Drone. Kim Garcia. Omaha, NE: The Backwaters Press, 2016.

A title, like a cover, is a book’s first impression. It sets the tone, orienting the reader in a particular conceptual frame. It evokes analogies and suggests expectations that authors may then subvert. Naming a work, a piece, or a child is essential to the vital act of creation.

Drone.

Here—locked between its denotation and connotation—I found myself trapped. Don’t judge a book by its cover, we are cautioned. Equally, we have a corollary: Don’t judge a book by its title.

Well, I did.

*

I should have written this review over a year ago when I had finished Kim Garcia’s 2016 poetry collection. Even then, I was delinquent, dragging my feet, as I was, to even begin reading Drone. I needed the extra time. My thoughts about this work and the world to which it refers are unruly. All symptoms, perhaps, of writer’s block. But I’m here now, carrying my baggage, ready to unpack.

I hated it. Or—let me be clear—I did at first.

After my first reading, I prepared to pan the collection. But, I couldn’t write the words. How could I say what I felt? What was it, even, that I felt? I was stymied by indignation. How to acknowledge that my professional judgment was personal? All I could see was the title and it poisoned the work, infecting Garcia’s craft and delicate, penetrating language. I suffered, let’s say, from a kind of poetic glaucoma.

*

“Drone” is a fraught term. In ordinary language, the word refers to the gamut of flying robots. Acronym-less, unlike the unwieldy “unmanned aerial vehicle” (UAV) or the cumbersome “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA), “drones” range from small commercial quadcopters to robust military aircraft. Outside military circles, the term evokes civilian casualties and unbounded American wrath, irrespective of sovereignty, as much as a seductive solution to wicked problems often kept hidden from the inevitable mess of public accountability.[1]

In a lucid, semantic critique, Dave Blair notes the conceptual faults perpetuated by the label “drone.”[2] Unlike manned aircraft, which are categorized based on mission-sets such as fighter, lift, or reconnaissance, all remotely piloted aircraft—the United States Air Force’s preferred name for their drones—are lumped together.[3] The unifying criterion is how they are flown: remotely. Blair’s critique is furthered by the ongoing blurring of conceptual boundaries between uninhabited aircraft, another suggested label for drones,[4] and missiles given loitering munitions.[5] Many different platforms, capabilities, and intentions lie within the bounds of this label, drone.[6] 

So, to someone in the field, “drone” is lazy, pejorative, or dismissive.

But this is poetry.

*

I was like a mathematician reading a love poem that referenced Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and quibbling about the logic undergirding the appeal.

Reductio ad absurdum: quod erat demonstrandum, I claimed.

But there was no underlying absurdity in the proof. If there was an absurdity, then it was in me.

*

I consulted Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry to help parse my feelings. In a nuanced defense of poetry, Lerner argues, “The poem is always a record of failure.”[7] A poet seeks to capture the necessarily unobtainable; the poem remains as testimony to the attempt. The failure is doubled upon the introduction of a reader—the one who bears witness to the poem, and scorns it. As Lerner clarifies, the poet “can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.”[8] This paradox breathes life into poetry.

This paradox, too, brought life into my rereading. I recognized my unwarranted contemptuousness and, with that gift, relieved my judgmental pressure. I could see how I had been unfair, rigid, and pedantic. Though I started asymptotically close to contempt, I was still infinitely far from perfection.

Reckoning properly, by which I mean honestly, requires that I serve up my bias on a platter.

A confession, if you will: I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the ethics of targeted killings that employ drones.[9] This was before, mind you, I became an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Officer, before I even knew I would be thrust into the unmanned space. I threw the word around blithely before learning not to—a similar lesson, in fact, to my taught aversion to an uncapitalized marine.

Looking at what I wrote, I read drone, drone, drone as if that word picks out a unique thing and a particular state of the world; but it is only as particular as a plane or car. Reviewing a draft poem of mine, a friend reminds me: You make it universal by making it particular. It is a sentiment also captured by the late poet Mary Oliver, “The language of the poem is the language of particulars.”[10]

My professional mind is too calibrated: To which drone did I refer? To which Drone(s) does Garcia?

Denotation and connotation are in tension, which is not uncommon for words describing technologies and acts of war. Military jargon is often accused of anesthetizing the act of destroying other bodies, of ripping flesh from the bone of those becoming, abruptly, pink mist.

I must clear a place for the genuine Drone that never appears.

*

Dislocation, n., disturbance from a proper, original, or usual place or state.[11] 

I turned next to Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone, which is a philosophical tour de force. Though I object to most of his conclusions, I find his theoretical instruments appealing and often necessary.[12] In an extended note, Chamayou describes the sense of dislocation produced by operating drones and “the phenomenological dimension of this sense of ‘shift,’ or swinging over that is linked to the experience of tele presence.”[13] Drone operators experience this as “a sense of being in between.”[14] He continues, describing how “[tele presence] is a matter of how the operator’s attention is focused, of how a number of choices are separated out or of a differential prioritization of what is to count as the foreground or the background within a single perceptual field.”[15]

In doubt and turmoil, I finally returned to the textual sanctuary. I hunkered down in my rereading, still prejudiced. And then it hit me, violently and ferociously. Garcia’s verbal fire rained down:

The drone circles his limbs, counting up to a body, weighing
the mass, blocking our view of what we have seen, and who sees it.[16]

This insight snapped my perceptual field wide, and I saw that I was so zoomed-in there was no way to distinguish between foreground and background. My soda-straw view had been only a slice of the words Garcia had written; it had been magnified to distortion on one and only one word. Dripping in public and private meaning, drone, I realized, was blocking my view—blocking my view, too, of what I could see and say and write. 

Consider how there are two ways to look at a shadow. The first is to outline the shape made by the absence of light and compare that to the object it represents. The other is to observe how the light falls around the object and observe how object and light interact, much like how snow falls around, but not under, a pine tree. My first reading of Drone typified the former. However, by the end of my second reading, I had fully embraced the latter, shifting from a hyper-focused reading of the object—the drone—to a nuanced inspection of the interplay between the drone and the environments in which it operates. I’d been misinterpreting the glint of the word with the world around it.

Lerner again: “To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use of it: Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that’s poetry.”[17] In my moment of insight, I realized Garcia’s work was more than a poetic glimpse into drone operations. It was a graceful attempt—a Lernerian failure, too, perhaps—to pin down modern war and embody the panopticon of persistent conflict. And with that coup de grâce, I realized, the title was now beside the point. It had been dislocated by purpose. Space was made for the genuine.

*

“Bird,” the collection’s first poem, is an invocation for what follows, functioning as a prelude to five numbered, yet untitled, sections. It serves to scope Garcia’s work, encapsulate it, and preview many of the themes to which she returns. She seeks to write of the dislocation felt by those flying drones while noting the complicity of the society that asks those crews to do so. She writes,

I set my alarm by an inner dove,
wake to crows.[18]

Garcia evokes conflict as a gestalt orthogonal to typified violent political interaction. Rather than creating a dichotomy between only warring hawks and peaceful doves, she introduces conflicted crows.

The poem continues, slowly evolving from imagery of more peaceful birds—jays, sparrows, and petrels—past annoying starlings, until it reaches warring hawks. That is not where she ends, however. Instead, Garcia continues,

Within that silence, love even for the carrion birds—
vulture, raven, gull.[19] 

We cannot be sure, exactly, what that silence is or where it is. Perhaps in that silence flies the genuine Drone that never appears? Silence contains enough space, though, for the carrions: vulture, raven, gull, drone.

*

In a collection suffused with allusions historical, Biblical, and Greek, Garcia grounds herself and her readers in the past, ancient and mythological. So situated, she lays out an orientation that is slightly off-kilter—as Chamayou put it, a sense of being in between. [20] Garcia’s poems seek to identify the borders of that in between—what or where they are. “Augury,” for instance, vacillates between historical and mythological reference points. Augury is a form of divination based on the interpretation of the flight of birds. Famously, after reading the flight of birds, Agamemnon of Greek myth sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, as an appeal for wind with which to sail to Troy. Garcia writes:

To read the tremor between earth
and air, warcraft and godcraft
and mend with sacrifice the flight-rift.[21]

Encased within this triplet are competing themes separated by a chasm, a “flight-rift” between the land and air. The horizon, it seems, rips apart the world of man and the world of god. Godhood becomes a way, conceivably, to un-man, a state without humanity and beyond mankind in the omnipotent sense. Or, as Garcia writes in another poem, “unmanning in its call to husband life.”[22] This fissure is cauterized as the bombs fall, uniting the craft of war with that of god.   

How different is man’s world of warcraft, Garcia seems to ask, from that of the gods, if both can “mend with sacrifice”?

*

Garcia uses a colon in 11 of her poem’s titles, as in “Drone: Predator.” The mark stands as a threshold, a targeting trajectory between concepts. A poetic strike ready to launch. Again from “Augury”:

The air is still ours to stitch
with winged messengers, living books
not of our making, if we read rightly.[23]  

Looking up at the birds, of which there are many, Garcia wonders: while we may be able to read them, will we ever understand their language? In “Drone: Ploughshares,” Garcia queries,

And what shall we beat you into, little mechanical bird
with the head of a bowling pin, speculum, goose?[24]

 This is another bird and another kind of might, and equally, the difference between what we can do and what we should. I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal[25] 

What shall we beat you into? An answer echoes in the violent air. Unmanned. Drone.

*

Poems can often feel locked until one finds the key. Not a cypher key with which one can unscramble gibberish into a coherent whole, but like that of a dusty attic chest. Once the lid lifts, any number of possible objects can be found. They may even turn out to be more inscrutable than the mystery of the locked box. The best collections become frayed as one lifts the lid time and time again finding new treasures and insights:

like those dreams in which I find attics under the floorboards, secret rooms,
an extra bath with a closet, a window, full of northern light, that opens back
into my own living room.[26]

Drone catalyzed this critique. That label prevented me from writing this any earlier than I could have, and it provided the key with which to unlock the collection and then the review. I was hiding in the cover of language, behind the connotation and denotation of drone, unwilling to let Garcia’s language slice into me, penetrating and questioning, revealing my bias and internal contradictions, splaying out our modern, persistent conflict in all its complications. It is as Bianca Stone says of Emily Dickinson:

And no one can take off her clothes, ever—she comes
and her language takes them off of us,
not piece by piece, not fumbling buttons,
but all at once in a single shot,
her tiny poems like grenades that fit in the hand.[27]  

Garcia’s work was more than a grenade. It was a drone that fired a missile, rifling through me, exploding me into another kind of mist.

This is why we need art.

My initial reaction—if we can call two years of brooding initial —is exactly why we need more poetry about the experience of modern war. We need it for catharsis, communication, and reckoning. We need more poetry that forces us to wrestle in the cobwebs and the debris of the darkest corners of the attic. We need to reflect in the mirrors, be they clear, clouded, or cracked, that we find locked away in the trunk. Garcia gave me a key. Maybe it will work for you as well.

Olivia A. Garard is an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and an editor at The Strategy Bridge. The opinions expressed are hers alone and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U. S. Government.

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Header Image: MQ-9 Reaper, a USAF “drone.” (General Atomics)

Notes:

[1] Loren DeJonge Schulman, “Behind the Magical Thinking: Lessons from Policymaker Relationships with Drones,” Center for a New American Security, July 2018, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/behind-the-magical-thinking.

[2] Dave Blair, “A Categorical Error: Rethinking ‘Drones’ as an Analytical Category for Security Policy,” Lawfare, https://www.lawfareblog.com/categorical-error-rethinking-drones-analytical-category-security-policy.

[3] Nor is there consistent agreement on terminology. Besides unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remotely piloted vehicle (RPA), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), small UAS (SUAS), and unmanned systems (UxS) also saturate the jargon.

[4] Note 2, Elsa Kania, “The Human Factor in the ‘Unmanned’ Systems of the People’s Liberation Army,” The Strategy Bridge, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/12/13/the-human-factor-in-the-unmanned-systems-of-the-peoples-liberation-army?rq=uninhabited.

[5] J. Noel Williams, “Killing Sanctuary: The Coming Era of Small, Smart, Pervasive Lethality,” War on the Rocks, https://warontherocks.com/2017/09/killing-sanctuary-the-coming-era-of-small-smart-pervasive-lethality/.

[6] This reading is separate from the debate over the use of the weapon. Cf. Hugh Gusterson’s helpful distinction between “mixed drone warfare” and “pure drone warfare,” even if he, too, perpetuates the label. Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), 14-15. Or Joe Chapa’s work on the drone lexicon. Joe Chapa, “The ‘Drone’ Lexicon,” E-International Relations, https://www.e-ir.info/2019/09/30/the-drone-lexicon/.

[7] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 8.

[8] Lerner, 78.

[9] Olivia Garard, “JUST DRONES: The Ethics of Targeted Killings,” Princeton University Senior Thesis, 2013, https://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp012j62s496t. (N.B. Don’t bother actually trying to read this. It’s what you’d expect from a thesis; it’s complete.)

[10] Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1994), 92.

[11] “Dislocation,” New Oxford American Dictionary (American English).

[12] Such disagreement would have been welcome had I actually, and simply, disliked Garcia’s work.

[13] Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, trans. Janet Lloyd, (New York: The New Press, 2013), 256.

[14] Chamayou, 256.

[15] Chamayou, 256.

[16] Kim Garcia, Drone, (Omaha: The Backwaters Press, 2016), 48.

[17] Lerner, 79.

[18] Garcia, 3.

[19] Garcia, 3.

[20] Chamayou, 256.

[21] Garcia, 10.

[22] Garcia, 47.

[23] Garcia, 10.

[24] Garcia, 80.

[25] T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. Frank Kermode, (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 68.

[26] Garcia, 76.

[27] Bianca Stone, “Emily Dickinson,” The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 23.