Navy weekends because of travel costs from Colorado Springs. But Lt. Col. Donald Anderson, director of the Air Force Academy’s creative writing program, says his courses are so popular with Zoomies that he “generally (has) to turn people away.”)

Cadets and midshipmen are, of course, trained to follow orders, and it is fair to say that such an undergraduate environment gives but small scope to the artistic sensibility. When it comes to the arts and the humanities, a West Point or an Annapolis education is an off-Broadway proposition.

Still, the young poets of West Point and Annapolis insist that they, perhaps more than any neo-beatniks in Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor or Berkeley, are bursting with the need to express themselves in verse.

“I don’t think anyone has more reasons to stop and smell the flowers than we do,” says Midshipman Darren McClurg, a third-year English major from San Diego. “Because our lives may end at any time, for duty.”

Midshipman Rusinko, a first-year English major who grew up in New Orleans, says that for her, writing poetry is a way of framing the questions she’s not allowed to ask in any other setting at Annapolis.

“When you’re in uniform, it’s your job to follow orders,” she says. “You can’t question orders. Your uniform is almost like a mask. You have to desensitize yourself, and you get hard. You become almost inhuman.”

Rusinko says she doesn’t want to “end up a Neanderthal who does stupid things,” so she writes poetry, establishing a distance between the cold, unquestioning officer she is training to become and what she trusts is her real and better self.

*

This year’s crop of poet-Middies arrived on a recent Friday night, after motoring up from Annapolis, Md., on I-95 and the New Jersey Turnpike in a Navy-owned Dodge Ram van.

On the next morning, the Army-Navy “read-off” began around a coffee urn. Ten men, three women and a handful of instructors chatted and ate doughnuts in the shadow of the hundred-odd bronze plaques on the Cullum Hall walls, honoring West Point’s dead in many a far-flung war.

Then, at 9:30 sharp, faithful to the day’s printed agenda, they moved into the Pershing Room, a comfortable salon appointed with Oriental carpets and wing chairs and dominated by a life-size, full-length portrait of John J. (Black Jack) Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I.

The poets, most in sharp blue blazers and brass buttons, sat themselves in a circle at the center of the room. Cadet Sgt. Laura Law opened the morning session with a reading of William Butler Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” an appropriate work addressed to the hard, brute work of poetic composition--and to how lightly regarded is the needy human who risks the effort.

The room was overheated, so someone eventually screwed up the nerve to open the French doors leading out to a balcony overlooking the Hudson. The pounding of helicopter rotors surged into the room.

Cadet Sgt. Ben Grimes, a West Point plebe, observed above the din that “Jim Morrison of the Doors used to write poetry while listening to the rest of his band play music,” and suggested that the group try the Morrison method.

He has brought along a boombox, and snaps in a tape of a Mendelssohn piano-cello duet, explaining that he considered bringing some of Morrison’s oeuvre but decided it was too “strange.” (It goes unnoted that Morrison, the late, Dark Prince of Sixties’ license, was the son of an Annapolis man and career naval officer.)

As the languorous strains of Mendelssohn fill the room, the cadets and midshipmen tilt back in their chairs, grimace at the floor, chew their pencils, study the ceiling. One bold midshipman even undoes the buttons of his blazer. Then at length, pens begin to scratch across the pages of dogeared notebooks.

The poems roll on through the day about: men trapped in unhappy marriages, the annoying woman in someone’s brigade, younger brothers and sisters back home, shoes, scuba diving, a dog’s fatal heart attack on the way to be put down at the ASPCA.

Some are written on the spot; others have been crafted, edited and rewritten over the months in lonely dorm rooms, after taps and lights-out. The themes range from the flippant to the soulful. The criticism is sometimes scathing.

Cadet Sgt. Min, the civil engineering major, has brought along free verse about his struggles as the child of Korean immigrants. He confesses that he normally shuns poetry readings because he takes the art seriously and doesn’t want to be “tainted” by the criticism of casual or untutored listeners. This weekend, however, he hopes that the give-and-take will be of a higher order and more helpful to him as he develops as a poet.

“I put this poem on the poetry bulletin board, but I didn’t get any criticism back,” he reproaches his listeners. (The “poetry bulletin board” is a computer bulletin board where West Point’s poets can “publish” their work and wait for other cadets to log on to say what they think.) “I’m hoping this time to get some good feedback.”

“Embracing America,” the poem by the Korean-born Min, tells of a prostrate Asian-American trying to embrace a “great white America” but getting little back. America simply heaps “dust, debris, condemnation and insults” onto the immigrant’s back.

“This mountain is so heavy,” the poem concludes, “and I’m running out of tears.”

For a few moments, the silence is broken only by bird song and the echoes of a departing helicopter. Min looks expectantly at his fellow poets, then allows, “It has some incongruities, but I can’t really figure out how to improve it.”

At that provocation, the dove-like poetry-lovers turn into hawkish critics.

“It’s not subtle enough,” says Midshipman Hicks, firing the opening shot. “It comes off as accusing, and that takes away from the poetry of it and turns it into something that belongs in an editorial.”

“I don’t identify with the speaker at all,” says Capt. Stephen Luebke, a tank commander before joining West Point’s English faculty. “He seems to be complaining, and I don’t know the reason why.”

Others object that they don’t understand why the speaker is lying on the ground, that a reference in the poem to “call waiting” is cryptic and that they consider the words “great white mountain” heavy-handed. One West Point instructor, Capt. Jonathan Smidt, recommends dropping the poem’s whole ending.

“Sir, I find that inconclusive,” says Min, ever respectful of the formalities of rank. Then, undeterred by the salvo of harsh words, he says: “OK, somebody want to criticize another one? I’ve got another one.” Boldly, he flips a few pages deeper into his well-used journal.

By late afternoon, the Hueys are all safely back on the ground outside, and the songbirds have the skies to themselves. Fordham has beaten Army on the baseball diamond, and the last of the many Saturday tourists have departed. The midshipmen will spend the night, then board their van next day for the long ride back to Annapolis.

Rusinko is exulting that she got six pages of ideas for her poetry. “In a couple of days, when I have a free moment, I’ll go and develop them,” she says.

Soon it will be back to the engineering classrooms for the poets, back to drilling on The Plain, back to lectures on amphibious assault doctrine in the pretty buildings of Annapolis--back, in short, to the world of prose.

And, soon enough, it will be time for some, maybe most or all, of these warriors-to-be to lay aside poetry as a passing fancy of youth, or be inevitably regarded as oddities and misfits in the Army or Navy. Art may be long, but war is always with us.