Spotlight on... Brian Turner

We listened to this poet and Fort Lewis-stationed war veteran on KUOW Presents, and were compelled to hear more: Journalists for Human Rights: How do you define Justice? Brian Turner: I don’t think I can adequately answer this question. I would suggest that people look to Socrates and consider his method in defining the word justice. JHR: How does your definition relate to your experience in the army? BT: What is happening in Guatanamo diminishes the American judicial system. Extraordinary rendition diminishes the same system. Abu Ghraib has become a synonym for torture, rather than a symbol for justice a democracy might bring.

JHR: In your poem At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center, you write about the war in Iraq and how, here in the US, it seems to exist in time, but not in space. What does this mean for your audience and its relationship to the war?

BT: In At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center*, I’m trying to connect the war in Iraq with those of us living here in the States, to bridge these two spatial divides by melding them together. It’s an attempt at the surreal.It’s also my way of saying--If we don’t feel the Iraqi and American dead among us, if we don’t experience some of the pain of a war we are participants in (as a nation of collective individuals), if we don’t have a sense of the suffering and struggle that is taking place, if we don’t sense even the foundation stones of war, what does that say about us as human beings? What does it say about us as a culture, and as a nation within a much larger community of nations?

JHR: In general, what can art do for a society like ours (in the U.S.)? What can it do now -- with both domestic and foreign human rights abuses (e.g. poverty, war) on the minds of its citizens? What can it do for policymakers and elected officials?

BT: I’m hoping that art might not only entertain, but that it might, on a more fundamental level, work within the Socratic method, offering us questions which we must answer for ourselves, each in our own way.

* To listen to At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center, visit:
http://www.kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=14325