Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl   Rhetorical turns are especially important to Bruce Weigl’s “Song of Napalm,” since it achieves its success by reenacting an authentic process of realization. Not that less dramatic, more meditative poems that share a sequence of thoughtful retrospection don’t employ such strategies—they can and do—but Weigl’s approach demands it and provides a particularly instructive illustration. The blend of past and present tenses, coupled with stances of both indirect and direct address, create a doubling effect in which the reader can experience Weigl’s speaker as poet, as husband, and as troubled veteran with immediacy and urgency. The poem’s rhetorical movement seeks less to convince the reader or the wife it addresses than to allow us to participate and feel…