SOURCE: "Agendas for Vietnam War Poetry: Reading the War as Art, History, Therapy, and Politics," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 5-13.

[In the following essay, Hidalgo focuses on language and sense-making in his discussion of Vietnam War poetry.]

This is about the margins of the poem, as much as it is about the poem itself, at once act and artifact, as is every written or recorded spoken word. At its margins the poem rests within the consciousness of the author and retrieves evidence of the poet's own implied situatedness in his or her social, political, and historical context, functioning as a source of meaning. Within the context, the poet of war experience, Veteran or protestor, endures a kind of social, political, and historical marginalization which the war poem seeks to invert, redefining the center of common experience out of its socially and psychologically repressed...