Alkalay, The Poetry of September 11, The Testimonial Imperative

The Poetry of September 11:The Testimonial Imperative

Karen Alkalay-GutEnglish, Tel Aviv

Abstract In October 2001, Lawrence Ferlinghetti declared that from now on, poetry

would be classied as B.S. and A.S.Before and After September 11. Despite the

exaggeration, it is clear that testimonial and elegiac elements of poetry and spoken

or sung text have become more valued. In public places and forums, there began

to surface poems in which aesthetics were apparently subordinated to communica-

tive function and direct expression. Indeed, poetry has acquired a long lost social

purposeto order, inform, unite, and console a confused and grieving people. The

Internet, accordingly, became the primary venue where the narratives and the emo-

tions collected. Its intrinsic democratic character was utilized, and every testimony

of emotion or witness was accepted as equally privileged, so a television witness had

as much right to feel and express this emotion as an actual witness. As George Lako

noted, The people who did this got into my brain, even three thousand miles away.

All those symbols were connected to more of my identity than I could have realized.

This study attempts to characterize this distinctive explosion of testimonial and ele-

giac poetry.

Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the

World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, poems began to surface in

public places and public forums.They appeared on the sidewalks of south-

ern Manhattan, on pages tacked to trees near the site of the twin towers,

and on bulletin boards around the country.Those who could not appear at

ground zero in person created symbolic sites at home and sent delegations

to lay the tribute of words. As Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians

Poetics Today 26:2 (Summer 2005). Copyright 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.

258 Poetics Today 26:2

(2002: ix) noted, Prose wasnt enough. There was something more to be

said that only poetry could say. Everybody, apparently, knew this. This

medium of poetry, in which a makeshift memorial is dotted with torn pages

or pages encased in plastic envelopes, is well-known to Israel and promi-

nently characterized the square in which PrimeMinisterYitzhakRabinwas

assassinated in 1995 as well as nearly every site of a terrorist bombing before

and since. But this intimacy and spontaneity of language seemed a unique

phenomenon in the United States, where more formal and measured emo-

tional displays are usually encouraged.

Like the media of trees and walls, the subject and form of these street

poems presented themselves in a spirit of impulsivity and spontaneous emo-

tion. Direct statements of grief, anger, or outrage characterize these writ-

ings. If classic poets or writers are quoted, it is frommemory, paraphrased

or decontextualized, as if academic accuracy would be in bad taste. Where

there is leisure for ction there is little grief, said Samuel Johnson (1906

[1779]: 112), explaining his distaste for John Miltons elegiac Lycidas, and

the obverse rule of thumb is apparent in the art that reacted to the immedi-

ate disaster. Grief seemed to instill a desire to communicate directly

and to disdain articial gures, elegant verse, complex explanations, and

Latinate language.

This reaction does not come ab ovo but is in a way the development of a

growing trend in literature and literary criticism away from the convoluted,

academic, and remote and back to the immediate, popular, and direct. A

parallel backlash against artice in the critical-academic world precedes

this phenomenon on the streets. InManhattan, for example, poetry slams

and popular readings in such clubs as theNuyoricanCaf attempt to appeal

to a general audience that values communication and social messages over

literary complexity. The concomitant scholarly shift is also apparent. For

years, literary scholarship has been rening the art of stepping away from

humane connection, Lisa Ruddick complained in a 2001 article in the

Chronicle of Higher Education. Nevertheless, the mass of poetry appeared asa spontaneous and unique phenomenon. In the weeks since the terrorist

attacks, Dinitia Smith (2001) noted in the New York Times, people havebeen consoling themselvesand one anotherwith poetry in an almost

unprecedented way.

Not only did the poems appear everywhere in public places inLowerNew

York City, Brooklyn Heights, Union Square, in shop windows, and at bus

stops, but the Internet became an extension of ground zero. The immedi-

ate result on the Web was a spirit of democratic inclusion in electronic lit-

erary journals. The day after the attack, almost every literary journal on

the Web called for submissions to special issues devoted to September 11,

Alkalay-Gut Poetry of September 11: The Testimonial Imperative 259

many online journals promising uncharacteristically that everything sub-

mitted would appear. As with ground zero, where a known writer such as

JackKerouac and an apparently unpublished poet, such as Foggy Starbuck,

appear side by side, theWebproved a democratizing force, reinforcing artis-

tic equality through thematic equation.

The Web, which has already transformed poetry in innumerable ways,

providing unlimited outlets for unlimited works, operated in a hypertex-

tual function as wellconnecting poems to give a cumulative response to

the disaster. For example, any search engine will nd several thousandWeb

links when looking for September 11 poetry, thereby providing the eect

of universal response (see the appendix). Many of the links do not state

the name of the editor, as if to deny the intervention of an artistic cen-

sor. Also, the sites may link internally to each otherwith the sense of

a universal link/connection among all those aected by the disaster. As

Jennifer Ley (1999) had previously noted in an online essay on hypertext:

One thing that hypertext seems to be doing to the concept of poetry on the

net is changing our expectations as to what makes up an individual poem.

Once we click/link/layer to a new associative thought, have we entered a

new poem, or merely ipped an electronic page? The language of hyper-

text turns almost any reading experience into one that has poetic, imagistic

properties, thus expanding the role of poetry in digital writing.

Immediately after September 11, this phenomenon served to give a sense

that in writing an original poem about the unique individual perception

of the disaster or about ones private grief, one was simultaneously par-

ticipating in a universal event and contributing to the understanding of a

communal trauma. This kind of communal experience was delineated by

Cathy Caruth (1995: 11):

The pathology [of post-traumatic stress disorder] cannot be dened either by

the event itselfwhich may or may not be catastrophic, and may not trau-

matize everyone equallynor can it be dened in terms of a distortion of the

event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal signicances

attached to it.The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experi-

ence or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time,

but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.

Poetry, in the pure formof experience,makes then a signicant contribution

to a healing process.

While the initial response to the September 11 tragedy has been the tran-

sient aesthetics of the art of raw emotion, there has been an equally strong

and immediate demand for a transcendent, suitable, and mighty art. Art

has lost the facility for rapid reaction or even considered response, com-


plained Norman Lebrecht in the September 19, 2001, edition of the LondonDaily Telegraph. Lebrecht was not alone in his reproach, and this complexdemand has continued. Acknowledging the continuing truth of his evalua-

tion of the dearth of great art responding to September 11, Anne Midgette

(2002) nevertheless responded to this view more than six months later in

the New York Times: The task of the artist is to shape a voice strong enoughto rise above the cloud of emotional responses that arises in the wake of a

crisis. Indeed, many of the more recognized poets, such as the poet lau-

reate Billy Collins, warned against immediate reactions in poetry and, for

a sense of comfort, advocated instead tried and true poems from the past.American poets will have a hard time if they attempt a direct response

to these events, because poetry by its nature moves us inward, not out-

ward to the public and the collective, he notes in Poetry and Tragedy

(2001). Adam Zagajewskis Try to Praise the Mutilated World and Law-

rence Ferlinghettis Are There Not Still Fireies were among the more

recent poems quoted and requoted. W. H. Audens September, 1939,

H.D.s TheWalls Do Not Fall, William ButlerYeatss Lapis Lazuli, and

other poemswritten before and duringWorldWar II were read at numerous

memorial ceremonies and spread over the Internetsometimes in response

to requests for appropriate readings for funerals, sometimes in an attempt

to give strength to traumatized victims, witnesses, and viewers. In the class-

room, as Milton J. Bates (2003: 170) has pointed out, selections from classic

texts like T. S. Eliots Four Quartets helped to speak of the unspeakable.Whether the poetry was recent, raw, and personal or classical and

recycledwhatever poetry was chosenthe only criterion for mass con-

sumption was eect. If the poems were judged to reect an appropriate

mood or to provide comfort in the immediate situation, they were included.

No criticisms were made of the quality of any workanymore than the

ower arrangements on graves would be judged for their artistic value or

epitaphs on gravestones assessed for their poetic signicance at the time of

their inscription. Even the two anthologies that emerged within the year,

both introduced and edited by well-known poets, focused upon the theme

of grief and tragedy, clearly seeing an aesthetic response as inappropriate.

We asked [poets] to simply chime in with work they had done since the

event that they felt showed its inuence. Thats all, wrote the editors of

Poetry after 9/11 ( Johnson and Merians 2002: ix).Now that some time has passed, however, it is possible to begin to evalu-

ate some elements of the unique situation, the unique response it engen-

dered, and perhaps, the inuence on poetry and its relationship to society

since that fateful day.

The atmosphere of genuine grief and the inclusiveness of New York


streets and the Internet are not the only features of the poetry of Septem-

ber 11. Other parameters provided a singular environment for poetry and

inspired and continue to inspire specic kinds of poetry.The rst is the tem-

poral framework: the fact that the dramatic event took place in its entirety

in a very short time but its signicance and consequences still remain to

be evaluated is an important consideration. Not only is a formal closure

lacking, but the testimony is current and therefore not yet historically con-

textualized. Therefore, intellectual and political questions of ultimate sig-

nicance cannot even be addressed with authority, and the emphasis must

be upon sensations and experiences.

Another contributing element is the universality of the witnessing of the

tragedy. Although the number of victims, survivors, eyewitnesses, and those

aected physically by the catastrophemay not have reached enormous pro-

portions, the entire world was literally witness to the event. The repeated

scenes on CNN and other news channels reached into the furthest corners

of civilization.

Furthermore, along with the victims, the survivors, the eyewitnesses, and

those whose lives were physically altered by the attack, the entire world was

aected and transformed by viewing the event as well as its consequences

and implications, far more than by any universal event in history. Billy

Collinss protest against writing about September 11, that poetry takes you

inward and not outward, simply did not apply to the case in point, because

the rest of the world had the same intimate experience.The viewing of this

event may have taken place while one was alone, but the intimate reactions

of individuals in their private spaces, though unmixed with the responses of

others at that moment, was both private and universal.The more intimate

the response, the more likely that others shared that response; the way in

was indeed the way out.

And the awareness of this universality contributed signicantly to the

power of the event itself.Unlike, for example, peoplewhowere hidden away

duringWorld War II, who only discovered after the war that suering was

not only their own lot, those experiencing the monumental event on tele-

vision were simultaneously aware that the rest of the world had been trau-

matized and threatened in the same way. This knowledge that the private

and the public are identical can comfort in its universalization while it ter-

ries in its proportions.

One result of this knowledge was the conceptualization of the event. As

George Lako (2001) noted in an essay entitled Metaphors of Terror:

The people who did this got into my brain, even three thousand miles away. All

those symbols were connected to more of my identity than I could have realized.

To make sense of this, my very brain had to change. And change it did, pain-


fully. Day and night. By day, the consequences ooded my mind; by night, the

images had me breathing heavily, nightmares keeping me awake. Those sym-

bols lived in the emotional centers of my brain. As their meanings changed, I

felt emotional pain.

It was not just me. It was everyone in this country, and many in other countries.

The assassins managed not only to kill thousands of people but to reach in and

change the brains of people all over America.

This knowledge that it was not just me appears to be connected with the

metaphorization of the event. Lako was not alone. Ani DiFrancos poem

self evident (2002) begins: yes, / us people are just poems/were 90%

metaphor. The destruction of theWorld Trade Center was reality, meta-

phor, and metonymy for Apocalypse, wrote David Ray (2002: 316), and

other writers and poets also strove to nd the universal signicance in this

universal grief.

This conceptual transformation of the way people had understood their

world and their positions in it was also a universal characteristic of the

poetry of September 11. In order to process this new information, many had

to alter their views of how they conceived of everything about their lives,

from their geographical security to their attitudes toward the other to

their concepts of political theory and its actualization. Characteristic is the

monumental tone of Larry Jae (2001), who connects the towers with the

fall of Rome:

If it falls, will it be heard?

A panorama falls

Everyone was there

It was heard

The sirens heard it

The ambulances heard it

The police cars and re trucks heard it

The TV channels broadcasting around the world heard it

It was heard far away in Afghanistan

It was heard in Beverly Hills

Even Moscow heard it

It was heard in the South Bronx where I was born

And it was heard in Los Angeles where my children were born

I know for a fact it was heard in Las Vegas where my grandchildren

were born because

My daughter called me at dawn to let me know she heard it

I am afraid to sleep tonight because last night I slept like a baby and

when I awoke,


it was a nightmare

It had fallen

Steel by steel

Stone by stone

Person by person

Like Rome

Like Nero.

The fact that it is not clear whether Nero here is the president of the United

States, some other leader like Bin Laden, the implied poet himself, or all

of them is part of the general confusion, the knowledge that some other

way of thinking is necessary to process this event, but what exactly is as yet

unknown.

One way of avoiding this confusion was the new patriotism toward the

United States, which ourished. Poems such as Maya Angelous tribute

to the reghters of New York, Extravagant Spirits (2004), and such

songs as Theres an Eagle (2001) by Steve Vaus, endeavored to unite and

strengthen theAmerican peoplewith the use of the standard symbols.Using

a line from W. E. Henleys powerful Invictus, Vaus sings, We may be

bloodied, But were unbroken / Despite the darkness,We are not lost. . . .

Theres a brave new spirit in America / United Forevermore. This is a

genre inwhich clichs succeed, and the genre of poetry spills over into popu-

lar culture. Life magazine published Angelous poem, and Vauss song notonly comforted and united a nation, it also catapulted his career.

1Even Paul

McCartney andMichael Jackson wrote songs, Freedom and WhatMore

Can I Give respectively, to inspire and uplift.

Amore personal form of patriotism is evident in the dramaticmonologue

employed by the popular Canadian songwriter and singer Neil Young in

Lets Roll (2001).Using themedia of the popular song to its greatest eect,

Young assumes the voice of Todd Beamer, one of the men on Flight 93 who

helped resist the attackers. Beamer had called the authorities to report the

hijacking, and the recording of his voice had been replayed frequently. But

realizing the urgency and responsibility involved, he had declined to call

his wife.2Incorporating Beamers now-famous words, Youngs song imag-

ines Beamers parting from her. It begins with the ringing of a cell phone;

then, after declaring his love, the speaker sets o the heroic operation by

declaring, Lets roll. This is the rst verse:

1. In A Tale of Two Songs (2001), published in World Net Daily, Joseph Farah analyzes thesuccess of this noncommercial song, recorded one day after the event.

2. ToddBeamers last words on the phonewere: God helpme. Jesus helpme.Are you ready?

Lets roll (Head 2003).


I know I said I love you,

I know you know its true,

I got to put the phone down,

And do what we gotta do.

Ones standing in the aisleway,

Two more at the door.

We got to get inside there,

Before they kill some more.

Time is runnin out. . . .

LETS ROLL!

The attempt here to relive the intensity of the moment is fortied by the

words, which have become part of the political clich of the war against ter-

rorism. Anthony Pratkanis even noted on CNN: In my mind its a phrase

thats gone to the ages. Its become part of what it means to be Ameri-

can (CBS News 2002). Whether or not political and military action was

the intention of this song, it has become one of the results.

Despite a tendency toward patriotism,3not all poetry was intended to

create a patriotic reaction. Some poems reinforced previous political criti-

cisms. Lorna Dee Cervantess poem Palestine, written one day after

September 11, begins with a quotation from Mahmoud Darwish and is

addressed to him. By implication, the entire event of September 11 is caused

by the loss of Palestine, and the poem comes to the conclusion: And what /

if the source of death / is not the dagger / or the lie? / But both? The

metonymic shifting of blame from the attackers to the attacked society

was not unusual. But more humane and inclusive voices were also heard,

attempting to widen the concept of sympathy and identication to include

the attackers as well as their immediate victims. Suheir Hammads much-

reproduced poem First Writing Since (2001), brilliantly and sympatheti-

cally discussed by Michael Rothberg (2003), acknowledges an identica-

tion with all the humanity involved in the September 11 tragedy. Hammads

poem concludes:

there is no poetry in this. there are causes and eects. there are

symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information

we will never know. there is death here, and there are promises

of more.

. . . .

arm life.

arm life.

3. For further information on the unwritten law of self-censorship during the aftermath of

September 11, see Biggs 2001.


we got to carry each other now.

you are either with life, or against it.

arm life.

In alternative music,4the identication with the exacting popular patrio-

tism was perceived immediately as a danger, and the texts oered other,

more critical, approaches to the event. DiFrancos poem self-evident uti-

lizes the well-known expression from the Declaration of Independence to

question the use to which the tragedy will be put, alternating identication

with self-distancing and ironically concluding:

look, another window to see through

way up here

on the 104th oor

look

another key

another door

10% literal

90% metaphor

3,000 some poems disguised as people

on an almost too perfect day

should be more than pawns

in some assholes passion play

so now its your job

and its my job

to make it that way

to make sure they didnt die in vain.

DiFranco echoes the Gettysburg Address in these last lines to highlight

the manipulation of patriotism as well as the national responsibility for

the event.

Whatever the conclusions drawn and however polarized the opinions,

the transforming experience as witness to and often active participant in a

universal conict was a general one. Every individual had an active involve-

ment in this event.

If everyone was transformed as witness and political individual, every-

one was also transformed as victim.The universal reaction of personal loss,

of, at the very least, having ones life and ones world inalterably changed,

suggests in turn that everyone and anyone is equally privileged to express

emotion. Poems and essays depicting the actual experience of escaping or

4. For more information about the category, see, for example, free-denition.com: The

term alternative music was coined in the early 1980s to describe bands which didnt t into

the mainstream genres of the time (www.free-denition.com/Alternative-music.html).


witnessing the burning towers rsthand appear side by side with poems

about the tragedy invading the living room and the individuals intimate

space, and poems of identication collocate with testimony seen on tele-

vision.The interchange of the experience can be felt in the following section

of an anonymous poem, one of many on a Christian September 11 site5that

uses the sense of intimacy of experience to comfort through religion:

Silent NightSeptember 11, 2001

You say you will never forget where you were when you heard the

news on September 11, 2001.

Neither will I.

I was on the 110th oor in a smoke-lled room with a man who called

his wife to say, Good-bye.

I held his ngers steady as he dialed.

I gave him the peace to say, Honey, I am not going to make it, but it

is OK . . . I am ready to go.

I was with his wife when he called as she fed breakfast to their

children.

I held her up as she tried to understand his words and as she realized

he wasnt coming home that night.

I was in the stairwell of the 23rd oor when a woman cried out for Me

for help. I have been knocking on the door of your heart for 50

years! I said, Of course I will show you the way homeonly

believe in Me now.

I was at the base of the building with the Priest ministering to the

injured and devastated souls. I took him home to tend to his Flock

in Heaven. He heard my voice and answered.

I was on four of those planes, in every seat, with every prayer. I was

with the crew as they were overtaken. I was in the very hearts of the

believers there, comforting and assuring them that their faith has

saved them.

I was in Texas, Kansas, London. I was standing next to you when you

heard the terrible news. Did you sense Me?

I want you to know that I saw every face. I knew every namethough

not all know Me. Some met me for the rst time on the 86th oor.

Although the speaker of this anonymous poem is God and this use of a

divine speaker deserves further inquiry, the manner in which the events of

September 11 were processed morally and ethically in this and other poems

is too vast to encompass in this essay.What is signicant in the present con-

text is the inclusion of actual television and newspaper testimony.The poem

5. Song is available through the Citadel CommunicationsWeb site at www.lilcountrycottage

.com/911.html (original link: ctknet.com/silent night september 11 2001.htm).


is lled with details of numerous events broadcast widely on CNN and Fox

News, recounted in the newspapers, and told over various radio channels.

Everyone was no more than one step removed from all the experiences,

and everyone can identify the details. Moreover, these details are ltered

through the universal witness, an omniscient Deity, whose order and orga-

nizationmake sense of the chaos, give perspective and position to the details

that are otherwise too numerous to absorb. It is not surprising that almost

six hundred sites reproduced this poem and many more link to it.

For those whose faith is not so absolute as that oered in Silent Night

(whose author is not mentioned, preserving the realism of the ction of

divine authorship and authority), the trauma is not so easily fathomed; and

yet it is analyzed through these same kinds of familiar references. Diane

Seuss begins FallingMan (2002) with an emphasis on the reported evalua-

tion of one of the iconic events: The man falls. Im told / he jumped. She

distances herself, through reported (told) information, from the terrify-

ing live footage of victims jumping from the towers to avoid the alternative

ery death. This tragic vision was one that many witnessed, either live or

replayed, on television and therefore can be identied universally from a

few details.

Nor can the trauma be graded. Unlike second- and third-generation

Holocaust survivorswhose tragedy is diluted and intensied by the guilt

of survival and the remoteness from the immediate catastrophenot being

there does not invalidate the right to grieve or to feel fear, shame, or guilt.

This universal entitlement is a characteristic unique to this experience

and interrelates with all the others previously mentioned. Rosalynne Car-

mine Smiths The Poison Birds (2002) ends each verse of birdsong with

the line, I want you dead, illustrating this universal experience and the

specically personal sense of self as victim. Similarly, AliciaOstrikers The

window, at the moment of ame (2001b) connects even the unaware, unaf-

fected individual with the signicance of the event:

and all this while I have been playing with toys

a toy superhighway a toy automobile a house of blocks

and all this while far o in other lands

thousands and thousands, millions and millions

you knowyou see the pictures

women carrying bony infants

men sobbing over graves

buildings sculpted by explosion

earth wasted bare and rotten

and all this while I have been shopping, I have


been let us say free

and do they hate me for it

do they hate me.

In the course of the poem, Ostrikers speaker slowly separates herself from

her previously unaware existence and concludes with the possibility that

she has been personally perceived as an American and part of the West-

ern exploitation of the third world (they hate me for it).The sense here is

that September 11 is not a nameless, generalized expression of the anger of

a few people but a personal attack on everything connected with the iden-

tity of the speaker. Whether cognizant of politics or not, the individual is

held culpable by the terrorists. Yet despite the intensely personal reaction

in this poem, where her life and activities are described with no reference to

any of the actual victims of September 11, Ostriker elsewhere perceives the

desired role of the writer in this situation to be objective. In an introduc-

tion to poems on the subject, Ostriker (2001a) contextualizes her approach,

prescribing this function:

The writers task in times of trouble is, I believe, rst of all not therapeutic but

diagnostic. For we cant be healed if we do not know what our sickness is. The

task is clarity. In the present time it is very hard to know how to respond to the

terrorism that has attacked us, which is at once so horrible and such a mirror of

the terror which we as a nation have unleashed against othersin our ignorance

and pride.

The task is clarity, claims Ostriker, and although her own work might

seem to run counter to this task, it does not, for one way clarity is achieved

is by collecting poems of personal and even intimate details.The individual

poems need not attempt to make sense but only to record events, feelings,

reactions. Once they are collected in an anthology, these details together

help to create an entire picture of the signicance of September 11 and form

the clarity of which Ostriker speaks.

Few poets seem to have felt a diagnostic urge. Rather, the idea of tes-

timony as tribute is present in numerous projects encouraging contribu-

tions of poetry. People wanted to share griefto write, publish, participate

in readings. But it was clear that a certain kind of censorship prevailed:

no graphic details of horror, no complex political and moral analysis, and

above all no polished, poetic poetry.The style expected is generally con-

ventional and the treatment of the subject positivepatriotic, elegiac,

heroic.NewYorkbasedPoeticVoices, for example, called for patriotic poetryliterally before the smoke had cleared, the day after the terrible tragedy.

The perception of the role of poetry here is as support:


Poetic Voices has always had a vision of being a forum where the voices of poets

would not only ring out to America and the world, but also as a community of

people who reach out to each other.

In light of this, I have decided that over the next few days and weeks, we will be

calling on all poets to put their voice out there about these events.We ask that you

do what you do best and write.Write poems in honor of America, write poems

in comfort to victims and families of victims, write poems about the heroes who

rise up out of the dust to risk their lives to save others, and write poems about

the strength of the American people in the midst of trials.

Submit these poems to us and we will publish them in a special memorial and

commentary section of PoeticVoices. All poems will be published that follow the

guidelines. (Travis-Murphree 2001)6

And in part because of the nature of the Internet, in which new work can

be easily incorporated into an existing site, the call for poems continues.

The project Testimony Continues: Museum of the City of New York 5th

Avenue and 103rd Street, for example, is an Ongoing web project which

allows the contribution of poetry and images that commemorate 9/11 in

the spirit of the shrines which appeared in Union Square in the aftermath

(Museum of the City of NewYork 2004).This and numerous other projects

give a sense of a massive archival eort.

More poems are necessary, and so accepted, by the same rationale that

the continual archiving of evidence is necessary, in part because physical

evidence ismissing.The bodies have disappeared. In WeCantMakeMore

Dirt . . . Tragedy and the Excavated Body, Jennifer Wallace (2003: 107)

notes that, although 2,823 people died in theWTC, in 2003 only 1,264 had

been positively identied, and the biographies that appeared daily in the

NewYork Times in the months following gave some substance to these vapor-ized human beings. In the midst of devastation, naming and lamenting a

particular bodyeven 2,800 of themasserts the human capacity to bring

public confusion and conict home (ibid.).

The classical advice to delay publication until sucient time has passed

for review is completely inappropriate to this situation.The encouragement

to speak out immediately is great. Because this is a communal experience

and the poem seems to serve the purpose of alleviating some fears and anxi-

eties and assuaging others, the language and form are of necessity commu-

nicativeclear, direct, and immediately accessible.This form of discourse

6. The page is signed by the executive editor. This call for poems is still on the Web and is

updated regularly. It has also maintained the grammatical inconsistencies of speaker with

I, We, and Poetic Voices.


is usually seen in engaged poetrypolitical poetry, minority poetry, and

poetry with social commitments and messagesbut is rarely granted criti-

cal attention and is therefore less well-known as poetry.

Many of the writings take the form of the media that accompanied the

tragedy. Almost in imitation of the CNN breaking news model, poems

chart the unfolding of the events. The idea of up-to-date information may

well have been the model for the books of poetry sequences that have since

emerged, such as Janet Bucks Ash Tattoos (2002) or the Missouri housewifeSue Ikerds Lady Libertys Still Standing: Poems in Memory of September 11, 2001(2002).

7It is also the model for Bucks cover, a photograph of the burning

towers.

The breaking news headline, which kept so many of us glued to CNN,

is also the model for poem journals published serially on the Internet. Cer-

tainly Charles Bernsteins long prose poem Some of These Daze, which

was sent serially to the University of Bualo Poetry Discussion Group in

the immediate aftermath, gives the sense of the poet as reporter, not of the

news but of the developing understanding as events proceed. Bernstein had

been theorizing about this before; in Poetry and/or the Sacred (1999), an

essay that appeared in the Web magazine Jacket just before September 11,he concludes:

Poems are no more sacred than the use to which they are made, any more than

you or I or Uncle Hodgepodge is.They are scared and looking for cover, scarred

by the journey. They may be good company but more likely resemble the man

in the train compartment who never stops talking.What time is it now? Are we

there yet? What do they call this town?

Bernsteins poem Some of These Daze is precisely in this form. Although

carefully structured, it looks like a to the moment journal. Here is one

section, entitled Aftershock:

Thursday night it started to pour.The piercing thunder claps echoed over Man-

hattan.We all woke up with a start and couldnt nd the way back to sleep.

Andrew tells us the story of a British man who showed up on time for his hair

cutting appointment, 4pm,Tuesday. He had been on an upper oor of theTrade

Center when the jet hit.

By mistake I rst wrote Word Trade Center.

7. Amazon.com explains: Sue Ikerd is a farm wife in Missouri who was aected by this ter-

rible event and inspired to write these poems. Her daughter, Leah Savage put the poems and

pictures on a website. After receiving several thousand visits to the site from over 76 countries

and over a thousand positive emails, many asking for this in book form, it was decided they

should publish this book.


Tuesdaymorning I rousemy friend Stu from a profound slumber to tell himwhat

has happened to the twin towers.Theyre ugly, he says, after a pause, but

theyre not that ugly.

In the last few days, everyone I know seems to need to be in touch with every-

one else. At rst, it was mostly calls and emails from outside the U.S. Now there

is steady stream of local calls: where were you when, how are you feeling now.

Every story is riveting, from the ones where the people were alone watching live

TV to themanywhowatched the events unfold, how to put it?, live and in person.

Those who saw the towers collapse, who saw the people jumping, were seared

in a way the rest of us have been spared.

A visceral need to lash out, to strike down, to root out, to destroy in turn for

what has been destroyed, seems to grip so many, grips part of me.When a co-

worker expresses just this sentiment, someone complains to her, Dont you think

we need to nd out who is responsible before we do anything? She shrugs: not

necessarily.

Its as if the blasts occurred dozens of time, the actual blasts being obliterated by

the constant replay.

I feel like I am going through those stages in an unwritten book by Kubler-

Ross: rst denial, thenmanic fascination, then listlessness, then depression. Now

denial again.

I cant get the lm out of my mind. You know, the one in which a crackerjack

team of conspirators meets in an abandoned hanger [sic] and meticulously plotsout the operation on a blackboard. Synchronize watches! This image stands

in the way of what occurred in the way that a blizzard stands in the way of

the sky.

Out of the blue, ags everywhere.

Things I do everyday like make airplane reservations on the phone are now

fraught with an unwanted emotional turbulence.

In some ways the blasts are a natural disaster, like an earthquake or volcanic

eruption.Though we might wish to ght it, human beings and what they do are

also a part of nature.

The letter trains are mostly running but I always think in terms of IRT, BMT,

IND. Well, the A is OK from 207th to West 4th but the Cs down; the D now

ends at 34th.The Es canceled service belowWest 4th indenitely. As to my local

trains, no service on the 2 & 3 and the 1 stops at 34th.

After the initial crash, an ocial period of panic set in. During this time, all bets

[sic] were o.We were told to expect anything, any target next. This period ofocial panic has set the tone for the days after and may have a more profound

eect than the events.

Now, Sunday, its cold for the rst time. The summer is over.


I bomb

you bomb

he/she/it bombs

we bomb

you bomb

they suer

Were ugly, but were not that ugly.

&, hey, Joe, dont you know

We is they.8

The turning of World Trade Center to Word Trade Center is crucial

here, because the poem is an attempt to reproduce the chaos and loss felt

at the moment. Only a few poetic techniques are visiblethe reden-

ing repetition of the Were ugly, the declension of the verb bomb, the

metaphorical The summer is over.

With its many sketchy anecdotes, the poem models itself on as-it-

happens reportage, and yet there is a structural framework that gives order

to the chaos of feelings. The conclusion, that the we with which we have

come to totally identify is perceived by the other as they, demands a

rereading and reunderstanding of the poem as well as the situation. We is

they frames the close attention to details and personal reactions and grants

the poem a sense of order.

The problem of imposing order on chaosalbeit only poetic orderis

dealt with in an unpublished work by Patti Marshock and Tad Richards,

circulated at the time only through a poetry discussion group (see gure 1).

In this work, the words maintain the sense of chaotic emotions, and the

framework is imposed by the visual angular structure, interrupted in two

places, in imitation of the attack on the World Trade Center.

The imposition of the form of the twin towers upon disconnected words,

the voices merging into the repeated word horror, and a large black

spot upon the page in the place where the rst attack occurred proclaim

the insuciency of language to deal with this experience. Traditionally,

emblematic poetry combines images and text to represent an idea or prin-

ciple. This work may appear to be emblematic in its use of shape, but it is

very dierent in the opposition between the visual and the verbal compo-

nents, an opposition that imitates the actual situation.

This problem with language is formidable, as Joseph Richey (2002)

notes. Like a statesman, the poet needs access to privileged information

8. Some of These Daze was posted on Sunday, September 16, 2001, at 17:47:37, to the Uni-

versity of Bualo Poetics Discussion Group listserv (Bernstein 2001). It is also on Bernsteins

home page, epc.bualo.edu/authors/bernstein/.


Figure 1 Unpublished work by Patti Marshock and Tad Richards, circulated at

the time of the September 11 event only through a poetry discussion group.

and trusty advisers. Some poets have neither.When language is as degraded

and abused as it is during wartime, its like what Henry James said about

The Great War, that it used up all the words: they have weakened, they

have deteriorated. Lies, propaganda, spin, hyperbole, etc., bring on an

increase in limpness, he said. In our time, the info-cuisine is a slumgullion

of Insta-Media. Just add state propaganda, interests of corporate power,

and stir. For alternative brands, take thick-skinned zeal, chopped left pro-

paganda and blend smoothly. With the proliferation of media, language

deterioration multiplies, and the diculty of genuine communication is far

greater.

The availability of canonical poems, previously published works newly


brought out for the occasion of this tragedy, earlier ways of dealing with

disaster were not helpful in providing literary models to imitate. They did

not simplify the transmission of the immediate, unique experience.The dis-

parity between Audens learning of the outbreak of war in Poland as he sits

in aManhattan bar and witnessing the attack on the towers on CNN, either

live or in its innite repetitions, indicates the historical distinctiveness of

the September 11 event and the literary uniqueness of the challenge to react

to it appropriately.

In at least one case, there is an attempt to deal with the experience by

using the language of the media and the language of literature. This hap-

pens in a poem by Sophie Levy (2001):

This second: Coming

turning and turning9.15 a.m. dreaming in Yeats two days until the exam the alarm

of the phone ringing England callingin the widening gyre; the falcon cannot

dreaming of ight, the airmanforesees his death

10.00 a.m. Ground Zero

the common room the common focus one box containing the

world

11.00 a.m. no subway no government employees central Toronto a deadtown

its the girl and boy holding each other outside the lecture building sunshineits the blood-dimmed tide already in the ashen city

12.00 p.m. hear the falconer WEWILL HUNT THEM DOWN &KILL THEM

hushed the feeling/say it things fall apart; the centrecannot hold

mere anarchy is loosed upon the worldwe are half-rhymed if that scattered in attitudes of gawk &

revelationloosed upon the world

if the centre cannot hold [these things]

If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers . . .

it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life,

the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

4 p.m. passionate intensity breedsbreath-holding

say worstthat echo of Lear in all our headache


5 p.m. everywhere / The ceremony we train ourselves in

correctness emergency procedures for such situations

and we fail (they fail us)

there is watching, slack-jawed Tom Clancy on CNN

there is

breaking the news

The end of history is over

[e-mail from a friend at CityTV

THE HEADLESS HEAD OF STATE SLOUCHING

TOWARDS

JERUSALEM]

its hour come round at last

its second / this

unfolding of seconds at the speed of (f )light

suddenly grounded

and we move through rubble / bone-exposed

hearing every tick (as

Ametapoem about poetry and disaster, Levys poem is a dialogue between

Yeatss vision of the end of civilization as we know it and the individual

speaker in the midst of the September 11 disaster. Conating lines from

Yeatss The Second Coming (in boldface type) and the title of An Irish

Airman Forsees His Death, as well as lines from Shakespeares King Lear,with quotations from news commentators and President George Bush,

Levys poem embodies the fragmentation and confusion of the moment.

The interweaving between individual vision and television news, the per-

sonal voice and the voices of politicians, is saturated in the poetry of Yeats

being studied for a doctoral examination.The dawn of a world transformed

by the chaos, a world predicted by the Irish poet, renders poetry simulta-

neously irrelevant and central.The citation of Its hour come round at last,

a situation understood by Yeats as poetic prophecy and now experienced

as reality, centralizes poetry in a way that Yeats would have praised. This

centralization seems to have continued and developed parallel to the cere-

monialization of the event. In the time that has passed since the immediate

event, the need for continual memorial ceremonies seems to have encour-

aged the continuation of the genre of commemorative poetry.

A year after Billy Collinss warning against immediate reactions, The

Names (2002), by Poet Laureate Collins, was read during a special session

of the U.S. Congress held in New York on Friday, September 6, 2002. It is

an attempt to represent the sense of inability to enumerate and cope with

the daunting and overwhelming lists of victims. So many names, he con-


cludes, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.9And the veteran

political poet Maya Angelou, who read at Bill Clintons 1993 presidential

inauguration, added her words to Lifemagazine (2004), praising the leaderswho helped soothe and comfort after the disaster as Extravagant Spirits:

These mothers, fathers, pastors and priests,

These Rabbis, Imams and gurus,

Teach us by their valor and mold us with their courage.

Without their erce devotion

We are only forlorn and only fragile

Stumbling briey, among the stars.

In early October 2001, at a sold-out poetry reading in a North Beach the-

ater, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2001) proclaimed that art and poetry will be

classied from now on as B.S. and A.S.Before and After September 11.

Although it is too soon to evaluate the long-term changes in poetry and

their relevance to contemporary events, this may be a great exaggeration.

Yet, as Joseph Richey (2002) warned his fellow poets at the outset, this is

not the end: Get ready for the long haul. Keep your keyboards dust-free.

Keep your feet dry, your ink wet. And keep your poetry helmet on.

Appendix: Additional September 11 Poems from theWeb

Academy of American Poets

2004 Poems ofGrief andCondolence, Post-9/11 PoetryResources, www.poets.org/sept11

.cfm (accessed October 3, 2004).

American Poets Society

2004 September 11:WeWill Never Forget, www.poetryamerica.com/sept 11 poems.asp

(accessed October 3, 2004).

11 September 2001: The Response of Poetry

2004 Web site, www.geocities.com/poetryafterseptember112001 (accessed October 3,

2004).

Poetry.com

2004 www.poetry.com/us tragedy/searchgroup.asp (accessed October 3, 2004).

Poetry Today Online

2004 Poets Honor September 11, 2001, www.poetrytodayonline.com/bbs/wtcpoetry

.html (accessed October 3, 2004).

9. The entire issue of the poetic use of the names of victims deserves a study unto itself.

As Ginger Strand (2003: 42, 62) noted in her essay Diminished Things: How does one

name the unnameable, describe the indescribable, without blurring the fantastic paradoxes

that swirl around world-changing events? The inability to describe the reality of an over-

whelming experience is what makes witnesses call it unreal, as if the reality of it has simply

overowed, exceeding the capacities of conventional description we use to x reality and its

signicance . . . As for us, from our vantage point in the wreckage there is nothing left but to

murmur name upon name, as a mother names her child.


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Angelou, Maya

2004 Extravagant Spirits, Life, www.life.com/Life/lifebooks/911/poem.html (accessedOctober 3, 2004).

Bates, Milton J.

2003 Pain Is Human: Wallace Stevens at Ground Zero, Southern Review 39 (1): 16880.Bernstein, Charles

1999 Poetry and/or the Sacred. Paper presented at the keynote panel Poetry and the

Sacred, Seventeenth Annual Tucson Poetry Festival, March 27. Published on the Jacketmagazine Web site, jacketmagazine.com/14/bernstein-sacred.html.

2001 Some of These Daze, September 16 (Sunday).University of Bualo Poetics discus-

sion group, listserv.acsu.bualo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0109&L=poetics&P=R19006

&D=1&H=0&O=D&T=1.

Biggs, Brooke Shelby

2001 Speak No Evil, Mother Jones, October 3, www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2001/10/self censorship.html.

Buck, Janet

2002 Ash Tattoos, Zee-Book, www.unlikelystories.org/old/Bookstore/bookbuck.html.Caruth, Cathy

1995 Introduction, inTrauma: Explorations inMemory, edited byCathyCaruth, 312 (Balti-more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).

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2002 The Marketing of Lets Roll, September 4, CBSNews.com, www.cbsnews.com/

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Cervantes, Lorna Dee

2001 Palestine, Poetry.About.com, September 12, poetry.about.com/library/weekly/

aa091201c.htm.

Collins, Billy

2001 Poetry and Tragedy, U.S.A. Today, September 25, www.usatoday.com/news/comment/20010925ncguest1.htm.

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DiFranco, Ani

2002 self evident. www.righteousbabe.com/ani/poem.asp.

Farah, Joseph

2001 A Tale of Two Songs, World Net Daily, October 17, www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE ID=24959.

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Falls.html.

Johnson, Dennis Loy, and Valerie Merians

2002 Foreword, in Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Dennis LoyJohnson and Valerie Merians, ixx (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House).

Johnson, Samuel

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Lako, George

2001 The Power of the Images, CogWeb: Cognitive Cultural Studies, September 18,

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Levy, Sophie

2001 This second: Coming, American Terror: Masthead Special Issue, au.geocities.com/masthead 2/us/levy.html.

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2002 Over There, in Heyen 2002: 31522.

Richey, Joseph

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Rothberg, Michael

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Ruddick, Lisa

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Smith, Dinitia

2001 The Eerily Intimate Power of Poetry to Console, New York Times, October 1, www.nytimes.com/2001/10/01/arts/01POEMS.html.

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2002 The Poison Birds, in Heyen 2002: 354.


Strand, Ginger

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Documents

Alkalay, The Poetry of September 11, The Testimonial Imperative